The perennially late, terribly toffy Boris Johnson is charm personified, until you ask about parties and cakes and telling lies in the House of Commons.
How do you interview Boris Johnson? You don’t. You skitter along behind him, trying to keep up, as he darts hither and thither, ducking down side lanes and stuttering around in circles and going down holes. A warning: do not follow him down any of these holes. You are unlikely to ever find your way back to the surface. And imagine being stuck down a hole with Boris for eternity. No, it does not bear thinking about. Trying to interview him is like trying to interview the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland as he rushes about, resplendently rumpled, consulting his pocket watch while muttering: “I’m late. I’m late. For a very important date.”
Of course he was late. It is obligatory to mention this. Almost every profile of the former UK prime minister does. He mumbled something which may have been an apology. “I think. I think. Well, I’m sorry we’re late for this.” Who knows who “we” is. Perhaps it’s the royal we. He is terribly toffy. He has terribly toffy charm. Lynn Barber, the former Observer profiler, once wrote about him: “He has charm the way people have perfect pitch – something he can rely on, deploy whenever he needs.” Is it charming to be perennially late? There’s no point getting in a stew about it. It’s just Boris.
He has written a memoir, Unleashed (HarperCollins, $55). It is the story – “the reality as he saw it,” says the blurb – of his tumultuous time as British prime minister from July 2019 to September 2022, after which he was putsched unceremoniously (is there any other way?) out the door of 10 Downing St with the boot marks of formerly trusted colleagues on the rear end of his already crumpled suit pants.
One of the reasons that I lost my job, sad to say, as prime minister was because people continued to believe that Brexit was a mistake, and I don’t think it was a mistake.
His book, including the index, which lists more characters than War and Peace, is 772 pages long and weighs almost a kilo. In other words, it’s a whopper.
I neglected to tot up the number of insults. He is fond of an insult. Present PM Keir Starmer is “the human bollard”. Theresa May is “grumpy old knickers”. Now that is just silly and naughty and schoolboyish. “I wondered about that. Perhaps I should have taken that out. But I had a very friendly conversation with her the other day. She can’t have taken it too much to heart if indeed she’s even noticed.”
It’s not his finest insult, is it? Because he can’t help himself, he says, “Well, maybe I should think of a few more. Look, I mean, it captures something about her. Let’s put it that way.”
Fantasy element
Within the whopper is what sounds like a whopper, or at least a batshit-crazy fantasy: in 2021, at the height of the Covid pandemic, he says he seriously considered invading the Netherlands. Seriously? Try seriously bonkers. I wish I’d never asked. Because, “Yeah, I did. I’ll tell you why. We were way ahead of other European countries with these vaccines. And so, by March 2021, we had vaccinated 45% of the UK, and of the over-80s we’d done almost 100%.”
That is the short version. But the gist of it is that under Johnson’s government, he says, the UK was leading the world in vaccinating people and this was making the European Union very cross indeed. Which led to the EU sequestering 5 million doses of vaccine intended for the UK in a warehouse in the Netherlands. He claims to have asked the armed forces about carrying out an aquatic raid and seizing the vaccines.
A number of senior Tories have scoffed at this ever having been a serious proposal and have said it was likely to have been one of Johnson’s jokes, overblown for the purposes of his memoir. It sounds like a conspiracy theory. “No! It wasn’t a conspiracy theory. It was absolutely true. They were furious because we were going so fast.”
Another reason the shadowy “they” were furious, he maintains, was that Brexit lay behind the UK’s success in vaccinating its citizens. Something like that. I was hiding down a hole at the time and wasn’t paying keen attention.
I asked, somewhat plaintively, did he think there would ever be a time when he wouldn’t have to talk about Brexit, or Covid for that matter? “Oh yeah, I’m sure. That’d be wonderful, wouldn’t it?” I may have said (or shouted) “Yes!” rather too enthusiastically.
I wondered whether he was defensive about Brexit still. Why does he still bang on about it? Obviously, he has a book to flog. But also because, he says, “One of the reasons that I lost my job, sad to say, as prime minister was because people continued to believe that Brexit was a mistake, and I don’t think it was a mistake.”
The blooming cake
Another reason he lost his job was a cake. A cake that, according to him, never existed. This was Partygate. He was accused of attending parties with staff at a time when the country was in strict lockdown, and when these party stories emerged, people were incensed. There was a birthday cake – his – at the centre of Partygate. He was, said a colleague, “ambushed” by the damn cake. Johnson told the Daily Mail: “I saw no cake. I ate no blooming cake. If this was a party, it was the feeblest event in the history of human festivity.”
Can he see anything remotely comic in this now? He is the first and almost certainly the last PM to be toppled by a cake that never existed, surely? “That wasn’t really what the issue was. The issue was that I kind of underestimated the number of enemies that I had.”
But how could he have underestimated them? This is the Tory Party, which is the very definition of an omnishambles (to pinch that fantastic term from The Thick of It), populated by people carrying grudges and knives.
“I didn’t see them and they were getting bombarded by stuff on social media. Yeah, ‘Get rid of Boris Johnson and you’ll go to Heaven.’ And I think they kind of believed it. And a lot of them thought they could do better under somebody else.”
