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Boris Johnson was too Dickensian Idiosyncrasy often ends in a kind of madness

Without rogues, the world would die of boredom. Tolga Akmen/AFP/Getty Images

Without rogues, the world would die of boredom. Tolga Akmen/AFP/Getty Images


July 16, 2022   6 mins

Everyone has a character, but some people have more character than others. The British, for example, are blessed with more of it than other Europeans. The Germans have intellect and the French have style, but the British are more dogged, brave, resolute and tenacious than either of them. They are steadfast in the face of utter disaster, as in those mighty symbols of the national spirit, the Charge of the Light Brigade, the Titanic and Dunkirk. No nation fails more magnificently. While fighting in the Falklands war, Prince Andrew described being shot at as “very character building”. Perhaps in the light of subsequent events he ought to have been shot at a little more.

The word “character” can mean a person (as in “heā€™s a sleazy character”), or someone of unusual probity and integrity, or a printed or written letter. In fact, the word originally meant not a person but the sign or description of a person. Your character wasnā€™t the kind of human being you were but an image of it, and this image could be either true or false to your inner nature. Your outward appearance could either reveal or conceal your inward reality.

People whose talk and behaviour masks their inner being are known as politicians. They say things like “I came into politics to make a difference”, rather than “I came into politics because Iā€™ve always been an ambitious little sod”, while inserting the phrase “very clear” into every second sentence. If they are asked whether itā€™s true that they have just been sick all over the Speaker of the House, they point out that there are matters of far greater importance to attend to like the cost of living, or the war in Ukraine. They are meticulously scripted creatures, in a way that dinner ladies and truck drivers are not.

Yet they are not scripted in the way that actors are. It wouldnā€™t make sense to ask whether someone playing Shakespeareā€™s Cleopatra is sincere or insincere. The terms simply donā€™t apply, any more than a plumber could be said to mend a pipe sincerely or insincerely. The actor is just doing a job. Politicians, however, are expected to be sincere, and sometimes they are. The problem is that there is so much they canā€™t say, such as “Youā€™d be barking mad to vote for us”, whereas an actor says all there is to be said. There is nothing he or she is concealing, such as what their character was doing before coming on stage. Since the character didnā€™t exist at that point, he or she was doing nothing at all. When an actor asked Harold Pinter what he was doing before making his entrance, Pinter replied “Mind your own fucking business”.

Boris Johnson rose to power largely because he was prepared to ditch the script. When someone remarked in his presence that grandiose schemes tended to collapse, he replied ā€œAh yes, all flesh is grassā€, which is not an appropriate verbal move for a politician to make. You are supposed to be practical, not a cracker-barrel philosopher. Even so, stepping outside the script can be part of the script. The comedian Frankie Howerd got some of his biggest laughs from making sardonic comments on the mediocre stuff he was supposed to perform. Clowns spend a lot of time rehearsing falling over their own feet. Even when Johnson is being serious, he maintains a slight ironic distance between his outward bluster and what with pardonable exaggeration one might call his inner self ā€” a distance which suggests that deep down itā€™s all a game, ā€œitā€ stretching all the way from the House of Commons to human existence. The only reality is naked self-interest.

Johnson blurs the line between performing himself and being himself. Clowning around, not taking himself seriously, is an integral part of what he is. He blurs the distinction between theatre and reality, rather as the concept of character does. The idea began in the theatre and was then extended to everyday life. The same goes for the word ā€œpersonā€, which originally meant a mask worn by an actor. It then mutated into ā€œpersonalityā€, meaning either a celebrity or someone who is lively and engaging. Some persons have plenty of personality while others, like Ant and Dec, have none at all. In fact, you arenā€™t even meant to be able to distinguish between them. There are also personages, in the sense of people of elevated status, but most of us are just off-the-peg persons.

ā€œPersonalā€ and ā€œindividualā€ are relational terms. There couldnā€™t be just one person, any more than there could be only one number or one letter. We are human by virtue of the kind of bodies we have, but we become personal only through our dealings with each another. If none of the faces around the cradle actually speaks to the baby, or communicates with it in some way, it will continue to be human but fail to become a person.

