23 May 2013 12:03:50
Like so many lucky "ladies", I feel quite an intimate connection with Boris Johnson. For the last few years, I have received birthday cards, Mother's Day cards and Christmas cards with declarations of love from him. This is my youngest daughter's joke. It started when she was about nine: "You gotta love a bit of Boris," she says. And many women have. So his cartoonish persona works even on little girls, though as we all know, clowns are really scary. What is scary about Boris is that he is serious. Deadly serious. His ambition is not only to be prime minister, his sister Rachel recently revealed, but also "World King". For all the sub-Wodehousian piffle, we are dealing with Borisconi.
This book is testament to the cult that he inspires. The genre it most resembles is slash fiction – in which fans write, often homoerotically – about the likes of Spock and Kirk. The Wit and Wisdom is the political equivalent, with Harry Mount as quivering fanboy. "This book has the full support of Boris Johnson," we are told. Really? It makes Beyoncé's self-produced documentary – in which she comes across as the most beautiful, loving, gifted but struggling woman in the world – look humble.
The grovelling here is unreal. Maybe it's a form of fagging that I simply don't comprehend. Take this, the first line of the demented aristo preface by Lord Charles Fitzroy: "It was down in the crypt of St Paul's cathedral that I first discovered that Boris was my cousin." It is bettered only by the first line of the introduction by Mount himself: "One evening, toward the end of 2012, I thanked Boris Johnson for letting me edit this book." Forget Sonia Purnell's biography and Andrew Gimson's, and kiss the feet of the emperor. Clothes are optional.
Is Bojo clever, charming, funny? Yes, of course. He is also the most ruthless politician I have ever met, and I have met a few. My admiration for him as a hack (the £250,000 "chicken feed" annual salary for his Telegraph column knocked out on a Sunday) knows no bounds. He is a terrific writer who can spin sugared words faster than a candy machine.
I have seen how the machine works. Years ago when I had to follow William Hague around America (I know … a dirty job), we ended up in George W Bush's mansion in Austin, Texas. Bush was not yet president but it was obvious he would be. He made some remark to Boris about his watch and they must have chatted for all of five seconds. Johnson turned this into a column in which it seemed as if he had had a personal audience with Dubya himself. This wasn't lying, it was just being economic with the actualité.
Still, to his disciples he is stardust, he is golden. There are endless quotes here about his genius and supposed lack of self-importance. There is much about his linguistic prowess and his genuine love of the classics. Cicero describes a certain style of Roman oratory as digressio. This is Boris's gift. That and the old ad lib.
The membrane between digression and lying, though, is semi-permeable. He lied about his affair with Petronella Wyatt and was sacked for it. (Eddie Mair in calling him a nasty piece of work might have got it right but somehow it felt wrong – precisely because Boris spins his "nastiness" as implicit to the "force of nature" his worshippers believe him to be.) "Petsy" now cuts a rather sad figure, torch-singing at the parties of Lord Rothermere and boasting in his papers of being groped by her father's friends. The Boris libido, a supposed part of his charm, has never been kept in check and no one seems to mind – a "love child" there, an abortion or two there. Such fun.
Is he actually as libertarian as he pretends to be? It's impossible to get to the bottom of his politics. Apart from militant cycling, he seems a fairly straight-up Tory. His USP is that he is fun and therefore anti-politics, which may work as mayor of a huge louche city that is itself a mass of contradictions, but could he lead the country? Voting Tory, he says, will make your wife have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW M3. We are not talking Wodehouse or Wilde – more sub-Clarkson.
The wit is there in his own writing and the fumbling and bumbling, but the wisdom is in his observations about other politicians. Here one sees the scalpel within. He is excellent on Blair, Roy Jenkins and Mandelson for instance. On Blair: "He is a mixture of Harry Houdini and a greased piglet. He is barely human in his elusiveness. Nailing Blair is like trying to pin jelly to a wall." On Brown: "He is like some sherry-crazed old dowager who lost the family silver at roulette, and who now decides to double up by betting the house as well." On Bush: "In his gift for surreal improvisation he resembles an unintentional Paul Merton, a linguistic dada-ist, armed with nuclear weapons and a worrying sense that God is on his side."
Who is most telling in their commentary on him? I would say the conservative Quentin Letts, who reveals how Boris was "very alive to money". The idea of capping bankers' bonuses is some kind of Trotskyite madness to Boris. "Buller, buller, buller" – he shouts the awful greeting to past members of elite Oxford clubs. It's a laugh, isn't it, in the world of inauthentic politicians?
When his editor, Charles Moore, told him that he didn't care about his private life, Boris replied "Nor do I." Nice. "All politicians in the end are like crazed wasps in a jam jar, each individually convinced they are going to make it," he observes acutely with the sting of a queen wasp. "How could anyone elect a prat who gets stuck in a zipwire," he asks in what I believe is deemed by classicists a rhetorical question.
Not having been to Eton, I don't know the polite way to say arse-licking, but this book for all its pretence to literary cleverness is strictly for the lavatory. It's small, but as there's no moral or political fibre in it whatsoever, you may be there a long time.
