My day in the life of Boris Johnson England's Falstaff has lost his wit

Will anyone though spare a thought for satirists? When this masterpiece by the Bullingdon Pericles was announced, I agreed to do a parody called Unhinged. Without a copy of Johnson’s book I thought I’d better go big, he’s larger than life, I’ll anticipate his crazy retelling of the Covid and Brexit years. After all, he’s certain to reframe everything as a tragedy with him as heroic victim.

I mean I was right, everyone was, but his account is oddly enervating. Say what you like about Johnson, he was always showbiz, always clever, always funny. Wasn’t he? So many of the similes, metaphors and gags just don’t land. His recent media round has seen him repeat this skein of bollocks from the book: “I used to claim that my chances of becoming PM were about the same as my being reincarnated as an olive or decapitated by a frisbee.” It just doesn’t work. On the basis of this magnum opus, satirists who’d pointed their lances at some imaginary political giant were in fact tilting at a windbag.

The idea was that my parody would be a pretend self-improvement book: you know, Be More Boris. Life lessons from the master of what we might call Kintsugi Politics. “What’s that?”, you ask. Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold. Something broken and repaired in this way becomes more precious than something that’s never been broken. And that’s what he did, didn’t he? He smashed all the protocols he could find, especially those concerning public trust, and then fixed them again with government contracts for party donors. Let’s be honest, has trust in politicians ever been higher?

The most spectacular application of Kintsugi Politics came at the start of his long, long three years in Downing Street: if it ain’t broke, Brexit. He smashed the concept of an orderly separation from the EU and the promise of what Brexit would bring us all, ably assisted by his chief smashing adviser Dominic Cummings — remember him? Five-feet-seven-inches of unquenchable wrath in a hoodie. How all these Brexit fragments will finally be glued together to create a better Britain remains to be seen. Trust yourself. The important thing is to channel your inner Borisivity. Keep going, concentrate on the really good stuff and simply ignore the rest, as one might ignore a discarded girlfriend.

The other part of my book is a timeline of imagined diary extracts. If you’ve ever been tempted to spend weeks trying to inhabit Boris Johnson’s mind, don’t. It’s quite taxing. In the end though it was simply a question of taking what actually happened — let’s say a pile-up of Partygate revelations — and calling that a Discredited Narrative. You’re free then to invent your own self-pitying, distracted Boris version, one in which he wishes that some of those raking over the ashes of the past would remember the bloody vaccine roll-out. He was King Jab, wasn’t he? He was Antidote Father Christmas, eheu, life goes on, etc. Then at any moment his mind might wander to consider what does give him the horn and it turns out to be meeting Meghan Markle at a formal event, ideally a funeral. “When you get close up, she smells of gardenias…”

Meanwhile, back in the fictionalised real world, I was pleased to see in Unleashed the return of Johnson’s great hero — the reckless mayor from the film Jaws who keeps the beaches open despite the (as it turns out very real) prospect of the shark eating its way through his constituents. Here, at the end of 2019, our other hero, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, considers the threat of a coronavirus rolling westward from China. “After more than 30 years of writing about or dealing with new zoonotic diseases…” writes Professor Johnson, “I had concluded two things: first, that these novel zoonotic plagues tended to sort themselves out…and second, that the greater risk of destruction was from the attempts by politicians to contain the disease.”

OK, he concedes, the Jaws mayor was wrong in the end, “but if you leave aside the requirements of the drama and you look at the cold, hard statistics — you can see that the mayor had a point”. Yes, that’s right. Johnson’s saying that of course it’s unfortunate that the Covid shark ate your nan, but we all thought it would sort itself out, don’t blame me for the dithering hokey-cokey of lockdowns delayed, imposed, lifted, hastily re-imposed and lifted again, let’s instead remember how brilliant Brexit was.