Personalities are bouncy, glittering, larger-than-life types, entertaining but potentially overbearing. They arenā€™t necessarily eccentric, however, which is where they differ from yet another sense of the word ā€œcharacterā€. To have character is to be solid and dependable, but to be a character is almost the opposite. It means being amusingly idiosyncratic, as in ā€œGad, but heā€™s a character, sir!ā€ Hovering somewhere between the patronising and the complimentary, it captures a distinctively English view of individuals as quirky, off-beat and lovably eccentric. From Falstaff and Sir Toby Belch to Mr. Pickwick and Miss Marple, each of them is his or her inimitable self. The word ā€œsingularā€ means both one and peculiar. If there is something appealing about eccentrics, however, there is also something alarming. Pushed to an extreme, idiosyncrasy ends up in a kind of madness. It is related to the word ā€œidiotā€.

It is this which accounts for much of the popularity of Charles Dickens. Dickensā€™s characters tend to be notoriously freakish, identifiable by some quaint habit or outlandish physical feature. Jane Austenā€™s characters speak the common language of polite society, but Dickensā€™s figures each have their own trade-mark mode of speech, whether quick-fire delivery, verbose ramblings, pious cant or portentous rhetoric. Each of them seems locked into his or her own private world, which randomly collide before bouncing off each other again. Like clocks or mechanical dolls, they just keep repetitively doing their own thing, unresponsive to their surroundings. It isnā€™t clear whether these oddballs are nothing but their appearances, like people glimpsed for a moment in a crowded street, or whether they have a secret hinterland of emotions and experiences which is inaccessible to others. Like rogues, in the zoological sense of the word, they live apart from the general herd; but if this is true of them all, then there isnā€™t a herd at all, just a host of deviations without a norm. A very English individualism is built into Dickensā€™s way of seeing men and women, and though it is wildly entertaining it can also be slightly sinister. Coherent communication between characters falters and falls apart. The eccentric moves quickly into the grotesque. The world is vivid but fragmentary, full of delightful bits and pieces but hard to grasp as a whole.

ā€œRogueā€ is a word often used of our departure-lounge Prime Minister, both in the sense of wandering from the pack and of being unprincipled but likeable. Rogues arenā€™t likeable despite being unprincipled but because of it. Because they kick over the traces, they allow us to do the same vicariously, which is always a source of pleasure. Because it is vicarious, we can smash the conventions and rip up the regulations while remaining eminently respectable. The reputable citizen needs the rogue as Wise needs Morecambe or angels need devils. Without devils, Dostoevsky remarks, the world would die of sheer boredom. The angels may play their harps in ecstasy, but the devils have all the best tunes.

Unscrupulous types are said to lack integrity, though itā€™s not clear what this means. The Oxford English Dictionary defines integrity as having strong moral principles, but also as the state of being whole. What is the connection between the two? Perhaps itā€™s the idea that being unprincipled corrodes or corrupts your nature so that itā€™s no longer all there. Or maybe a principled person is consistent, rather than self-divided and self-contradictory. Otherwise there seems no reason why acting morally should mean being complete. Lurking behind this word may be the Romantic-humanist view that we act well when we bring the whole of our being into play, as opposed to being lopsided. But the whole of my being may include an overwhelming desire to murder my hairdresser, which it would be better to repress. Ideas of wholeness, like visions of harmony, are usually suspect.

Boris Johnson is a character without much character. He is a character in the Dickensian sense, but not in the Austenite one. Or, to put it another way, he has too much personality and too little consistent selfhood. It was because he is likely to quote Horace when asked about the rate of inflation that a public bored with plastic politicians elected him. But it was for just the same reasons that he couldnā€™t govern. It helps to be a character to scramble into power, but you need to have character to stay there.


Terry EagletonĀ is a critic, literary theorist, and UnHerd columnist.


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Samir Iker
Samir Iker
2 years ago

All this talk about character. We are talking about the prime minister, not the future son in law. A cunning scoundrel who runs the country properly would be preferable to a noble simpleton.

