Boris Johnson becomes the author of ‘Brexit’ and falls for his lies, his Achilles heel
The man who wanted to be ‘king of the world’ as a child is now asking for prime minister until autumn as the Conservative Party elects a new leader. Cabinet ministers and MPs demand that Boris Johnson leave 10 Downing Street immediately. His three years at the head of the government culminated in a revolt – “eccentric”, in his words – by a party tired of the chaos it has caused.
His wish was to leave in history the mark of the predecessors he admires: Benjamin Disraeli, a strange and controversial 19th-century Tory politician, who created conservatism away from ideological dogmas and wrote novels while leading the country, and Winston Churchill, also a man of letters, a great orator, undisciplined and fringe before becoming a charismatic leader in times of war.
That Conservative MPs and supporters chose him as leader to solve the monumental ‘Brexit’ mess confirms his personal philosophy about the incoherence of life. A national movement that dismisses the European Union as the embodiment of society’s distance from the ruling ‘metropolitan liberal elite’ entrusted that outcome to an elitist, cosmopolitan and libertarian.
Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson was born 58 years ago in New York. His father, Stanley, was 23 and had been awarded a scholarship to continue his poetry studies, which he soon dropped out. Charlotte, her mother, was 22 and had the liberal and bohemian nature that would lead her to give up her studies at Oxford and follow her husband through countries, cities and dozens of homes, while giving birth to four children.
Al, as he is known in his family, had inherited the striking platinum blonde hair that was in the genes of his great-grandfather, a Turkish journalist lynched by political rivals. But the trait that may have influenced Johnson’s psychology the most is his profound deafness up to the age of eight. Shortly after healing, he was sent to a boarding school.
Before receiving a scholarship to attend the elite Eton school, in Brussels, where his father worked as an official of the European Economic Community specializing in environmental matters, he first suffered his mother’s nervous breakdown, which had to be hospitalized, and then his parents’ divorce, after Stanley’s long absence and relentless infidelity.
Boris Johnson’s sentimental upbringing can be understood as a disdainful teaching of the bourgeois moral order, but the character trait of his personality that stands out in his biography – following the story of Sonia Purnell, in ‘Just Boris’ (Simply Boris, story of a blond ambition) – is that the British leader is a lonely man. In social professions like journalism or politics, he doesn’t build relationships, doesn’t talk, charmingly gets help or forgiveness by recreating the character of a sloppy, scruffy upper-class man.
Fired from his first job as a journalist at ‘The Times’ for making up a quote from a family friend, he established himself as the Brussels correspondent for ‘The Daily Telegraph’, defying his colleagues’ annoying consensus on the relentless advance of regulation and European unity. He chose to send exaggerated or lie-strewn chronicles, which endorsed Margaret Thatcher’s Euroscepticism in recent years.
Back in London, he was a much sought-after media commentator and the character he composed as a mask and shield in his adolescence and youth made him a national celebrity. “I have news for you?” is a BBC comedy show in which comedians and personalities enter a failed competition for the funniest commentary on current affairs. The chaotic Johnson surprised the audience as a guest and in the host’s chair.
The polyglot who adorns his offices with a bust of Pericles – the Athenian who built the Acropolis, promoted democracy and philosophy, won wars and hated Spartan rigidity – was unpunctual and disorderly, a television and radio star, directed the weekly ‘The Spectator,” was a luxury car reviewer in GQ magazine. He negotiated his salaries very well, always concerned about money.
But the journalist is a parasite of those who really change society and is commemorated with statues. Boris Johnson wanted a statue to be a reigning politician. His first seat, representing the preeminent riverside village of Henley-on-Thames, took him to a parliament he never succeeded in, because he does not cultivate friendships and complicity with fellow seats and because his brilliance as a writer is not translates into the short, sharp oratorio popular in the House of Commons.
Suffering from boredom and frustrated with his ambition to become prime minister when another Eton boy, David Cameron, was elected leader of the party, he accepted his offer to run for mayor of London. Cameron was ridding himself of the lingering speculation about Boris’ desire to dethrone him. Johnson awaited his fate (replacing a prime minister he found intellectually inferior) in a metropolitan mayor’s office that gave him national visibility.
His first months at City Hall are even described as chaotic by his employees. Chain of dismissal and lack of direction. But he turned the tide and renewed his victory over Labour, in a London where Conservatives have lost popularity and votes in recent decades. He cemented his further career with the merits of his municipal administration, emphasizing crime reduction or his anti-poverty policies.
He returned to parliament in 2015, a year before the European referendum that would destroy old friendships between the ruling elite. He is said to have written two articles – one for sustainability, one for ‘Brexit’ – for his weekly column in the ‘Telegraaf’, before slipping into the winning case for arguments over sovereignty. He led a campaign that exploited popular discontent with immigration, despite shortlisting “pro-immigrant” for his political ideas. In Theresa May’s cabinet, he was a foreign minister remembered for his clumsiness and his ambition to oust the prime minister.
Since his first triumph was to become a celebrity, it is privately inseparable from his achievements in politics, journalism or literature. The list of episodes known to the public is very extensive. A synthesis of the British leader’s political personality could be that people like him more the less they know him, and that the downside of his popularity is the rejection he provokes from a section of the population.
It is a sexual divide, which accumulates children, lovers and divorces. Those who have worked with him say he has a remarkable ability to focus when the task interests him. His intellectual weakness with regard to the details of the administration led him to entrust himself at the beginning of his term of office to an intense modernizer of the administration, Dominic Cummings. His breakup, in November 2020, sparked a flurry of accusations from the guru, who has portrayed Johnson as incapable of being head of government.
Indifference to truth or falsehood was useful in the ‘Brexit’ campaign, but the accumulation of grotesque episodes in 10 Downing Street had fed up the majority of the population and now the parliamentary faction and cabinet. The departure of the European Union may mark his reign, an incomplete and still contradictory work. His UK-lauded role in the war in Ukraine did not save him.
Source: La Verdad
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