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Interview
Anthony Seldon on Boris Johnson: ‘At his heart,
he is extraordinarily empty’
Tim Adams
The distinguished historian and headteacher discusses
his latest book about a contemporary prime minister, a devastating – and
dispiriting – account of Johnson’s chaotic reign
Andrew
Rawnsley reviews Johnson at 10 by Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell
Tim Adams
@TimAdamsWrites
Sun 30 Apr 2023
09.00 BST
Sir Anthony
Seldon, the famous headteacher, has been writing book-length report cards on
British prime ministers for 40 years. The latest, on Boris Johnson, based on
the accounts of more than 200 people who witnessed his catastrophic, clown-car
time in office first-hand, is a test not only of Seldon’s method, but also his
tone. In previous volumes the author has assumed a base level of gravitas in
his subjects, and of structure in their government. Though he employs the same
quasi-legal model for his inquiry here, gathering careful evidence, weighing
judgments, the story he pieces together is often one of venal mayhem; it
frequently reads like a considered constitutional appraisal of rats in a sack.
There is a
telling coincidence in the fact that the first indelible report of Johnson’s
behaviour was also the work of a school master. Martin Hammond’s infamous notes
on Johnson at Eton, which recorded his “disgracefully cavalier attitude”, his
“gross failure of responsibility” and his deep-seated belief that he “should be
free of the network of obligation that binds everyone else” is the opening
source of Seldon’s account. Johnson’s “end was in his beginning”, he argues.
Speaking to me about his book last week, Seldon noted that Hammond – who had
been the “formidable pipe-smoking” head at Tonbridge school when he started out
as a teacher – was a longstanding inspiration, both as an educator and a
writer. “Two things,” he says. “One is that his report was typically acute and
detailed, like a psychiatrist’s analysis. And second: just how much the
character is formed very early on.”
Seldon is
very well placed to offer the much fuller version of that analysis. He came to
national prominence as a thinker on education as head of Brighton college and
then Wellington college. He recently returned, at 69, to his former day job by
agreeing to take over the headship of Epsom college after the murder of Emma
Pattison and her daughter in February. The day we meet is the day before the
new term at Epsom, where Seldon has an 18-month contract. The aim, he said on
taking the role, would be “to provide the confidence, stability and maturity to
see the school through the aftershocks of the deaths of Emma and Lettie
Pattison”.
In recent
years, Seldon has experienced some of the effects of instability and grief on a
personal level. His last book before the volume on Johnson was a thoughtful,
heartfelt journey on foot along the western front of the great war. He
undertook it, he wrote at the time, because his endlessly busy life had come
unmoored. He had lost his beloved wife to cancer in 2016 and had quit his job
as vice-chancellor of the private University of Buckingham after disputes with
the board. Though he had long been a proponent of teaching wellbeing, “enduring
peace” eluded him. He traced some of that disquiet back to the fallout of anxiety
and depression that was a legacy of his maternal grandfather, who was badly
wounded in the first world war. The walk was an exorcising of demons. “Could I
change to a less manic gear?” he wondered. “Writing a book on Boris Johnson, as
planned, if I was to keep up my rhythm of books on recently departed prime
ministers, would hardly help me do this…”
Seldon is
far too rigorous a historian to let that backstory seep into his account of
Johnson in office (which was co-written with the historian Raymond Newell).
However, you have a strong sense reading it, talking to him, that the soul
searching fuelled his efforts to capture the exact nature of Johnson’s
irresponsibility in office. Seldon is a man who has devoted his life to
understanding and nurturing the kind of emotional intelligence and civic
responsibility from which society can be woven. Johnson represents the wilful
rupture of those beliefs. Talking about him, Seldon acknowledges the former
prime minister’s charisma “lights up the room”, but you sense too his almost
personal feeling of betrayal at the squandering of those gifts, that
headmasterly reaction that Johnson had let down his school, his family, his
nation, but most of all, himself.
Of the 57
people who have held the highest office, Seldon suggests, Johnson was probably
unique in that he came to it with “no sense of any fixed position. No religious
faith, no political ideology”. His only discernible ambition, Seldon says, was
that “like Roman emperors he wanted monuments in his name”.
“To those
many people who say, ‘Of course he believed in Brexit’, the evidence is
absolutely clear,” Seldon says. “From the beginning it was striking that he
believed that there was a cause far higher than Britain’s economic interests,
than Britain’s relationship with Europe, than Britain’s place in the world,
than the strength of the union. That cause was his own advancement.”