Doesn’t have to be a saint, just someone who understands and does what the people want (less inflation, not more green. Less immigration, not more virtue signalling).

Kal Bevan
Kal Bevan
2 years ago
Reply to  Samir Iker

And that is precisely why the Establishment wanted rid of him – he understood the public and did as the majority wanted rather than pandering to the virtue signalling Woke sheep.

David Simpson
David Simpson
2 years ago
Reply to  Kal Bevan

If only he had. I suspect he was undone by a combination of a mid-life crisis and his infatuation with a young blonde. Had he run the government as he appeared to have run London we might still have him as PM. I mourn his passing, not least because i see no suitable successor. Badenoch would be good but she appears to be too far behind. And she has character.

Last edited 2 years ago by David Simpson
M. Jamieson
M. Jamieson
2 years ago
Reply to  David Simpson

He has always seemed to be inclined to take the easy road in his personal life, and it affected his public life somewhat too in the end. Whatever good qualities a person has they can be undone by a failure to persevere or do the hard things or abstain from immediate gratification. I think that’s what did him in at the end, just the cumulative effect of all of it.

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ayesha jannat
2 years ago
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David Chipping
David Chipping
2 years ago
Reply to  David Simpson

Good comment but I think the government was in reasonable shape considering what came beforehand.
An altogether harder task than London.
Post Covid was always going to be hard and as you rightly point out no obvious successors. A shame he has gone.
Why Badenoch she has no experience-Ukraine etc, not a good choice. Frankly Boris was the man to lead us out of this.
MSM and the establishment have shot us in the foot, a huge mistake.

Iris C
Iris C
2 years ago
Reply to  David Chipping

There is no doubt in my mind that the MSM used their power to bring Boris down.
For example, it was not Boris who arranged the drinks “dos” in Downing Street but the staff. He was only passing through. And yet the press hounded him
Contrast that with the opposition election night “do” which was organised by the politicians and enjoyed by the politicians. Little publicity was given to this and the threat that Keir Stammer would resign if found guilty, put the police in an impossible position.
We should not be ruled by the MSM. It is time that all media outlets and publications were licensed with a code of conduct imposed and policed. .

Liam O'Mahony
Liam O'Mahony
2 years ago
Reply to  Kal Bevan

While he ‘did’ what the people wanted, sadly (or maybe happily?) he failed in virtually all his endeavours.. Covid, Brexit (NI), Economy, health etc.
Of course if you’re one of the 0.1% super rich he’s been a great success!

David C
David C
2 years ago
Reply to  Liam O'Mahony

I donā€™t agree with your comment on failures;how was Covid a failure, the U.K. had some of the best support anywhere in the world, look at China and Japan -how do you compare the response and outcome. There were mistakes that revealed themselves in hindsight , the same for the economy but what did anyone really expect after Covid and NI is a failure for who? , itā€™s an ongoing political problem for NI and a headache for the U.K.
Similarly Brexit itā€™s not a single event itā€™s an ongoing adjustment to new political and economic circumstances.
This MSM/ Labour monologue on Boris Johnsonā€™s record is distorted in my view.

Bruce Crichton
Bruce Crichton
2 years ago
Reply to  David C

Kim Jong Johnson imposed three lockdowns for show and only a rebellion prevented him imposing a fourth lockdown.

David C
David C
2 years ago
Reply to  Kal Bevan

Thoroughly agree.

Bruce Crichton
Bruce Crichton
2 years ago
Reply to  Kal Bevan

He is a great fat Communist fraud, he is as establishment as it is possible to be.

Kim Jong Johnson is thoroughly woke and disgracefully condemned the Industrial Revolution.

Liam O'Mahony
Liam O'Mahony
2 years ago
Reply to  Samir Iker

This is why Representative Democracy (what you’ve got) is preferred to real democracy – what you seem to want: ie Populism? God forbid the great unwashed determine what decusions are taken!

