As the prime minister's political future hangs in the balance, Rachel Sylvester talks to Westminster insiders about the 'narcissistic populist' in No 10.
The first time I met Boris Johnson, I was a junior political reporter at The Daily Telegraph and he was a senior columnist. He came bounding into the newspaper's tiny office in the House of Commons, plonked himself down at the desk next to mine and declared that he was writing about Northern Ireland. "Remind me," he said, "which ones are the Orange johnnies?" It was a classic example of the faux naivety that Johnson would often use to extract as much information from those around him while giving back as little as possible (he deployed the same approach to buying cups of tea). Within ten minutes, everybody in the office had helped him craft his argument and he dashed off a superb piece right on deadline.
A few years later, I had started writing a column myself and, new to the opinion pages, I asked Johnson for some advice. It was the week of the Tory conference and I wanted to run my thesis past a more experienced colleague, with a good understanding of the Conservative Party. We met for a drink and Boris could not have been more helpful or supportive. Then, the next day, I opened the paper to find that the star columnist had nicked my idea. He had written it with dazzling wit, of course, and no doubt convinced himself it had been his idea all along.
These personal anecdotes are utterly trivial, but they are also revealing about the character of a man who is extraordinarily talented and charismatic, but can be lazy, manipulative, dishonest and ruthless. Many of those who have worked most closely with the prime minister are among his staunchest critics. Dominic Cummings, his former senior strategist, is only the most high-profile and dangerous example. Another former No 10 aide says, "David Cameron and Tony Blair still have a team of advisers who remain loyal to them. People who have worked for Boris just have horror stories about how appallingly they were treated."
Sir Max Hastings, who was Johnson's editor at The Daily Telegraph, puts it even more bluntly: "The only people who like Boris Johnson are those who don't know him."
Johnson is in many ways the most successful politician of his generation. He changed the course of history by helping to secure a Leave vote in the EU referendum, then won the Tory leadership, secured an 80-seat majority for the Conservative Party and with swashbuckling bravado delivered on his promise to "Get Brexit Done". He is, the Tory strategist Sir Lynton Crosby once told me, "a multigrain politician in a white bread age", an entertaining character in a world of grey suits. His appeal has always gone way beyond the traditional Conservative tribe, as he showed by winning the mayoralty twice in London and then smashing down Labour's red wall at the last general election.
I remember sitting in a focus group with swing voters in 2019. As soon as Johnson's name was mentioned everybody smiled. Unlike most politicians, he has a sense of fun and an irreverence that cuts through. One woman compared him to a monkey swinging through the trees stealing bananas – he was seen as a rogue, but a loveable rogue who, despite his upper-class accent, was on the side of ordinary voters. MPs out canvassing in the critical northern and Midlands seats in the run-up to polling day lost count of the number of times people told them, "I'm not voting for the Conservative Party. I'm voting for Boris."
Ben Houchen, the Conservative mayor of Tees Valley, wrote for The Times Red Box recently that Johnson is "a one-of-a-kind politician who is able to unite north and south like never before and who understands what really matters to voters and communities across the country". The Teesside engineering workers who were photographed with homemade "Boris" banners during the last general election campaign were not under any illusion that they were backing "a saint", he said. "Boris already had a track record as a maverick… What they were supporting was someone with energy, empathy and, above all, the will and the ability to deliver real things for areas like mine and the rest of the north." He warned Tory backbenchers that "if they vote to get rid of Boris they'll be voting to lose the next election".
The prime minister's energy and optimism are enormous. Already his time in No 10 has been a whirlwind. As well as handling a global pandemic and negotiating with the EU, he almost died of Covid-19, got married and had two children. He presided over the successful vaccine rollout that helped combat Covid-19.
Yet, two years after securing a landslide election victory, Johnson's premiership is in serious peril. The prime minister is under investigation by the police for breaking his own lockdown laws. He has been accused of "failures of leadership" by the civil service investigator Sue Gray and lost four of his closest aides, including his trusted head of policy, Munira Mirza, who was known as the "Boris whisperer" in Whitehall.