The
eyewitness reports of events in Seldon’s book expose once and for all the great
con of the referendum campaign that has so savaged the country and its economy.
We learn from many named and unnamed sources that even Johnson was outraged by
some of the stunts pulled by Dominic Cummings in the name of Vote Leave.
Confronted with the xenophobic – and untrue – scaremongering that Turkey was
about to join the EU, one confidant reports that “[Johnson] wanted to come down
to London and apparently punch Cummings”. On the morning of the referendum
result itself, Seldon writes, Johnson “paced around in a Brazilian football
shirt and misfitting shorts looking ashen-faced and distraught. ‘What the hell
is happening?’ he kept saying… Soon after, stopping in his tracks, a new
thought struck him: ‘Oh shit, we’ve got no plan. We haven’t thought about it. I
didn’t think it would happen. Holy crap, what will we do?’”
Johnson’s
eventual solution to getting Brexit done as prime minister was to bring in
Cummings to do the work that he had no appetite for, in the full knowledge that
his chief adviser was a wholly destructive force. That, Seldon, suggests to me,
was another first for British political leadership:
“There has
never been a prime minister who has been so weak to have ceded so much power to
a figure like Cummings. Here was someone who went ahead and removed the
chancellor of the exchequer, to replace them with someone more biddable. Who
knocked out the cabinet secretary and head of the civil service, appointing
someone unable to assert himself. Who tried knocking out and appointing his own
person as governor of the Bank of England, and as head of MI6. While all the
time expressing contempt for Johnson.”
The book
describes how after the 2019 election Cummings assumed universal power across
government as Brexit and then the pandemic unfolded. (Johnson at one point
raged impotently that: “I am meant to be in control. I am the führer. I’m the
king who takes the decisions.”) Unwilling to confront his chief of staff
directly, it is said that Johnson frequently employed the excuse that he was
subject to the “mad and crazy” demands of Carrie, his fiancee upstairs. (In
response to the book a spokesperson for Johnson described that allegation as
“malevolent and sexist twaddle”.)
Seldon
suggests now that the results of this chaotic approach “took us back to a
pre-1832 world of court politics when the idea of a programmatic government
with a series of policies and beliefs hadn’t yet been formed. It was just a
milieu of shifting alliances and factions.” One of the striking aspects of his
book is that the world beyond the confines of No 10, the reality of
unprecedented national crisis in millions of people’s lives, hardly ever gets a
look in, so concerned are the principal actors in this drama with protecting
their sorry backsides.
Johnson could have been the prime minister he craved
to be, but he wasn’t, because of his utter inability to learn
Cummings
was one of the few participants in that Downing Street and Whitehall farce who
did not speak to Seldon. The author does not feel that the omission is
significant, since Cummings has written so very much about this period, “and
his footprints are over everything anyway. People will make their own
judgments,” he says of what he discovered, “but I don’t think that it’s
remotely unfair to Cummings or for that matter to Johnson.”
The most
dispiriting thing about reading the book is that dawning sense that all your
worst imaginings about the conduct of that government were, it seems, played
out in real time. Seldon argues that the double act in the oven-ready years of
prorogation and Barnard Castle really did deserve each other, even if none of
us deserved them.
“I suppose
at least Cummings did believe in Brexit, although ultimately, really, did he?”
he says. “From everything we heard [for the book] it just seemed Cummings was
full of hatred. He probably hates himself; he certainly hates other people. He
wants to destroy everything. Johnson in his own way never knew what he stood
for, but he shared that contempt for the Tory party, contempt for the cabinet,
contempt for the civil service, contempt for the EU, contempt for the army,
contempt for business, contempt for intellectuals, contempt for universities.”
About a
decade ago, Seldon, who is a governor of the Royal Shakespeare Company, began
an informal programme with David Cameron’s government that sought to provide
for the present incumbents of the highest office some history of No 10 itself
and their predecessors there. He staged a series of talks from prominent
historians, as well as performances of Shakespeare in the rose garden, in the
belief that politicians “might root themselves in the arts, in the benchmark of
what is good and true”. He recalls a performance that the RSC gave for Cameron
and guests just before the former resigned as prime minister: “It was quite a
moving occasion in the garden. The killing of Caesar was one of the scenes and
I remember watching Cameron with his daughter leaning on his shoulder and
Samantha next to him.”
