Studying Boris Johnson

with help from Boris Johnson, Winston Churchill, Matthew Parris, Anthony Storr. . .

A few years ago the New Statesman asked me to write something about Boris Johnson, which sent me down a rabbit hole towards biography and psychoanalysis, in particular the enlightening – to me – work of Anthony Storr. Here, in light of his latest nonsense – and with a few amendments and updated details – is what I came up with. . . It breaks the Goldwater Rule, about speculating on the minds of public figures, but that applies to professionals, many of whom violated it eagerly to write about Donald Trump (and others). Speculating in this way as a total amateur is apparently okay, hence all the many accounts of Johnson’s personality and so on from down the years, one or two of them quoted here. It’s a sad personal story and a tragic collective one.

The man who was christened Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson has been called a lot of other things as well. “Fanatically anti-intellectual”, in the assessment of his former Islington neighbour David Goodhart. “Ineffably duplicitous”, according to Conrad Black, Johnson’s boss during his eventful period as editor of the Spectator (1999-2005). He has been likened to Princess Diana (by Michael Gove), Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Silvio Berlusconi, a butterfly (by Ferdinand Mount, who acknowledged the “insult to lepidoptera”), the Dulux dog, a punk (by John Lydon), “the general who leads his troops to the sounds of the guns and then, within sight of the battlefield, abandons them” (by Michael Heseltine), Toad of Toad Hall, the Pied Piper, “the Doctor” (in Doctor Who), the Rector of Stiffkey, and various PG Wodehouse characters. Such assessments go some way in characterising his behaviour. But perhaps the most useful charge levelled against Johnson is that he is a child, possibly as young as two years old (the journalist Dominic Lawson’s estimate) and certainly no older than six.

Like any child, Johnson hates rules while craving structure – a set of reflexes he rationalised as One Nation Conservatism with strong free-market sympathies and a libertarian streak. Personal freedoms, the sovereignty of self, concepts easily transposed to the political stage, are the belief by which he seemed to live. A source of insight into Johnson’s character – who he is, how he wants to be seen, and what he represses, denies, and disavows – is his writing: the dozens of columns and interviews for the Spectator and the Telegraph collected in Lend Me Your Ears (2003); his EU-baiting history of Rome; a self-advancing history of London; a long satirical poem about “pushy” parents; and Seventy Two Virgins (2004), his comic novel about Westminster against the backdrop of a presidential visit. But Johnson’s most recently publisher book, The Churchill Factor (2014), was overtly intended as an exercise in self-portraiture or self-reflections.

“In habits,” Johnson wrote, “he superficially resembled a Bertie Wooster figure … in industry and output he is the polar opposite.” Or: “Far from being a dissolute Toby Belch, he showed – in his own way – remarkable personal discipline… the more exuberant sides of his personality contained an element of calculated exaggeration.” At points, the book’s relevance to Johnson’s own career is not retrospective but prophetic: “By the time Winston Churchill came to power. . . there were many people who were amazed, and many who were appalled – but also many who thought it was inevitable. And there’s also Churchill the writer and speaker: the fluent, tireless Telegraph journalist whose interventions were “the continuation of politics by other means” and produced an income “vast by the standards of his day”; the frontbench Conservative MP noted for an oratorical style that combined plainness and pomposity. Churchill once wrote a little guide called “The Scaffolding of Rhetoric” on the art of converting people to your point of view. In Johnson’s case, the mixed style originates not just in a desire to change minds but to seem intelligent and impressive without seeming boring and serious – being just the right kind of very English show-off. (If he mentions Homer or Horace, he’ll then be sure to use a phrase such as – a real favourite – “no one gives a monkey’s”.)

There are traces, too, of the unself-conscious self-portrait. In saluting Churchill’s achievements, Johnson provides little account of his character. There’s a telling moment towards the end when he takes a swipe at Anthony Storr’s psychobiographical study, which appeared in 1969 as “Churchill: The Man,” which he recalls reading as a teenager. Reducing Storr’s dense 50-page argument to a single detail, Johnson claims to find a “circularity” in the claim that Churchill’s bravery originated in a desire to master his cowardice. Johnson asked: “Why did he decide to master his fear? Was he really a coward?” In reality, Storr, a renowned psychoanalyst, admits to being at a loss to explain Churchill’s “remarkable courage”. The essay is devoted to sources of Churchill’s ambition in fantasies of “infantile omnipotence”. It’s well-recorded that Johnson, from an early age, expressed the desire to become “world king”. The child who suffered parental neglect or early trauma, as Churchill and Johnson did, will possess little inner conviction and self-esteem and is therefore drawn, in Storr’s words, “to seek the recognition and value which accrue from external achievement”.