Many MPs are starting to fear that a Heineken politician who used to reach into parts of the country that other Conservatives could not reach is starting to create a Boris hangover in their constituencies. Sir John Curtice, the polling guru, points out that Johnson's success in 2019 was based on uniting the Leave vote behind the Conservatives while the Remain vote was fragmented. "He has never been a particularly popular prime minister," he says. "He was popular among half of the population but deeply unpopular in the other half. It's very different from the Boris Johnson as mayor of London, who managed to appeal across party lines." As for the Downing Street parties, according to Curtice, "The public have already decided he broke the rules."
The "greased piglet", as David Cameron describes his Old Etonian rival, may wriggle free yet again. The prime minister's allies insist he is determined to fight to stay in No 10 – he has taken to singing Gloria Gaynor's I Will Survive to his staff. The crisis in Ukraine could buy him some time: loyal ministers have already started making the case that the last thing the country needs right now is a "vacuum" at the centre of government. But many senior Tories think Johnson's time is running out. MPs have started quoting an adaptation of a Turkish proverb: "When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn't become a king. The palace becomes a circus." One former cabinet minister describes the prime minister as a "narcissistic populist". When a Treasury minister was recently asked if the government felt like the last days of Rome, a time of military defeats, starvation and spiralling corruption, he replied, "No, it doesn't. The last days of Rome were more fun." Guto Harri, the prime minister's new director of communications, could only say, on his first day, he's "not a complete clown".
MPs who are watching the polls and recent by-election results are starting to wonder whether the prime minister is becoming a liability rather than an asset. Andrew Mitchell, the former chief whip who supported Johnson for the leadership, now wants him to quit and believes the letters will go in demanding a confidence vote if he is issued with a fixed penalty notice by the police. "Our party has an entirely transactional relationship," he says. "Boris is a bit like a medieval monarch, ruling in a medieval court. Much of being prime minister is hard work and laser-like dedication to the detail, and that is just not Boris. It feels now very much as though Boris thinks what's in Boris's interest is in the national interest and I'm afraid it is not."
With Shakespearean symmetry, the strengths that got Johnson to the very top have become the weaknesses that may drive him from power. The leader who triumphed by breaking all the political rules now stands accused of behaving as if he is above the rules. A man who charmed the voters by cultivating an image of self-deprecating scruffiness is now irritating people with his shambolic approach. David Gauke, the former chief secretary to the Treasury who had the Conservative whip withdrawn by Johnson, says the Downing Street lockdown parties have created a tipping point in public perceptions of the prime minister. "People liked Boris because he made them feel that they were in on the joke, but partygate has turned that around and left them with the impression that the joke is on them."
The constitutional historian Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield – who coined the "good chap" theory of politics – suggests the traditional reliance on decency has been suspended under Johnson, he hopes temporarily. "He's not a man driven by public service; he is the most dramatic example we have ever had of a vanity prime minister. His great project is himself, which is very dangerous for a country. He thinks he has a unique access to the minds of the British people so if some betweeded person says, 'There's a convention…' he will say, 'Who are you? You haven't got an 80-seat majority.' No prime minister in the 100 years since Lloyd George has had such a disregard for convention and norms of behaviour in their personal and political life. But Lloyd George was a genius and Johnson is not."
A former Downing Street aide believes that Johnson has been fatally wounded by his own character flaws. "The main reason this has all collapsed is that Boris is incredibly paranoid. He doesn't trust anybody," he says. "He can't rely on anybody else to help him, because he thinks everybody will turn against him. He believes the worst of everybody, then behaves in such a way to ensure that that will happen. He betrays people and then they do turn on him. It's a self-fulfilling self-destructive pattern. Behind this persona of the jolly clown, Boris is a deeply scarred, deeply cynical individual."