Much has been made of Johnson’s lack of contrition for the lockdown bacchanalia at Downing Street. And yes, he has issued an apology of sorts, admirable for its chutzpah. He’s sorry that he gave a heartfelt apology when the scandal broke, as it unfairly hemmed him into the guilty corner for the duration. He’s sorry for saying sorry. Brilliant. But his account of Partygate, such as it is, goes further, and has an odd accusatory tone of such bitter melancholy, it’s clear that an apology is finally due — to him. Two, actually.

First, he’d like an apology from us for thinking him so inept, so dissembling, so morally vacuous. He’s just a decent guy, with a big heart and a nimble mind, standing in front of us, trying to do the right thing and blow me down if the dark forces of a hostile media and ruthless political opponents haven’t given us entirely the wrong idea. He hopes his version of events will encourage us to see how harshly we misjudged him.

Second, he’d clearly like an apology from the Conservative Party for their betrayal, for their ghosting him as the revelations piled up and the resignations multiplied, until he was finally tick-tweezered out. His last Commons speech ended with a quote from Terminator: “I’ll be back”. His farewell speech to the nation outside No. 10 was marbled with dark mutterings about “the herd” that turned on him. Only weeks ago he told Mail readers: “When we get back in, don’t be too hasty to get rid of successful election-winning leaders…some polls put us only two or three points behind in the days before I was forced to resign, in what was really a media-driven hoo-ha.”

The gaslighting in Unleashed is relentless. The Covid task force infuriated him: “the gall, the audacity of the government in trying to micromanage humanity…” Mate, wait until you remember who was literally prime minister! Oh, ha ha, a few pages on he does, and invites sympathy for being both a libertarian and “the first prime minister in history to cancel Christmas…” Yeah, that was a tough break, hug it out big guy. There’s an apparent moment of clarity when he tells us “I don’t think you should underestimate the many goofs I made”, which then subsides into the confession that he made “too many duff appointments”, some of whom turned out to be “homicidal maniacs”. Those psychopaths I mistakenly invited into the Cabinet, shake my damn head.

He has a conviction that history will exonerate him. Perhaps he’s right. Perhaps the fury we all spent on the Downing Street pandemic piss-ups was misplaced. Perhaps, in the fullness of time, we will come to understand that Partygate was actually a morale booster for the whole nation, a defiant light in the gloom, a glow of Blitz spirit, wheeled clanking into HQ in a Samsonite travel case.

The book itself is — at two and a half pounds, 1.2 kilos — quite daunting and as one of a series of displacement activities before having to trudge through it, I searched the index hoping to find the “real story” behind certain rumours. Alas, nothing between “Bloomberg, Michael” and “Blyton, Enid”. No “Blow job, embarrassment at being discovered during receipt of…” Likewise, it skips from “Arab Spring” to “Argentina”, finding no room for “Jennifer Arcuri”. I was hoping, too, for a solution to the puzzle of Gavin Williamson, a Grayling-level political dimwit who was knighted for services to God-knows-what.

Is Boris planning a return to politics? He’s coquettishly teased us on the subject for months. “As for whether I will ever stand in the Commons again, to call the speaker ‘baby’ or anything else, I have no idea,” he tells us. Elsewhere, he fondly remembers the Queen, unironically praising her “ethic of service, and patience, and leadership”. He goes on to say that “you need someone kind and wise, and above politics, to personify what is good about our country”. Perhaps he’s eyeing up a future ambassadorship.

There’s certainly an elegiac feel about Unleashed. The scores having been settled, the narrative corrected in his favour, does he really want to be back in the Commons? He must know that the Falstaff he was before 2019 — the bumbling wit, the charming cad — has been obliterated by his tarnished reputation in office and his removal from power in disgrace. Or as a result of a “media-driven hoo-ha”, you decide.

If he, like Falstaff, seeks to ingratiate himself, he may find that we, like Henry, have a very changed opinion of him. He’s 60 now and not the Big Booming Boosterist Boris he once was. “I know thee not, old man,” says the king. “Fall to thy prayers. How ill white hairs become a fool and jester, good luck on GB News, yeah?”

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Ian Martin is a writer and a producer known for The Thick of It, In The Loop, Veep and The Death of Stalin. 

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