Boris Johnson arriving at 10 Downing Street for the first time as Prime Minister. Getty Images.
An Englishman would burn his bed to catch a flea. Turkish proverb
For Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, there has always been an itch he just could not scratch. Born in the Upper East Side of New York City in 1964 to parents of Russian, Turkish, Muslim, French, English and Jewish descent, Alexander Johnson was, as he would later call himself, “a one man melting pot.” This myriad of forbearers ensured Johnson and his siblings grew up in wealth, with a silver spoon stuck firmly between his teeth. Alexander attended the elite boarding school of Eton College, Berkshire where he promptly became ‘Boris’, a name which stuck. His earliest recorded ambition was to be “world king” and power and influence made young Alexander-turned-Boris, future Prime Minister of the United Kingdom’s palms itch – but how would he get there?
On the uncertain path to world domination, Eton College was, for Boris, the perfect place to start. An institution which has produced twenty of the fifty-four British Prime Ministers seemed like good odds, as it did when he advanced to Oxford University in 1983. Accompanied by his peers and future Conservative Party co-members David Cameron, Theresa May, Michael Gove, Jeremy Hunt and Nick Boles, the University of Oxford pledges to have produced twenty-seven Prime Ministers in total. It was here that Boris attempted to forge a person of pure English likability. A rugby lad and member of the Old Etonian-dominated Bullingdon Club of which vandalism and prostitution were its hallmark, Johnson was well liked for his eccentricities and elitism. He was popular and is recalled by classmate Nick Robinson as “shambolic, though never anything other than hilarious.
Boris Johnson at a ball at Oxford Town Hall in March 1986. Photograph: Dafydd Jones
Despite his social successes, the unlikely Prime-Minister-to-be wanted more. Boris ran for the presidency of the Oxford Union twice, losing in 1985 but seizing the title in 1986. His time as Union President is regarded as both forgettable and forgotten, just a few complaints detailing Johnson’s complete incompetence and lack of seriousness remain as some of the only evidence of the time. Frank Luntz, a peer and campaign aide of Johnson’s during his time at Oxford aired a politically-dirty secret of Boris in the pages of The Independent in 2006. Luntz accused his old friend of “political stagecraft” in posing as a supporter of the Social Democrats rather than revealing his true Tory blood. “I felt at the time, as I do now,” Luntz spoke, “that you should be who you are, not what you think voters want you to be.” It was advice Boris would go on to be the antithesis of, soon malleable to the mood of the moment as he parted ways with Oxford and entered into the world of journalism.
Before being lauded by the 45th President of the United States as “Britain Trump”, Boris Johnson had been playing with the fire of fake news back when it was merely fraud. First ousted from his job at The Times for falsifying a quotation, Johnson then became the Brussels correspondent of The Daily Telegraph in 1989 and, according to Chris Patten, “one of the greatest exponents of fake journalism.” Boris enjoyed the power that fanning the flames of Euroscepticism granted him, despite saying in 2003 that, “I am not an ultra-Eurosceptic… I am a bit of a fan of the European Union. If we did not have one, we would invent something like it.” Regardless, he spun ‘Euromyths’ which instilled fear in Brits back home, citing EU plans to introduce same-size ‘Eurocoffins’, ban prawn cocktail crisps and establish a ‘banana police force’ to regulate fruit shapes and condom sizes. “Everything I wrote from Brussels,” Boris said of his time with The Daily Telegraph, “I found I was sort of chucking these rocks over the garden wall and [listening] to this amazing crash from the greenhouse next door over in England… [it had] this amazing, explosive effect on the Tory party, and it gave me [a] weird sense of power.” None of Boris’ fabrications were well-founded, but each caused Euroscepticism to root itself deeper into the mandate of the British Right. He had secured his influence, but still could not kick that craving for more.
Despite denouncing bigotry, racism and far-rightism in its multiplicity, Boris was nothing if not the pragmatist, any opportunity for controversy the journalist (now also an MP for Henley) seized with both itching palms. In one column, the straw-haired sensationalist referred to African people as “piccaninnies” with “watermelon smiles” before celebrating the colonisation of Uganda. In another, he used the words “tank-topped bumboys” to describe gay men. The criticism which followed was fierce, but somehow Boris could not be sunk – he had reached bumbling celebrity status, an in-joke of the electorate, an impersonation of a politician that slowly became him. He was immune to backlash, proven by his accession to the mayorship of London in 2008. The voter attitude was a resounding “I’m voting for Boris because he’s hilarious.” The Mayor of London was a caricature of himself, his policies and opinions a paradox of pathologies. He flip-flopped throughout his mayorship and his further ministerial positions from pro-immigration to anti-immigration, from endorsing Obama in 2008 to criticising him in 2016 for opposing Brexit, citing his views had been shaped by an “ancestral dislike” as a result of his “part-Kenyan” ethnicity.
Johnson, trapped on a zipline in Victoria Park in 2012. Barcroft Media.