It’s understandable that Johnson, writing a book commissioned by the Churchill estate and designed to reveal a flattering likeness between author and subject, chose not to draw – or build, or reflect – on what Storr really argued in “Churchill: The Man”. Storr explains that as an extrovert, defined as “a person whose chief orientation is towards events and features of the external world,” Churchill showed “little interest in philosophy and none in religion”; the Times columnist and former Conservative MP Matthew Parris has noted that Johnson “finds arguments in principle, in the abstract, or about ideology rather tiresome”. Storr quotes Jung on the psychological subtype known as “intuitive,” someone “always present where possibilities exist”, with a “keen nose for things in the bud”, incapable of “conviction”, lacking consideration for others, and often dismissed as “a ruthless and immoral adventurer” – properties that Johnson was less inclined to dwell on than his oratory, his journalism, the undervaluation at the hands of peers. Instead of ignoring uncomfortable subject matter, Johnson goes for revisionism, arguing, for example, that Churchill’s depression, his “Black Dog” moods, have been “overdone”. Yet Johnson recognises exactly what role a propensity to low moods, a fear of silence or introspection, plays in the lust for power. Parris has said that Johnson is “more easily depressed than he appears”, and Johnson’s former girlfriend, Petronella Wyatt, has written that “the key to Boris lies in his concealed and sometimes agonised personality. He is Wodehouse with tears.” But Johnson occasionally forgets to protest. He acknowledges that Churchill wept “at the drop of a hat,” and suggests that Churchill’s tendency to write 2,000 words a day was a product of his “creative-depressive” temperament, helping to keep at bay “the ‘black dog’ of depression.” It’s a direct borrowing from Storr, who maintained that Churchill used his writing “as a defence against the depression which invariably descended upon him when he was forced to be inactive.”

Johnson makes a characteristically slippery move of dismissing psychology, to keep the traditionalist reader on side, while simultaneously deploying psychological and even psychoanalytic terms. Again and again in his writing, he has speculated about the sources of conduct and attitudes. To “psychoanalyse” the Europhilia of Heseltine and others, he once wrote, is to uncover an “irrational” distaste for the United States. In the Churchill book, he wonders if Evelyn Waugh’s dislike of the prime minister had a basis in envy. He further suggests that the coldness and aloofness of Churchill’s parents was a major “contribution to civilisation”. This is Storr’s argument. All that’s missing are quotation marks.

Johnson cannot help but accept that, as Ferdinand Mount put it, Churchill was emotionally “starved into greatness”. If we adjust greatness to “desire for greatness”, this has largely been Johnson’s own story. As Sonia Purnell argued in her sharp biography Just Boris, Johnson’s father, Stanley, was avoidant and immature, the son of an alcoholic who confessed an inability to understand human relationships, a philanderer and inveterate joker who lost his job at the World Bank over an April Fool’s Day joke. Boris Johnson was the eldest of four (Rachel, Jo and Leo). Storr, in the Churchill essay, wrote that the “hard lesson that one is not the centre of the universe is more quickly learned in the rough and tumble of competition with brothers and sisters”. Johnson told Wyatt – she recalled – that he was forced to “fight for every scrap”.

When Johnson was ten, his mother, Charlotte, suffered a nervous breakdown and spent many months in a psychiatric hospital in London. Johnson and his siblings were living in Brussels, where their father worked for the European Commission. Johnson’s experience of this horrifying incident, and more generally, his separation from Charlotte, seemed to have manifested itself in strange ways. There is a moment in Johnson’s 1990 telephone conversation with his friend Darius Guppy, in which he was being asked to provide the address of a journalist whom Guppy wanted to hurt, when Guppy admits that he would certainly have been a psychopath if he did not have… and Johnson cuts him off to say: “A mother?” In an article about PD James, Johnson wrote of her novel Devices and Desires that “the bit that gets me” is when a murder victim emits “a silent wordless scream of ‘Mummy! Mummy!’” On the first page of his own novel Seventy Two Virgins we are told that Sigmund Freud would “have been thrilled” by the son of the central character, who tells his mother, “I am going to kill Daddy, and then I am going to marry you.”

