Boris Johnson: The Gambler by Tom Bower review –
the defining secret
The affairs, the lies, the shoddy handling of
coronavirus … Johnson is let off the hook in this biography – it’s his father,
Stanley, who emerges as the villain
Jonathan
Freedland
@Freedland
Tue 13 Oct
2020 13.42 BST
Tom Bower
made his name as a writer of acid-pen biographies and his latest is no
exception. It’s a hatchet job. Except the hatchet is aimed not at the man whose
name is on the cover, but rather at his father. The villain of the piece is
Stanley Johnson.
Bower
portrays him as an absent father and violent husband, who punched his wife so
hard he broke her nose. Johnson Snr is faithless and a creep: in the parched
summer of 1976, he told the family’s two au pairs that the water shortage made
washing clothes impossible and therefore they would have to follow the lead set
by him and his wife and walk around naked, which they duly did. Naturally,
Stanley began sleeping with one of the two young women, in full knowledge of
his children.
In Bower’s
telling, Johnson Snr is a lifelong flake: dabbling in jobs, failing at most of
them, then using his connections to find something else. He is a parasite,
sponging off his in-laws and “a professional guest, always searching for a free
bed”. He yearns for the spotlight, happy to trade off the fame of his son if
that will get him attention. He takes no interest in his children’s upbringing,
except to communicate a couple of life lessons: “If you’re working hard, don’t
show it … show effortless superiority”; and “Nothing matters very much and most
things don’t matter at all.”
All this is
laid out in the opening chapters, inviting the reader to see the prime minister
as the inevitably damaged product of a morally inadequate father. Bower
suggests that Stanley’s mistreatment of Boris’s mother, Charlotte, is the
defining secret of the Johnson family and the fact that Boris, as the oldest
child, witnessed it is the key to understanding his character, including his
rampant ambition. Charlotte, who eventually had a breakdown and was
hospitalised, says of her son: “I have often thought that his being ‘world
king’ was a wish to make himself unhurtable, invincible, somehow safe from the
pains of your mother disappearing for eight months.” Apparently Boris Johnson’s
long-suffering second wife, the human rights lawyer Marina Wheeler, took a
similar view: “She unhesitatingly rebuked Stanley for her husband’s sins.”
It’s a
reading – Boris as victim – which is helpful for Bower who, it soon becomes
clear, wants to write a forgiving portrait of his subject. Tellingly, he is
“Boris” throughout, a courtesy not extended to previous Bower subjects. (His
biography of the last Labour prime minister spoke firmly of “Brown” rather than
“Gordon”.)
Repeatedly,
he grants Johnson the benefit of the doubt. Sure, when he was the Telegraph’s
correspondent in Brussels, serving up comedy EU tales of bureaucrats dictating
the right size of a condom or the correct curvature of a banana, his colleagues
believed he was a charlatan and a liar, making stuff up, but Bower says they
were “an undistinguished pack” and, after all, who remembers any of them?
“History remembers Boris.” In a statement that neatly encapsulates the ethos of
the post-truth era that Johnson’s spell in Brussels anticipated, Telegraph
executive Jeremy Deedes insists his correspondent might have been “exaggerating
but it was all too good to check. His reports were all correct in spirit if not
in detail.”
Similarly,
Bower concedes that Johnson once wrote of “grinning picaninnies” with
“watermelon smiles” and, for good measure, digs out a line that Johnson’s
critics missed: “Some dream of their teeth falling out as they are about to be
executed with the scimitar by a beautiful black woman.” But none of this should
be understood as evidence of racism, which for Bower would be “unusual” in a
man married “to a half-Indian woman”. Johnson was surely “satirising
neocolonialism”.
This same
generosity marks Bower’s description, in two lengthy chapters, of Johnson’s
handling of the coronavirus pandemic. These pages are somewhat out of place in
a biography – they are a perfectly competent summary of the news events of the
last few months, but sit awkwardly in a portrait of a life – but they have one
unifying theme: namely, it’s not Johnson’s fault. Bower adopts the Dominic
Cummings position that Britain is run by unqualified and useless civil servants
and bureaucrats and it’s they, not Johnson, who messed up. He is especially
scathing about the government’s scientific advisers, who gave the PM duff
advice. Some might suggest Johnson should have pushed them harder, asking the
tough questions. “On what basis could a politician question the experts’
apparent unanimity?” asks Bower, suggesting that of recent prime ministers only
the chemistry graduate, Margaret Thatcher, would have been in a position to do
such a thing.
For all
Bower’s eagerness to put a kind gloss on Johnson’s actions, he doesn’t flinch
from the man’s record
And yet,
isn’t that what leadership is about? Bower’s recitation of the failures of, for
example, Public Health England is certainly damning of that body, but surely
the task of leaders is to get a grip when something is not working. Johnson’s
hero, Winston Churchill, did that with the entire war effort, from the
manufacture of armaments to military strategy. It would be hard to imagine
Churchill pleading that he could do no more than follow the guidance of his
subordinates.
For all
Bower’s eagerness to put a kind gloss on Johnson’s actions, he doesn’t flinch
from the man’s record. It’s all there: the affairs, the lies, the broken promises,
the unpaid debts. There is yet more evidence that Johnson scarcely believes in
anything. After an argument about education, his first wife realises with
horror: “Oh God, he’s got … no ideals.” Oliver Letwin comes to see that Johnson
was “politically light, there was no ideology”. And of course there are the
wildly oscillating positions on Europe. Bower reminds us that Johnson, who
headed a Vote Leave campaign that falsely warned that Turkey was poised to join
the EU, had made a TV documentary in 2008 advocating Turkey’s accession to the
EU. Even once he’d committed to Brexit, he argued that it made no sense for
Britain to leave the single market – a position he would casually jettison once
it suited him.
There are
some new nuggets – I’d happily have read more about Johnson’s fisticuffs with
George Osborne when the two men were in a lift together during a visit to China
– and some useful insights. The onetime Telegraph diarist Quentin Letts is
struck that Johnson never passed on any gossip: “He doesn’t notice people’s
quirks and their embarrassments,” Letts observes, which Bower puts down to
Johnson’s “narcissism”: he’s just not that interested in anyone other than
himself.
The book
also provides a perhaps inadvertent portrait of one corner of the British
elite. Stanley Johnson’s sense of entitlement was fed by his ability repeatedly
to fail upward, but he’s hardly alone in this story. The posh and privileged
are constantly granted unmerited opportunities. When Johnson edits the
Spectator, “applications for employment bereft of nepotism or patronage were
automatically binned”. Marina kicks him out over his affair with Petronella
Wyatt, daughter of Thatcher pal Lord Wyatt, so he lodges with an old Balliol
friend, whose wife happens to be the daughter of former cabinet secretary,
Robin Butler. It’s a small world.
This book
makes a good stab at answering the question, “What makes Boris Johnson tick?”
By the end, we have a sense of what void Johnson with his restless ambition is
seeking to fill. As with his counterpart in the White House, we can point to
the damage inflicted by a callous, demanding father as a partial explanation
for the lies, the betrayals, the narcissism. But that leaves a larger question
untouched, one less about the politician than about the people who vote for
him. That question is not “Why does Johnson behave this way?” but rather, “Why
do we put up with it?”
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