Repeated gaffes lead to Boris’ tongue being eclipsed by his slip-ups, the public warmed to him as he tackled former footballer Maurizio Gaudino in a 2006 charity game and was left dangling from a suspended zipline in Victoria Park in 2012. His blunders had granted him a bizarre amnesty from retribution. By the end of his second mayoral term, 52% of Londoners told YouGov pollsters Johnson did a “good job”, while only 29% believed he did a “bad job”. His pragmatism and pathological lies meant there was something from Boris’ mouth that would please everyone. For example, the Business Insider viewed a Johnson who was “a liberal, centre-ground politician” where through the smoke and mirrors The Guardian journalist Polly Toynbee saw a “jester, toff, self-absorbed sociopath and a serial liar.” Boris was either beloved or a source of apathy, he was harmless entertainment to which nothing would stick. Underestimated and under the radar, Boris soon morphed from a satire of himself to the face of Brexit, a campaign which marked his ascent to supremacy.
When Boris Johnson announced his support for the Leave campaign in 2016, the majority of onlookers viewed the United Kingdom leaving the EU as a distant fever-dream, a haunting and unpredictable parallel universe where up was down and Donald Trump was the US President. Johnson scolded the then-Prime Minister and Remainer David Cameron as “greatly overexaggerat[ing]” the dangers of Brexit and heralded the UK’s venture into true sovereignty. In response, financial markets jolted. The increased probability of Brexit alone caused the pound sterling to decrease in value by 2%, it’s lowest at the time since March 2009. Since the vote to leave the EU, the market has begun to punish the pound even more – with future projections leaving question marks over how far it will plunge in the case of a no-deal Brexit. Despite financial fears, and perhaps motivated by the unlikelihood that he would ever see the day that a Leave-majority would be a reality, let alone that he would be the one governing a Brexit-ridden nation, Johnson became the poster-boy of the hardline Brexiteers – history was in sight.
The wheels of Boris’ Brexit dream were already stuck in the mud when Prime Minister Theresa May appointed him as Foreign Secretary in 2016 following the successful Leave campaign. The new positions of Brexit Secretary and International Trade Secretary meant that Johnson’s powers were vastly depleted. Political analysts saw this as no accident. While having the man who became a meme as Foreign Secretary was embarrassing, for May it was ingenious. Boris was out of her hair and out of the backbenches, he was the issue of foreign consulates now – and the brunt bearer for all Brexit backlash. Divine inspiration or happy coincidence, Johnson was where May could keep her eyes on him – the press. In his time as Foreign Secretary, Boris had compared Vladimir Putin’s hosting of the World Cup to Adolf Hilter’s 1936 Olympic Games, had stated that the Libyan city of Sirte could be the next Dubai if “they… clear the dead bodies away” and alleged in a Daily Telegraph column that Muslim women wearing the burka “looked like letterboxes.” A thorn in the side of Theresa May definitely, but she had seen nothing yet. Two years later, in protest to the Prime Minister’s Brexit deal, Johnson resigned as Foreign Secretary and returned to the backbenches to ensure Brexit could be delivered the Boris way – “do or die.”
For Boris-when-he-was-Alexander, ‘world king’ felt reasonable, natural, inevitable. As he evolved into Boris-ex-Foreign-Secretary-and-leading-Brexiteer, ‘world king’ perhaps felt like too much responsibility. As Mayor of London, Boris was criticised by Ken Livingstone as “a fairly lazy tosser who just wants to be there [without doing any work]”. In 2018, The Economist awarded Johnson the title of “The Politician who has Done Most to Let Down his Party and Country” due to his seemingly innate ability to be “a demagogue [and] not a statesman [but] the most irresponsible politician the country has seen for many years.” These quips however, are not the blows to Boris’ character and career one would assume. For decades, the Old Etonian has pleaded with the world to not take him seriously. He is meticulously-crafted chaos, a trainwreck which borders on shambolism, a man who is so dedicated to being seen as anything but serious that he specifically ruffles his hair before making public appearances. In his mind, he was born for power and not responsibility, bred for nobility and not national office. Boris impersonated a satire of the political elite so well that he became it, the sugared-pill of anti-establishment rightism to the point that national office was handed to him on a silver platter. His quest for power became fate the day the Leave campaign contorted into a referendum on supremacy and sovereignty, not one of international consequence.
On July 23rd, Boris reached the fantastical finale in the comedy of errors that his political career has inarguably been. Despite never filtering his words, forever contradicting himself, ever being the clowned celebrity of the Tory party, he was announced victorious over opponent Jeremy Hunt to become the Conservative leader and next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom – 92,153 votes to 46,656. A boyhood itch for power and prestige had finally been satiated, Boris was now the leader of a nation self-destructing, of a nation he willed into self-destruction as long as it meant the name Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson was a feature of history books.
He is the champion of a party with a lacklustre two-person majority in parliament, the kingpin of a country which is straining under the weight of a Brexit in stalemate, of an electorate at loggerheads, of a threatening conflict with Iran. Boris wanted to be ‘world king’, but never dreamed of what would come next. With power in his pocket, will he finally fulfill his responsibilities, or stick to his old ways? Always the pragmatic opportunist, never the measured arbitrator, all eyes are fixed on Boris – just where he likes them.