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October 5, 2024 - 9:30am
A man cheated of his rightful, glorious legacy by mere circumstance — this was the anguished self-portrait Boris Johnson painted in an interview with ITV’s Tom Bradby last night, projecting a relaxed but scrappy unrepentance, peppered with the rhetorical flourish with which we are so familiar.
There was no mea culpa from this latinate literarian over Number 10 lockdown frivolities, questions over his ethics and standards, and actual policy outcomes. Instead, we saw Boris pine longingly for a forgotten erstwhile future. It’s obvious — he would do almost anything to have had more time in Downing Street. “We barely got going,” he lamented.
Unsubtly scheduled to launch just days before the Tory leadership finalists are chosen by the parliamentary Conservative Party, Johnson’s new book, Unleashed, is an unabashed sales pitch for his brand of conservatism and an apologia of his eventful three-year premiership. His message to MPs and party members considering how to vote in this leadership election was clear: I was a winner, do as I did.
“Get back to the winning agenda that we had,” he said. “In 2019, we put together an enormous coalition of people. What we did wrong was turn our backs on two vast sectors of our coalition, and we need to get them back.” He managed to resist the tempting news line of backing a specific candidate, while not denying that Robert Jenrick’s throaty rejection of the ECHR met with his approval.
Gifted the interview after the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg accidentally sent her preparatory notes to Johnson, ITV’s Tom Bradby was stylistically free to appeal with emotion-laden exasperation at the former PM over the Number 10 lockdown frivolities. In his own book Johnson described the “grovelling” and “pathetic” apologies he made at the time as a mistake, but he offered little contrition when pressured to the viewers at home.
“I think that the blanket apology — the sort of apology I issued right at the beginning — I think the trouble with it was that afterwards, all the accusations that then rained down on officials who’d been working very hard in Number 10 and elsewhere were thought to be true,” he said. “And by apologising I had sort of inadvertently validated the entire corpus and it wasn’t fair on those people”. Through these remarks, he neatly deflected from how criticism has been almost entirely levelled at his leadership, and how he managed and oversaw a devil-may-care Number 10 operation that broke the very regulations it drafted. If the Prime Minister is not accountable for the culture and conduct of Downing Street, who is?
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SubscribeI think I’d struggle to show remorse when the next elected replacement of me is lionised in many quarters of the media and excused the same and often considerably worse sins.
Free Gear, Two Tier, and Curry’n’Beer is all that Boris was except humorous and communicative. I think these last characteristics are what did it for Johnson: the media is stuffed full of po-faced dullards in the mould of Starmer who seeth with jealousy and discontent. Sure, Johnson’s politics was the wrong sort for many, but his charisma (faux or not) really grated with the progeny of the metropolitan middle class that lack natural wit.
My former colleague (Durham, 2.2, daddy commissioning editor at the BBC) quite literally spent his every day of lockdown churning out anti-Boris copy like the stuff above simply because he hated him at a personal level: when they worked together Johnson could always charm his managers to avoid trouble. I did suggest my colleague try not being a humourless mood hoover, but he ignored my advice. He now writes here and I don’t so take what you will from that.
Sue Gray was the Eminence Gris who plotted the defenestration of Boris.
I would have voted for him again, but not Truss or Sunak. However, even they seem to embody more of the dynamism required of leadership than ol’ turnip head 2TK.
It’s interesting that 2TK or Two Tier is never mentioned in the media. Below the line and in everyday conversation it is ubiquitous but somehow it rarely makes it above the line. The media normally loves a handle no matter how inaccurate (or libelous) and Two Tier is beautifully short, two simple sounds, and an alliteration to boot. Yet I will never hear a Hislop or Vine say “Two Tier” like they used Beano, Buffoon, BoJo, and BoZo in lieu of Johnson’s name.
One would need to consider Johnson’s ‘surprise’ April of 22 trip to Kyiv his greatest disaster. Like many politicians in trouble at home the international stage often beckons. His encouragement of Ukraine ‘fight them on the beaches’ pep talk when a peaceful resolution was in the works from the Istanbul talks and the hundreds of thousands of deaths which ensued should qualify as his worst moment.
But it offered the comedic actor in the Ukrainian president’s office an opportunity to play on a global stage and bring the scale of attention, that is after all, what most actors are fundamentally all about. Look at me.
Tragic.
But not to worry, Johnson and Zelensky will be just fine, they can go on to write their memoirs. It’s the human wreckage that they leave in their wakes that is their true legacy no matter what they try and tell you.
In December 2019 the country was given the choice as Prime Minister of either having a man who had been both Mayor of London and Foreign Secretary and one who had had no ministerial experience in his 36 years in Parliament , who had voted voted against his own Labour Government numerous times , who had entertained members of the IRA in the Houses of Parliament and who was a friend of Middle Eastern terrorists. In spite of his many faults the country wisely chose the former. Yet within three months of his winning an 80 seat majority Boris Johnson was felled by the worst peace time pandemic in a century- one which fully exposed the weaknesses we all knew he had. The rest is history.