Back in the mid-1990s, I remember sitting in the House of Commons press gallery with a chaotic young political reporter called Boris Johnson, who announced that he was planning to stand for parliament in an unwinnable seat in Wales. I assumed it was a laugh — an attempt to gather material for a book on his hapless japes in Labour-land. “You’re not serious?” I asked.
He was serious — although as Anthony Seldon’s graphic account of Johnson’s tumultuous three years as UK prime minister asserts, the joke ended up being on the country. “Aides who have worked with him for years still question whether he even knew the difference between right and wrong,” Seldon notes in Johnson at 10.
Johnson served in 10 Downing Street through momentous times — Brexit, Covid and the war in Ukraine. But Seldon, one of Britain’s leading political historians, argues that it was the first of these three for which the ex-prime minister will be remembered. It was Johnson’s showbiz style and remarkable gift for communication that turned Brexit from a cranky Eurosceptic obsession into a new national mission.
“It was one of those rare decisions which reverberates through history,” Seldon says, in his latest reported account on Britain’s premiers. Yet Johnson approached this moment of national destiny in 2016 with a frivolity and a lack of interest in detail that reflected his later approach to governing.
“You’re not seriously going to back Brexit?” I recall asking Johnson at a London City Hall charity event in early 2016. “I’m veering around like a supermarket trolley, George,” the then mayor of London replied. He was later surprised when I reminded him that he was the first to coin that phrase — later deployed by his enemies.
That he had no idea what Brexit would mean in practice was no surprise. As Seldon and co-writer Raymond Newell recount, Johnson did not think Leave would win, but he thought that campaigning for it would boost his chances of becoming leader of the Conservative party. “Oh my God, oh my God, what have we done?” Johnson asked on the morning of the result of the Brexit vote.
In a section that suggests those closest to Johnson at the time have been obliging in spilling the beans, Seldon describes how Johnson, digesting the results at his London home, “paced around in a Brazilian football shirt and bottom-hugging shorts looking ashen-faced and distraught”. A new thought struck him: “Oh s**t, we’ve got no plan. We haven’t thought about it. I didn’t think it would happen. Holy crap, what will we do?”
That challenge initially fell to Theresa May, Johnson’s ill-fated predecessor in Number 10. Her attempt to blur the edges of Brexit and try to limit the economic fallout was later opposed by Johnson, who eventually became prime minister in 2019 and delivered the “hard Brexit” that is hobbling the British economy today and still causing tensions in Northern Ireland, in spite of prime minister Rishi Sunak’s efforts to sort out the mess.
“Johnson did what was best for himself,” Seldon writes. “If Britain benefited in the process, well, it was a fortunate occurrence.”
Seldon argues that Brexit was “never the love of his life” and that other ideas like “levelling up” poorer parts of the UK consumed more of his attention. By which Johnson meant building lots of things. Like a latter-day Roman emperor, the Classicist wanted to litter the country with monuments to his time in power.
Sadly for Johnson, Covid drained the economy of £400bn and the money ran out. Grands projets like a fanciful bridge over the Thames or tunnel to Northern Ireland or a new royal yacht were schemes that only saw life on the front page of The Daily Telegraph, his former employer, with whom he was constantly trying to curry favour. To his credit, however, Johnson did see the need for Britain to invest in new wind farms and nuclear power stations to meet official green targets.
Johnson was a big political figure, but Seldon chronicles in painful detail how ill-suited he was to using the power he acquired in 2019 with an 80-seat majority in the Commons. The fact that the book devotes 70-odd pages to the role of Johnson’s extraordinary adviser — Dominic Cummings — is a sign of how others were left to try to keep the show on the road.
Seldon’s book makes detailed reading for those with the appetite to revisit the chaos of the Johnson years. While some of the author’s earlier prime ministerial tomes have lacked a little in original reporting, Johnson at 10 is rich with first-hand accounts of those who saw him at work first-hand — and are still trying to process what happened.
Johnson at 10: The Inside Story, by Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell, Atlantic Books £25, 624 pages
George Parker is the FT’s political editor
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