In the mid-1990s I remember sitting in the press gallery of the House of Commons with a chaotic young political journalist called Boris Johnson, who announced that he was planning to run for Parliament in a seat impossible to win in Wales. I assumed it was a laugh – an attempt to piece together material for a book about his unfortunate jokes in Labour-land. “You’re not serious?” I asked.
He was serious – though, as Anthony Seldon’s graphic account of Johnson’s tumultuous three years as British Prime Minister asserts, the joke ended up being about the country. “Helps who worked with him for years still wonder if he even knew the difference between right and wrong,” Seldon notes in Johnson at age 10.
Johnson served at 10 Downing Street at memorable times – Brexit, Covid and the war in Ukraine. But Seldon, one of Britain’s leading political historians, argues it is the first of these three for which the former prime minister will be remembered. It was Johnson’s showbiz style and remarkable gift for communication that turned Brexit from a grumpy eurosceptic obsession into a new national mission.
“It was one of those rare decisions that reverberates through history,” Seldon says, in his latest account of Britain’s prime ministers. Yet Johnson approached this moment of national destiny in 2016 with a frivolity and lack of interest in detail that reflected his later approach to governance.
“You’re not seriously going to support Brexit?” I remember asking Johnson at a charity event at London’s City Hall in early 2016. “I’m spinning like a supermarket trolley, George,” replied the then Mayor of London. He was then surprised when I reminded him that he was the first to invent this phrase – later deployed by his enemies.
That he had no idea what Brexit would mean in practice was no surprise. As Seldon and his co-screenwriter Raymond Newell recount, Johnson didn’t think Leave would win, but he believed campaigning for him would increase his chances of becoming leader of the Conservative party. “Oh my God, oh my God, what have we done?” Johnson asked the morning of the Brexit vote result.
In a section that suggests those closest to Johnson at the time were forced to spill the beans, Seldon describes how Johnson, digesting the results in his London home, “walked around in a Brazilian football shirt and skintight shorts face ashen and distraught”. A new thought hit him: “Oh shit, we don’t have a plan. We didn’t think about it. what are we going to do?”
That challenge was first given to Theresa May, Johnson’s ill-fated predecessor in Number 10. Her attempt to blur the contours of Brexit and try to limit the economic fallout was then resisted by Johnson, who eventually became Prime Minister in 2019 and delivered the ‘hard Brexit’ that now hampers the UK economy and continues to cause tension in Northern Ireland, despite Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s efforts to address the issue.
“Johnson did what was best for him,” Seldon writes. “If Britain benefited from the process, well, it was a happy event.”
Seldon argues that Brexit has ‘never been the love of his life’ and that other ideas like ‘leveling up’ the poorer parts of the UK have caught his attention more. By which Johnson meant to build a lot of things. Like a latter-day Roman emperor, the classicist wanted to litter the country with monuments to his time in power.
Unfortunately for Johnson, Covid drained the economy of £400billion and the money ran out. Major projects like a fanciful bridge over the Thames or a tunnel to Northern Ireland or a new royal yacht were projects that only saw the light of day on the front page of the Daily Telegraph, his former employer, with whom he constantly tried to to curry favor. To his credit, however, Johnson saw the need for Britain to invest in new wind farms and nuclear power stations to meet official green targets.
Johnson was a great political figure, but Seldon recounts in painful detail how ill-suited he was to use the power he gained in 2019 with an 80-seat majority in the Commons. The fact that the book devotes around 70 pages to the role of Johnson’s extraordinary adviser – Dominic Cummings – is a sign of how others have been left behind trying to keep the show on the road.
Seldon’s book makes detailed reading for those who fancy revisiting the chaos of the Johnson years. Although some of the author’s early tomes on prime ministers lack a bit of original reporting, Johnson at age 10 is rich with first-hand accounts from those who saw it at work first-hand – and are still trying to figure out what happened.
Johnson at 10: The Inside Storyby Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell, Atlantic Books £25, 624 pages
George Parker is the political editor of the FT
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