Marcia McGrail
Marcia McGrail
2 years ago
Reply to  Liam O'Mahony

If voting ever delivered what the people wanted, theyā€™d ban it.

Edward Seymour
Edward Seymour
2 years ago

“Hovering somewhere between the patronising and the complimentary . . .” Rather like Eagleton himself. Leftists will never understand the connection between a unique leader like Boris and working class people. An enduring image for me from the 2019 election was Boris surrounded by construction workers who were holding up a hand written placard saying We Love Boris. Marxisant post modernists cannot comprehend this.

Brendan O'Leary
Brendan O'Leary
2 years ago
Reply to  Edward Seymour

Contrast with the 2017 image of the, er, somewhat less working-class, Glastonbury crowd chanting for Jeremy Corbyn!

Nicky Samengo-Turner
Nicky Samengo-Turner
2 years ago
Reply to  Edward Seymour

it is called the social horse shoe… that links the top and bottom of the British socio demograph, like betting, swearing, drinking, whoreing, hunting, long dogs, racing and Toyota Hi Lux… and definitely NOT golf….

Jack B. Nimble
Jack B. Nimble
2 years ago

This made me laugh. Thank you. I think what you say is humorous and true. Those on either side of the middle class–the really poor, and the really rich–seem to have certain indifference to middle-class notions of respectibility and the sense of shame that goes along with it. I wonder if there’s a sense of inward liberation that comes along with this indifference, too. What’s especially interesting about it, to me, is what it reveals about envy. It’s easy to see how the rich can be envied for their possessions and wealth. But I wonder, too, if being envious of that inward liberation is mixed in there–and also mixed in with the middle-class fear of becoming poor. So either way the middle-class looks, up or down, they have something to be envious of. Anyway, I think what you observed is more than just a British phenomenon.

Nicky Samengo-Turner
Nicky Samengo-Turner
2 years ago
Reply to  Jack B. Nimble

touche!!!

Nicky Samengo-Turner
Nicky Samengo-Turner
2 years ago
Reply to  Jack B. Nimble

Rich is not a class definition… by any stretch of the imagination… or perception

Harry Smithson
Harry Smithson
2 years ago
Reply to  Edward Seymour

There was nothing Marxist about this essay, if anything it evoked traditional standards of virtue which Johnson for all his classical education clearly disdains. Eagleton is also avowedly anti-PoMo.

Liam O'Mahony
Liam O'Mahony
2 years ago
Reply to  Edward Seymour

The lower orders know their betters and wring their caps in yrue subservient style!

Patrick Moore
Patrick Moore
2 years ago
Reply to  Edward Seymour

Those placards were for Brexit not Boris

Christine Thomas
Christine Thomas
2 years ago
Reply to  Edward Seymour

What was that about “false consciousness” then? Or have I misunderstood and/or mistaken its meaning? In my interpretation seems both Johnson and construction are suffers of Sid complaint.

Christine Thomas
Christine Thomas
2 years ago

are sufferers of said complaint.

Man of Gwent
Man of Gwent
2 years ago

Character seems to get confused with personality. Many modern politicians are incredibly grey because they donā€™t want to offend anyone. So whilst they donā€™t generate any obvious offence nor do they inspire interest. Boris did inspire interest because he was interesting, but flawed.

In 2019, people voted for him because he wasnā€™t Corbyn, because we were all fed up with Brexit and because we though that if he surrounded himself with competent people then his obvious flaws would be masked by them. Sadly he went for the non competent sycophants in the main and, coupled with enough scandal for a Jackie Collins thriller, his government failed to deliver.

AC Harper
AC Harper
2 years ago
Reply to  Man of Gwent

Thatcher – character
Major – grey
Blair – character
Brown – grey
Cameron – grey
May – grey
Johnson – character
I offer no stunning insight, and you may disagree with my assessment of each PM, but I think it shows that we get whatever PM the machine spits out, not necessarily who we would want.

Richard Craven
Richard Craven
2 years ago
Reply to  AC Harper

Cameron wasn’t an endearing character, but he was a character nonetheless.

