“I WOULD NOT take Boris’s word about whether it is Monday or Tuesday.... He is not a man to believe in, to trust or respect.... He is bereft of judgment, loyalty and discretion.” Certainly not a ringing endorsement for Boris Johnson, the odds-on favourite to become the next British prime minister. There is no reason to disbelieve Max Hastings, who saved Johnson’s career by hiring him for The Daily Telegraph after he was sacked by The Times for manufacturing a quote.
Johnson, who is locked in a two-way race with Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt for the leadership of the Conservative Party, has had a checkered career in journalism and politics, marred by constant ideological as well as personal flip-flops. Johnson and Hunt were selected by Conservative MPs as candidates and the final selection will be made by around 1,60,000 party members, 97 per cent of whom are white and 71 per cent male. The results will be out on July 23.
This is the second time Johnson has come close to claiming the top post. His first chance came two years ago during the Brexit referendum when he ditched prime minister David Cameron, his junior at Eton and Oxford, who was leading the campaign to keep Britain within the European Union. Johnson’s about-turn, however, was not entirely unexpected. At Oxford, he had aligned himself with the leftist Social Democratic Party to win the presidency of the students’ union, although he was a Conservative and a member of the Bullingdon Club, the two-century-old, male-only preserve of young patricians.
While leading the leave campaign, which he took to the English countryside aboard a red bus, Johnson made several specious claims. He said Britain was paying the EU £350 million every week and suggested that the money could be used to support the National Health Service. He also endorsed the rumour that Turkey was about to join the EU, and that its citizens—most of them Muslims—would swarm Britain. Johnson’s use of the Turkish bogey was ironic as his great-grandfather Ali Kemal was, in fact, from Turkey. Kemal was a journalist and briefly interior minister of the Ottoman empire. Kemal loved his vacations in Europe. During a trip to Switzerland, he met and fell in love with Winifred Johnson, a British national. He married her and had a son and a daughter with her. Winifred died young and the children were raised by her mother. Ali’s son Osman adopted his maternal surname and made his middle name Wilfred his first name. A successful businessman and an aviator, he flew for the Royal Air Force during World War II. Wilfred’s son Stanley was among the first batch of British bureaucrats sent to the European Commission headquarters in Brussels, after Britain joined it in 1973. Johnson was born to Stanley and his wife, Charlotte, in New York in 1964.
The editor Hastings sent Johnson to Brussels in 1989 to cover the EU, perhaps because he had grown up in the Belgian capital. But Johnson always had bitter memories of the city. His mother had slipped into extreme depression while in Brussels and had to be shifted to the Maudsley psychiatric facility in London. And Stanley, who, in Charlotte’s words, “exuded an Elvis-like charisma”, had several affairs. The marriage did not survive Brussels. It hurt Johnson no end.
It was therefore not surprising that Johnson chucked the reverential tone of the traditional EU coverage and would file outrageous, yet interesting stories. He wrote about the EU trying to regulate everything from the size of condoms to the smell of manure. Pascal Lamy, who was the head of the World Trade Organisation, was then chief adviser to European Commission president Jacques Delors. He recently told the Financial Times that Johnson “did what people 30 years later would call fake news.... He was a precursor.” But the stories brought him recognition, especially from the right wing of the Conservative Party, and helped him launch his political career. Critics call him a shoddy journalist, but even they credit him for his incredible writing skills and oratorical gift. No wonder, the Telegraph pays him £2,75,000 a year for his weekly column. He earned another £4,00,000 last year on speaking assignments.
Jeremy Hunt | AP
In 2001, Johnson got elected to the House of Commons from Henley, a safe Conservative seat. Seven years later, he once again displayed enough ideological flexibility to become the mayor of London, a Labour stronghold. The Labour nominee was the sitting mayor, Ken Livingstone. Johnson served two moderately successful four-year terms at the City Hall.
After losing his Brexit campaign, Cameron quit as prime minister, making Johnson the most obvious successor. But he suddenly looked unprepared and indecisive. A day after the Brexit verdict, according to an article which appeared in The New Yorker, Johnson went to the countryside to play cricket with the ninth Earl of Spencer. Soon, justice secretary Michael Gove, who was chairing Johnson’s leadership campaign, quit, and entered the race himself. In the ensuing confusion, Conservatives chose Theresa May as the new leader. After a disastrous campaign to implement Brexit, May was forced to quit last month, leaving Johnson with his best chance to head the government.
Johnson’s second shot at premiership has so far been methodical. He has stayed on message and has avoided major gaffes. Timothy Heppell, who teaches British politics at the University of Leeds, told THE WEEK that Johnson could cause offence with his off-the-cuff comments. “Political opponents will try to make mileage out of this and may accuse him of racism and sexism. This explains why his advisers have limited his public appearances during the leadership campaign,” said Heppell.
Johnson once said that Hillary Clinton looked like a “sadistic nurse in a mental hospital”. While he was Britain’s chief diplomat, he called burqa-clad women “letter boxes”. He called Africans “piccaninnies’ and the French “turds”. When Barack Obama criticised Brexit, he said the former US president hated Britain because it once ruled Kenya, in a clear reference to the Obama senior’s nationality. Three years ago, he wrote a limerick about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan having sex with a goat.
Johnson’s acerbic wit can hurt Britain’s foreign relations. Anu Sharma, associate fellow at the Delhi-based Centre for Air Power Studies, said, it could be a double-edged sword for even friendly countries like India, although Johnson recently wrote to Prime Minister Modi that he wanted closer ties.
Johnson’s private life, too, has been receiving increasing scrutiny. He seems to have survived the latest fiasco involving a late night domestic row with his girlfriend, Carrie Symonds. Johnson has had a tumultuous love life, with several affairs and two marriages. Johnson and his second wife, Marina Wheeler, daughter of a British father and an Indian-origin Sikh mother, are in the process of getting a divorce. Johnson has half a dozen children, including one from an extramarital affair.
Despite Johnson’s overwhelming lead, the leadership contest is not a done deal yet. Hunt has not given up. Barring a last-minute implosion, however, Johnson is likely to move into 10 Downing Street by the end of the month, when his real challenge will begin.
Brexit, which killed the careers of May and Cameron, could take Johnson down as well. The new deadline for Britain to exit the EU is October 31, 2019. “Johnson has not explained how he can secure amendments to the deal, given the unwillingness of the EU to contemplate this and the lack of time to achieve that between now and October,” said Heppell. While Johnson has made it clear that he will go ahead with a no-deal Brexit if needed, the parliament has vetoed leaving without a deal.
Moreover, the Conservative Party is facing an existential crisis. In the European parliamentary elections held in May, the Tories finished an embarrassing fifth, while far right leader Nigel Farage’s newly-formed Brexit Party came first. Recent opinion polls have shown that a significant number of Conservative voters prefer Farage to take up leadership of their party. It is now up to Johnson to find a way out of the mess.
And, he could just be the man to do it. In August 2012, Johnson, as mayor, was participating in a promotional event for the London Olympics. He rode a zip-wire, wearing a helmet and carrying two small British flags. While coming down, he got stuck for about five minutes, even as spectators filmed him hanging midair comically. “If any other politician anywhere in the world was stuck on a zip-wire, it would be a disaster,” said Cameron, who was then prime minister. “For Boris, it was an absolute triumph.”
Johnson and his supporters hope the luck holds this time, too.