When
Johnson came to power Seldon hoped the programme might continue – Johnson did
after all have a lucrative contract to write a book about Shakespeare. There
was no interest whatsoever. “Covid made things difficult obviously,” he says,
“but we did come in. Johnson never once showed up. As [his school reports
showed] he had no deep interest in any classical history, language or
literature or Shakespeare. His examples were always for show. At his heart, he
is extraordinarily empty. He can’t keep faithful to any idea, any person, any
wife.”
The tragedy
of that fact was twofold, Seldon argues. For one thing Johnson was a
non-starter as a competent prime minister, let alone a great one. The historian
numbers nine out of 57 in that latter category (Attlee and Thatcher are the two
who make the cut postwar). “The great prime ministers are all there at moments
of great historical importance,” he says. “But they have to respond to them
well. Chamberlain didn’t; Churchill in 1940, did. Asquith didn’t; Lloyd George
did in 1916. Johnson had Brexit, he had the pandemic, he had the invasion of
Ukraine and incipient third world war. He could have been the prime minister he
craved to be, but he wasn’t, because of his utter inability to learn.”
We saw some
fear of some of the people around Gordon Brown, but this was off the scale. And
that’s a deeply unhealthy facet of modern government
The related
tragedy was the national one, in which we are still living. Whatever you
thought of Brexit, Seldon argues – he thought it was a bad idea – it did
provide “the overdue opportunity to modernise the British state and Britain’s
institutions. There was a desperate need to bring the civil service up to
date,” he says. “To forge better connections between universities and public
life, to rejuvenate professions.”
But of
course the adolescent “disruptors” that Johnson was amused and supported by had
no interest in that work. Their goal was either personal enrichment or, in
Cummings’s case, the application of that Silicon Valley mantra “to move fast
and break things”. Disruptive change can work in the commercial sector because
you are replacing one product or technology with another in a limited market.
One lesson of Seldon’s book is that to apply that idea to government is a
fundamental misunderstanding of what government is. Degrading and destroying
institutions is not the way to reform them.
“People we
spoke to were afraid of Cummings, personal fear,” he says. “And to an extent of
the whole Johnson court. In the seven books I’ve written, we saw some fear of
some of the people around Gordon Brown, but this was off the scale. And that’s
a deeply unhealthy facet of modern government that you let in people who are
using fear as a method of control. Quite a lot of that was misogynistic in what
we saw.”
In another
of his roles, Seldon has been tasked with examining how institutional
competence and trust might be re-established. He has recently become deputy
chair of something called the Commission on the Centre of Government, created
by the Institute for Government, which will recommend steps to improve the
workings of the Cabinet Office and No 10, post-pandemic and Brexit and Johnson
and Cummings.
“The fact
is,” he says, “people come into No 10 knowing less about [complex
organisations] than most people running companies employing less than 20
people. That’s forgivable. What is unforgivable is that almost without
exception, they do not want to learn how to do it. They think they know best.
They are often snide, poisonous, dismissive of previous teams, particularly
teams from their same party. And they come in with frothing adrenaline and
swagger.”
If Johnson
was the blueprint of that failing, his immediate successor, prime minister Liz
Truss, was a kind of cringeworthy caricature of hubris (Seldon will write about
her costly tenure as a £65bn preface to the arrival of Sunak). Given these
examples is he optimistic that confidence in government can be rebuilt?
“I think
that Johnson and Cummings were what was needed to bring the country to its
senses,” he suggests. “People didn’t want things broken up. They wanted to be
listened to. They wanted institutions that were more relevant to them. They
felt excluded by metropolitan elite. Nobody is happy with what has happened.”
We can
agree on that much, I suggest. But does he really think that the lessons of
Johnson’s government have been learned?
“If Johnson
understood more about classical philosophy, he’d have recognised that an
antithesis – being against something – isn’t enough. The country now needs a
synthesis from whichever party. The great prime ministers are healers and
teachers. They need to be able to tell a story of where they have come from and
to where they will lead us.”
Is that
leader evident to him?
“Well,” he
says, “this is the reason why for the moment Starmer is disappointing, because
there is this enormous desire for renewal. But Starmer seems micro when he
could be macro, cautious when he could be passionate, dull where he could be
inspirational.”
He doesn’t
make it sound like much of a page-turner, I say. But having read the current
volume, I’ll still be looking forward to that particular sequel.
Johnson at
10 by Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell is published by Atlantic (£25). To
support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com.
Delivery charges may apply
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