The issue was that I kind of underestimated the number of enemies that I had.
There is something almost touchingly naive about this. For all the bombast, and there is plenty because he does bombast brilliantly, you are left with the impression of a failed politician who is still wondering how and why all of this happened. I am wondering why he didn’t deploy his famous charm and make his colleagues like him.
“My charm has catastrophically worn off, ha, with lots of people. I have to face that.”
He writes, “I was more disposable than I believed.” Is that a sad sentence? “I think that what I mean by that is that some of them … Look, a lot of my colleagues remained loyal, right? But too many of them sort of thought that they could move along and do without me. That was a sad thing. But I don’t blame them, but I think it was a mistake.”
The bluster, the instinct for biffing back, is never far from the surface. He was found to have lied to the Commons. “Yeah, well, I think that was all bollocks, to be honest. Anybody who thinks that we were partying, setting out to break the rules in No 10, is really out of their minds. And you should have been there at the time; people were just working their guts out. It was just rubbish and it was politically motivated rubbish.”
He, ahem, apologised. Actually, he grovelled. He is now ungrovelling. He now writes that, “I tried to defuse public anger by a series of pathetic apologies,” which, he says, just made people angrier. He should not have sanctioned “a witch hunt led by a woman [Sue Gray] who was to become – unbelievably – chief of staff to Keir Starmer.” He should have known his former buddies were out to get him. “Ah, well, never mind.”
Unruly meringue
There are more burning questions. They are to do with his mad, and, you suspect, carefully cultivated hair. To borrow from Dolly Parton, you have to spend a lot of time to look that dishevelled.
In Kyiv, a bakery came up with a bun to commemorate him having been given the bum’s rush. The bun featured vanilla ice cream and “wisps of unruly meringue”, as one rag described it, designed to mimic Johnson’s unruly hair.
Honestly, why doesn’t he just get a decent haircut? “I know. It’s a bloody good point. The answer is that I just haven’t had time. I’ve been flying around the world.” I say he hasn’t had time for the last 10, 20 years. Come on. “I’ve got to get my hair cut. You’re quite right.”
He’ll get it cut and it will still look mad. It’s his signature look, his clowning glory, if you like. It signals that his inner buffoon is still there, just beneath the surface and his inner buffoon is part of his charm.
He was in Auckland for a lunch put on by Duco Events. He gave a very long speech. It was a very long lunch. It was a “pretty well lubricated” lunch. He was pretty well lubricated. “It was impossible not to be. Everybody was in fine fettle.”
People could pay up to $1000 plus GST for their grub and to have their picture taken with him. It wasn’t lunch with a failed politician; it was lunch with a celebrity.
“One very nice woman wanted to dance with me. We did dance together for quite a long time. We danced in a slightly sort of 1950s way. It was rather decorous. It was a sort of waltz she seemed to want to do. It wasn’t disco dancing. We did it for quite some time. Then she kissed me. Which was great.” On the lips? “I can’t remember exactly where. It was a very good event.” To which you can only reiterate: it was a pretty well-lubricated event.
I wanted to know – I didn’t really, this was, as I warned him, a set-up question – whether he had retired from politics. “I want to try to be useful but, you know, I have to be realistic. My party might or might not find me useful in the future.”
Philandering
What I really wanted to know was whether he had retired from philandering. He is married to Carrie; they have three young kids. She is his third wife. He has had numerous flings, one with the journalist Petronella Wyatt, while he was her editor at the Spectator. At the time, he said this was “compete balderdash. It is an inverted pyramid of piffle.” It wasn’t. That lie got him the push from his then position as Shadow Culture Minister. He has eight children, possibly nine.
He said, in a spluttering response to my question: “Have I, I, I … the answer to that is ask my loving wife. All such questions I think you should direct to her. She will give you an authoritative answer.”
Has he examined why he went about philandering? It seems like a lot of bother. “All such questions should be directed to my wife.” Well, what’s her phone number? “You’re asking me to accept the premise of your question … But I don’t want to get into the premise of your question. Because I don’t want to Cover The Subject. I’ve always drawn the veil over these issues.”
There was a thumping noise coming from his end of the phone. Was he banging on a table? “The best answer to these things is, honestly, I don’t think it’s important.”
Here is a very Boris story. He is telling me about going to Piha and climbing Lion Rock. I told him people are always falling off Lion Rock and dying. Which may be a slight exaggeration but when you are attempting to interview the king of hyperbole, a little exaggeration might be forgiven. “Really?” he said. “Yes, well, there were all these signs that said, ‘Do not go past this point’, but I could see very clearly that the path was still there. So I just went on. And it was so beautiful. I was left entirely by myself because the detectives didn’t come with me.” Of course they didn’t. They didn’t want to die. “I went all the way up to the very, very top. It was just mind-blowingly lovely.”
Of course he went all the way to the very, very top. Of course he ignored the warning signs. The perfect ending to this story would have had him falling off the very top and landing at the very bottom. He lives a charmed life, so he would have survived the fall – and scrambled right back up. And that is the story of Boris.