Clowns are usually hiding their tears beneath the painted smile and it is impossible to get anywhere close to the truth about the prime minister without understanding his childhood. Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson – known as "Al" to his family – was born in 1964 in New York. Over the first 14 years of his life, the family moved 32 times. It was a chaotic and discombobulating upbringing. I once asked his father Stanley how he had managed to produce so many successful children (as well as Boris, there is Rachel, a journalist, Jo, a former minister and now a peer, and Leo, an environmental consultant). He replied that it was by ignoring them as much as possible and sub-contracting the parenting to expensive schools. His proudest boast was that he had never attended a parent-teacher meeting for any of his children.
The motto Stanley preached was, "Nothing matters very much and most things don't matter at all." According to Rachel, everything in the Johnson family turned into "a competition, a game, a joke – or all three". The siblings were fiercely competitive. Once, the future prime minister kicked the garage door so hard that he broke his toe after he was beaten at table tennis by his sister. He was always a disrupter – in one photo I've seen of the Johnsons out for a walk with another family, everybody is standing in a regimented group, while the young Boris is leaping in front, his arms and legs all over the place.
Johnson's mother, Charlotte Wahl, a talented painter who died last year, suffered from debilitating obsessive compulsive disorder before being diagnosed with early onset Parkinson's at the age of 40. She was admitted to the Maudsley psychiatric hospital when Boris was ten and once said she was convinced that his boyhood desire to become "world king" was born out of "a wish to make himself unhurtable, invincible, somehow safe from the pains of [his] mother disappearing for eight months".
During her time in the Maudsley, Wahl completed 80 extraordinary and disturbing canvases, including one haunting image called The Johnson Family Hanged by Circumstances which shows Charlotte, Stanley and four traumatised children dangling by their arms. Boris – with his distinctive mop of blond hair – is in the middle. When the paintings were exhibited in 2015, Johnson's daughter Lara wrote that she found them "harrowing but extremely honest in the way they deal with the darkest places in a person's mind", adding, "They have helped me in many ways."
At Eton, Johnson developed his now trademark buffoonish persona and adopted the name "Boris" to go with the new identity. The journalist Toby Young, who knew him at Oxford and wrote for Johnson when he was editor of The Spectator, thinks it was a way of covering up the pain.
"He needed a mask because he is naturally shy and needs to be able to perform, to be out there in the world meeting people," he says. "I've never got the impression he enjoyed being at parties. Insofar as he did go to those parties [at Downing Street], it would have been out of a sense of duty. It would be ironic if that proved to be his downfall."
There was always an element of Machiavelli masquerading as Bertie Wooster about Johnson. In one school report a teacher wrote of the future prime minister: "I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation which binds everyone else."
Young remembers watching him speak at the Oxford Union freshers debate. "I was bowled over by how funny and charismatic he was. He had exactly the same appeal that he would turn into a winning electoral formula: to appear to take the question seriously but at the same time not seriously, seeming to lose his place. He was confident enough to send up the whole proceeding and make everyone else look less sophisticated and worldly than him."
When Johnson decided to embark on a political career, Young wrote to him saying it was a terrible mistake because he was a "born journalist" and would never be able to toe the party line. "What I hadn't factored in is he worked out a way to succeed in politics without ever really becoming a party hack," he says. "He wrote back saying, 'Thank you for your note, but I feel the pull of public service is too powerful.' Mixed up with the vanity and the ambition, there is a sense of public duty, sometimes quite deeply buried."
It is the "combination of bumptiousness and vulnerability" that explains the prime minister's appeal, Young suggests. "He brings out people's protective instinct because he clearly is so emotionally needy. He seems like someone you want to reassure and throw your arm around. There's something boyish and a bit raw about him. It's the narcissistic wound that is often applied to celebrities. They felt undervalued and unloved as children because of complicated relationships, so they seek affirmation and approval from large crowds."
Certainly Johnson has – or had – an ability to connect with the electorate that most politicians can only dream of. There is nobody else in politics who could get stuck on a zip wire, or drive a JCB through a wall of polystyrene bricks, or have so many extramarital affairs, and get away with it. Johnson is a post-modern politician who pokes fun at the pomposity of Westminster and the absurdity of life. When Cameron was mocked for admitting that he did not know the price of a loaf of bread, Johnson told a reporter the correct cost, then offered to give the price of a bottle of champagne as well.
