The new British PM is quite different from anyone else inhabiting Number 10 in my lifetime, certainly:
Prime Minister Boris Johnson at his first Cabinet meeting in Downing Street, 25 July 2019.
Official photograph via Wikimedia Commons.
… unlike most media or entertainment figures who progress into politics, Boris has not abandoned his old self — for the very good reason that it’s a hit persona: The great-grandchild of Jews, Muslims and a distant cousin of the Queen, he invented himself in his teens as what his Oxford chum (and another old editor of mine) Toby Young calls a Wodehousian buffer — one might say a Drones Club character, were it not for the fact that he is not, as it happens, terribly clubbable.
It was a canny choice of shtick: It duped the left and half of the right into dismissing him as a buffoon. And, even more cleverly, chuntering his way around the country as a toff with a massive thesaurus gave him, somewhat counter-intuitively, the common touch. The famous image of him stuck on the zipline in a beanie-like helmet waving plastic Union Jacks is so ingeniously endearing one assumes he paid them to stall the thing — because a failed photo-op is way less tedious than one that goes off like clockwork.
This is the genius of the act: He’s Bertie Wooster with Jeeves’ brain. Out on the street, he’s everybody’s friend; among his actual alleged friends, he’s utterly ruthless: Within twenty-four hours of entering 10 Downing Street, he’d pulled off the bloodiest cabinet reshuffle of “modern times”, as the papers say — although actually I can’t think of a bloodier one even from non-modern times. (Only four members of the May regime were retained: Michael Gove, Amber Rudd, Baroness Evans and Matt Hancock.)
Is he a nice person? Well, he’s left an awful lot of human wreckage in his wake. Some of the women he’s used and discarded seem to me, without naming names, to be sad and profoundly damaged from their brief intersection with his wandering zipper. His latest squeeze seems likely to be moving into Number Ten without benefit of clergy – a first for the Tories and a sign of how desperate they are after years of letting all the sober, serious, earnest types turn their party into a laughingstock.
What does he believe in? Other than himself, not terribly much. About a decade ago, I was in London for a couple of days and had lunch with him and Stuart Reid at a favorite Italian restaurant. Stuart was the deputy editor who did all the hard grind at the Speccie, while Boris was the great fizzing impresario fronting the operation — a business model he transferred successfully into his mayoral regime, and will no doubt be trying again in Downing Street. He was going on the BBC’s “Question Time” that night and was worried that he didn’t have anything sufficiently arresting to say, so asked if I had any tips. I gave him a few thoughts on the passing scene, and he considered them not in terms of his own public-policy positions (if any) but in terms of attitudinal cachet. Finally, I said, “Why don’t you really stir them up and put in a word for social conservatism?”
“You mean abortion and all that? Oh, God..,” he sighed, and ordered dessert.
If that seems to be (for self-interested reasons) his most firmly drawn red line, don’t nevertheless overstate his ideological flexibility. Like Boris, Theresa May schemed and maneuvered for decades to reach the top spot … and, by the time she pulled it off, she’d spent so much time and effort on the scheming and maneuvering that she had no idea of what to do once she got there. Boris is likewise invested in himself, but, having reached the finial of Disraeli’s greasy pole, he doesn’t intend to be just the latest seat-filler. Mrs May wanted to be prime minister; Johnson wants to be a great and consequential prime minister.
On another brief pop-in from the thirteenth century, David Warren also takes note of the new British PM:
It has come to my attention that Britain has a new prime minister, BoJo the Clown (known to his friends as “Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson”). I gather Mrs Maybe, previously raised to that office under some gender equality programme I suspect, didn’t work out. Mr BoJo has already been criticized for having unkempt blond hair (and small eyes, I have noticed). Too, he was educated at Oxford University, which is still somewhat élite. He was able to use the word anaphora in a sentence (here), and shares with Churchill (and Trump) an ebullience, a buoyant exuberance, that his enemies invariably discount to their cost. He is a reminder that one man (and I have named three) can change the course of history, and the fate of nations.
Not necessarily for the better, of course.
Jacob Rees-Mogg, Member of Parliament for North East Somerset, is suddenly elevated from the backbenches to the front bench; from persistent articulate rearguard rebel, to House Leader in the Mother of Parliaments; and, Lord President of the Council.
Born to rule (the son of an editor of The Times), the now right honourable gentleman stands as a throwback to 1529, when the last indigenous Catholic was appointed to that office. (Though I am not entirely clear what were the Privy Council arrangements under Good Queen Mary, before the return to Erastian apostasy under Bad Queen Bess.)
Not merely a Conservative but a member of the party’s (“Faith, Flag, and Family”) Cornerstone Group, and a diligently practising Roman Catholic with forty children or so, Rees-Mogg has already made a mark in his new rôle, by imposing rules of civility upon the Tory caucus. He was able to do so while characteristically exhibiting them, in a talk that kept everyone in stitches.
Mr BoJo, too, was christened a Catholic, though it has not so far had much effect. He has rabbinical Jewish and infidel Turk antecedents, too, and learnt Anglican hymns at Eton. He is thus a kind of one-stop shop for nominal Abrahamic associations, but to the point, the Orangemen of Ulster are already calling him “England’s first Catholic prime minister” — and what’s good enough for Belfast is good enough for me.