Arnold Grutt
Arnold Grutt
2 years ago

The upshot of this article is that Terry doesn’t like Boris. Who effing cares?

Liam O'Mahony
Liam O'Mahony
2 years ago
Reply to  Arnold Grutt

You for one it seems!

Arnold Grutt
Arnold Grutt
2 years ago
Reply to  Liam O'Mahony

I care to the extent that I pay money to hopefully read trenchant articles, not a slurry of sub-Freudian guff and teasingly ‘humorous’cliches and half-truths.

Margaret TC
Margaret TC
2 years ago

Eagleton’s loathing of Boris may have something to do with a family likeness (or likeness of ‘character’): show and little substance is what Eagleton does, throwing out crass generalisations that he knows aren’t true, like the French have style – some of them do but an awful lot don’t – and clever sound bites. Like other contributors to Unherd he likes to show off more than anything else.

Last edited 2 years ago by Margaret TC
Liam O'Mahony
Liam O'Mahony
2 years ago
Reply to  Margaret TC

Naw: nice try but he got it mostly right..

Alan Osband
Alan Osband
2 years ago
Reply to  Margaret TC

Idiosyncratic or idiot ? The two words are related one gathers .

CHARLES STANHOPE
CHARLES STANHOPE
2 years ago

So these inadequates have ā€˜stolenā€™ Borisā€™s 80 seat majority and now revoltingly hope to profit by it themselves.What an utter disgrace!

ā€˜Rogueā€™ Boris may have been a ā€˜rogueā€™ but his appeal to the Red Wall, North & South was undeniable. No Tory leader has had such plebeian appeal since Baldwin or Peel.

The crucial question is whether Boris could change tack at a moments notice, and his recent handling of the Brexit saga certainly proves that he can. However he performance over Corona was lamentable. As a quick thinker and a KS*he will have now learnt the lesson of never to trust ā€˜expertsā€™.

As for your final remark Mr Eagleton that ā€œIt was because he is likely to quote Horace when asked about the rate of inflation that a public bored with plastic politicians elected him. But it was for just the same reasons that he couldnā€™t governā€, what nonsense! Show me a contemporary politician who would have done any better in the Corona Crisis. If Boris had followed his instincts it would have been ā€˜nihil facereā€™,** and jolly good too. Letā€™s hope he gets a second chance, as we havenā€™t much time left.

*(Kingā€™s Scholar)
**( Do nothing!)

M. Jamieson
M. Jamieson
2 years ago

It’s not really his majority though, he is still the MP for the people who voted for him.

Nicky Samengo-Turner
Nicky Samengo-Turner
2 years ago

love the KS jipe!

Aphrodite Rises
Aphrodite Rises
2 years ago

I think to have integrity is to possess a set of moral principles and to act according to these principles even when to do so is detrimental to oneself. Many nowadays seem to act out of a single principle, the principle of self interest.

Last edited 2 years ago by Aphrodite Rises
James 0
James 0
2 years ago

Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Osama bin Laden all had great integrity, in the sense that their actions were guided by their inner convictions, ultimately at great personal cost.

As always, be careful what you wish for. On the whole, I’d rather have politicians who reliably act according to self-interest and are well practised in the art of U-turns.

Aphrodite Rises
Aphrodite Rises
2 years ago
Reply to  James 0

The extremes, the mystic and the mass murderer.

Last edited 2 years ago by Aphrodite Rises
Tony Taylor
Tony Taylor
2 years ago

“You’ll love Joe Bloggs! He’s a real character.”
You won’t.