With a knowing glance at the camera, he often openly discusses his own cynical political tactics. In one interview he described his performative incompetence as a "very cunning device"; in another he said it can be "useful" to give the impression that you are deliberately pretending not to know what is going on because people won't be able to "tell the difference" when you actually don't know. "I've got a brilliant new strategy, which is to make so many gaffes that nobody knows which one to concentrate on," he told the BBC in 2006. "It's like a helicopter throwing out chaff."
Miriam Gross, the former literary editor of The Sunday Telegraph, who knows the prime minister well and was a close friend of his mother's, says, "He's a very complicated man, not in the slightest bit self-important. He doesn't like telling people off. He is actually a very good-hearted man, but of course he is tremendously ambitious, and anybody who is very ambitious behaves quite badly from time to time. He seems to thrive in chaos which makes things very difficult for the people round him. He gives in to people because he doesn't like confrontation."
The disarray in Downing Street is at one level deliberate. Cummings claimed last year that Johnson had told him, "Chaos isn't that bad. Chaos means that everyone has to look to me to see who's in charge."
The only other politician I have ever interviewed who thrives in chaos is Angela Rayner. She too had a dysfunctional childhood, with a bipolar mother and explained that she had had an edge during the recent divisive years at Westminster because, "The trauma, the screaming, the unpredictability – this is my bread and butter. This is life. This is what I'm used to."
A former No 10 aide thinks something similar is going on with the prime minister. "Boris is used to chaos and nobody else is, so it gives him an advantage. He weaponises chaos and he weaponises trust. He builds loyalty in people, then turns it against them. He has a very Darwinian view of people – it's survival of the fittest. His great skill is that he makes people feel sorry for him when he betrays them. He will stab them in the back and it's always someone else's fault. He's always the victim. He thinks only of himself, he thinks everybody else is entirely disposable professionally and personally. I've never met anyone who believes their own lies so much."
Rory Stewart, the former cabinet minister, says Johnson is both exceptional and deeply flawed. "He is a sort of magician and he's clearly extraordinary at making people warm to him, identify with him and enjoy the spectacle of him," he says. "But there was always something very strange and unstable about the idea that somebody who had created that kind of buffoonish personality was going to be able to survive as a prime minister. The Joker Boris was so much about a combination of clownishness, bumbling, deliberately playing up his incompetence, making fun out of his own dishonesty. These things are very difficult in the long run to match with anybody's idea of what it means to run a big country. The surprise isn't so much that he's now coming undone; the strange miracle of the thing is that he managed to become prime minister in the first place."
Stewart believes that Johnson lacks the intellectual honesty or rigour to have a guiding philosophy. "If you lie all the time, you end up lying to yourself and that means that you don't know what you think about anything. When I was the minister of state at the Foreign Office and he was the foreign secretary, it was simply impossible to know what he really thought about any of the foreign policy issues. There are no clear principles. He's often saying things to please whoever he's been talking to most recently. The civil servants are then in a really difficult position. They can't drive policy through with confidence because they have no clear sense of what his values are. The thing that always struck me as so odd about it was his lack of interest in administration or governing or running things. He's not really interested in power in that sense at all."
Hastings, a military historian as well as former editor, argues that Johnson is "an immensely gifted performer" but, he says, "There's an incredibly long divide between thinking that somebody is an appropriate person to be a newspaper columnist and thinking that somebody is an appropriate person to be prime minister." Johnson, he suggests, lacks the "moral authority and dignity" required in a leader.
"One of the things I have always found ludicrous as the author of a book on Churchill is the effrontery of Boris Johnson aspiring to a Churchillian mantle. If Boris Johnson wanted to be a Churchillian figure, he'd have to work a bloody sight harder and he'd have to pay attention. He's quite unwilling to do either of those things. If you're going to run anything, whether it's a newspaper or a government or an army, you've got to have a capacity for gripping what's going on around you, and the one quality that has been absent from Johnson's life is grip."