Michelle Johnston
Michelle Johnston
2 years ago

What absolutely fascinates me about all the post-Boris debate, and it was glaringly obvious last night in the way the debate was framed, is the West (well nearly all of it) has just put itself through the most self-destructive set of policy decisions since the Great War over a virus that was only ever a threat to the non-productive part of the economy and now the narrative is to completely ignore the consequences of those policies rather than frame every leader’s performance and outcomes in the context of this gigantic stupidity. I have to say that not only goes for the media but for far too many of us.
Boris was stupid and lied sometimes but the much more interesting point to consider is like some other Prime Ministers he was a consequence of a particular set of circumstances and a much more interesting question is to ask why did we need him at that precise moment in 2019.
As an aside, one interaction made it clear last night that Sunak did what he was told to do. So you had a PM that was dragged into a policy he did not believe in and basically said. If that’s what the experts insist then just print money and Sunak probably did not believe in that either. The unconvinced lead the unconvinced and the poor and the young will suffer for a very long time and woe betide the other lot to say they would have done anything different it would have been worse. Check every other Left Centred Government as well as what Labour said.
That is the stuff that will look important in the coming years not observations about the nature of Boris’s personality. The latter was important in getting the election won in 2019 the rest of his performance is about specific decision-making and personal behaviour during an extended period where he was offered a blizzard of incomplete narrow advice which lacked context or consequences which people are now realising is way more important than a spring and a couple of winters where the death rate to a virus was 3 times that of a typical flu season of a particular age group.

Last edited 2 years ago by Michelle Johnston
Nick Marsh
Nick Marsh
2 years ago

Being a ‘character’ certainly helped Boris gain power, as it did Donald. Both men stood out from their non-committal, insincere rivals. The public could accept lies emanating from childish self-interest, because it was fed up with the intangible untruths of the politically-acceptable. Unfortunately, as the writer concludes, both men lacked the true character to meet expectations. As far as character went, they were seeds in shallow ground.
But, like a politician, the writer fails to answer the question, preferring (as ever) the easier line of defining terms. History shows that people are always prone to follow characters, no matter how flawed, and our technological age appears to be no different; in fact its return to a form of puritanism has only served to increase the public search for character. Our species, it seems, will not evolve on demand, no matter how much data we feed it.
But Should our leaders have character? Again, history seems to prove its advantage (as well as its risk). As preached in the military, any decision is preferable to no decision, and risk-takers are essential in all walks of leadership. Risk-takers also usually happen to be egotistical – those that aren’t succumb to stress, as does anyone with a conscience. In many jobs, I’ve noticed that the only way to achieve company expectations is to break company rules. The respectful child is father of the failure; certainly in the business world.
Boris bungled many things and had the trustworthiness of a snake, but he presented an identity and was never afraid to confront anyone. These skills are often overlooked; no matter how brilliant the policies, a leader is useless if they fail to garner support. The fact that Boris fell over such trivial matters as eating cake, or overlooking a frisky reputation, is nationally embarrassing. True, these events illustrated his hypocrisy, but he was never one to back down on decisions of national, or international, importance.

Last edited 2 years ago by Nick Marsh
Brendan O'Leary
Brendan O'Leary
2 years ago

Well, Boris is almost gone.
The biggest remaining “character” now is Angela Rayner, so I guess this is aimed at her.

RAYMOND Yeow
RAYMOND Yeow
2 years ago

YES !, ….out with bland milquetoast politicians

polidori redux
polidori redux
2 years ago

“Should politicians have character?”
Better than an excess of virtue. Leave that to bishops (And literary critics!)

Last edited 2 years ago by polidori redux
Nicky Samengo-Turner
Nicky Samengo-Turner
2 years ago

very good!

Ian Stewart
Ian Stewart
2 years ago

You started losing me when you slagged off politicians with the usual cliches; and then you lost me completely when you described Ant and Dec as having no individual personalities.

What bigoted, snobbery! Does it make you feel good churning out cliches to feed the circus spectators? And dressed up as intellectual fare for us to consider. Just awful.

Jerry Carroll
Jerry Carroll
2 years ago

Be A Clown, Be A Clown,
All The World Loves A Clown.
Act A Fool, Play The Calf,
And You’ll Always Have The Last Laugh
— Cole Porter lyrics for the 1948 movie The Pirate starring Judy Garland and Gene Kelly

Nicky Samengo-Turner
Nicky Samengo-Turner
2 years ago

surely you mean ” Dickhedian”?

Josie Bowen
Josie Bowen
2 years ago

Well, that was a waste of my time.