The former home secretary Amber Rudd, who briefly served in Johnson's cabinet, famously joked during the Brexit debates that he was fun to talk to at a party but he was not the person you wanted to drive you home at the end of the evening. Now she tells me that the country is discovering that she was right. "He's so likeable, but can you trust him?" she says. "Everybody's deciding they can't." She points to a "frat house" culture in Downing Street. "In the few meetings I attended in cabinet with Boris, nobody quite knew what was going on because he could change the subject very quickly, and when you would like to be having a serious discussion he was cracking a joke. There's a blokeyness about the whole thing. There's a certain type of English public school man that only really sees men. They would never consider themselves anti-women. They're the sort of men that often say, 'I'm a feminist.' But they don't actually see women as equals. David Cameron overcame it because he was very conscious of it, but Boris? Of course not. It's just 'people' are the men, and then we mustn't forget about the women."
In his well-documented personal life, Johnson has always preferred to apply his "have your cake and eat it" philosophy to his relationships as well as his politics. He has seven children by three mothers. Lord Howard of Lympne, the former Tory leader, now regrets firing Johnson from the front bench for lying over his affair with the journalist Petronella Wyatt. "It was all about his private life. I think I was wrong to sack him," he tells me. But that was not the only consequence.
Marina Wheeler, a high-powered barrister, ended their 27-year marriage when his relationship with Carrie Symonds (now Johnson) was revealed. Friends insist that Wheeler does not feel like a victim of her ex-husband and has moved on rather than "lying in a heap on the ground". Far from being a "schoolmistressy type" who kept Johnson in check – as has been suggested by some supporters of the prime minister – she is "a person that has fun". One family friend says, "It was quite a joyful family. People talk endlessly about who is influencing Boris, but part of everything that has happened is that he did also lose something that was very dear to him. It's a waste and it's sad."
The prime minister's new wife is very much part of the court in No 10. When Johnson was "ambushed by a cake" at one of the potentially lockdown-busting parties, it was being held by "Carrie Antoinette". She is said to have influenced the government's decision to evacuate animals from Afghanistan and presided over the refurbishment of the Downing Street flat by the boho chic interior designer Lulu Lytle. It is by all accounts a complicated relationship. A former colleague says the Johnsons are both "damaged souls" who are drawn together by their childhoods. Just as Boris suffered the trauma of separation from his mother at an early age, the young Carrie "thought her father lived in a car" because she only ever saw him drive up and drive away again. "They enable each other," one senior Tory says. "It's not that all roads lead to her; all roads lead to them. And they both have a disregard for rules. You can see why there's a bond – they think they're above the rules. It's the bond of entitlement."
Some see the prime minister's wife as a "manipulative force" who uses the power of patronage that comes from her marriage. According to a friend of Johnson, "She has slowly cut out the people who were close to him and surrounded him with people who are Carrie-approved. The whole thing is toxic." But one former Downing Street aide argues that the Tory leader has deliberately sought to deflect blame from himself onto his wife. "He is the prime minister and he is responsible for the decisions he makes and for how much of an impact his partner has on his work life. That starts and ends with him. I think he is a very cunning operator and he uses people – even in this situation he uses Carrie as a lightning rod to deflect from himself. He will openly blame Carrie for all sorts of things he is doing. It's as if he is simply observing events, not actually the man who is in charge and can make the decisions. He uses the relationship as a weapon to take the pressure off himself. It's what he does with all his relationships." A senior Tory points out that, "Her interventions are symptomatic of the fact that the government doesn't know where it's going. She only has influence because there's a vacuum."
The prime minister's fate is hanging by a thread. The next few weeks will be critical and nobody should write him off just yet, but reality may finally be catching up with the great escapologist. One family friend says, "There's a little bit of a feeling that, as Martin Luther King said, 'The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.' People have to take responsibility for their behaviour."
Written by: Rachel Sylvester
© The Times of London