Storr suggested that the child’s need for “total care”, if unfulfilled, may create “a sense of something missing and something longed for; and he may, in later life, try to create conditions in which his slightest whim is immediately attended to”. Johnson’s mother said that the ambition to become “world king” was “a wish to make himself unhurtable, invincible, somehow safe from the pains of life, the pains of your mother disappearing for eight months, the pains of your parents splitting up”. (Johnson continued to refer to his mother, who remarried in 1988, as Charlotte Johnson.) Without wishing to body-shame the former Prime Minister, it seems relevant that Storr associates this character type with greed of an “oral” kind, as well as with a (more symbolic) hunger for fame, adulation, success and power. He also recognised that mitigation for feelings of desertion or rejection may be found in a “sense of belonging to a privileged class”, which is easily applied to the gusto with which Johnson pursued membership of elite societies at Eton and Oxford. Another source of relief is disobedience and disrespect to authority, which Johnson has demonstrated in his dealings with house-masters, college tutors, European bureaucrats and three Conservative prime ministers. But it’s also a type, Storr explained, that displays a capacity to “identify with the underdog”. Parris identified Johnson’s “passion for wronged individuals and the overlooked”, going as far as to say he “would have been a brave defender of Dreyfus”. If art is more revealing than punditry, it’s worth noting the chasm between Seventy Two Virgins, which portrays terrorists with a degree of sympathy, and Johnson’s remarks in columns on single mothers and the Global South.

But while neglected children “tend to treat all authority as hostile” and exhibit sympathy for other victims of hardship or deprivation, Storr writes, they also idealise their parents, as a defence against the idea of not being loved. Johnson dedicated Seventy Two Virgins to “the best of parents”. Of course, the dedication was presented in Latin, “optimis parentibus”, and what Storr called Churchill’s “gift for words” has likewise been a comfort for Johnson, the occasion for a show of strength – his turn of phrase is often genuinely spry – and a source of “self-esteem”. Storr asks of Churchill: “How did so egocentric a man inspire devotion in those who served him, whose immediate needs he seldom considered?” The answer is that it was because “men who demand and need a great deal of attention from others are manifesting a kind of childlike helplessness, which evokes an appropriate response, however difficult they may be”. Chris Patten once said you can’t call Johnson “a liar” – “he simply doesn’t really understand the difference between fact and fiction.”

Of course, the important difference between Storr’s subject and the former Prime Minister is that one saved the country whereas the other only caused damage. Storr accounts for Churchill’s greatness by saying that in 1940 he coincided with a reality well-suited to his personal capacity for romantic fantasy and “became the hero he had always dreamed of being”. What England needed, Storr maintains, was precisely “not a shrewd, equable, balanced leader”. In this case is that the equivalent scenario for Johnson – his “finest hour” – was the Brexit referendum and the COVID-19 pandemic, in both of which scenarios romanticism was disastrous.

Storr also noted the degree to which “the highly successful” are able to conceal their private torment from other people and themselves. There’s a glimpse in an essay Johnson wrote for a book called The Oxford Myth, edited by his sister Rachel and published in 1988. It’s a piece of writing that Johnson has since dismissed, not unsuspiciously, as an exercise in “self-deprecation”. Johnson’s record of his second attempt to win a place on the Oxford Union, a period when the pages of his diary were “dark with tiny entries”, resembles his second – successful – attempt to become leader of the Tory party (“for weeks his team have been filling his diary with up to 16 phone calls and one-to-one meetings with MPs each day,” the Guardian reported during his campaign). But there are also revelations of a more significant kind. Johnson said that engaging in Oxford politics gives you “a load of self-knowledge” – in his case, presumably about how much he needed praise, flattery, attention and admiration. Johnson once told the broadcaster Michael Cockerell that failing to be elected to the Union on his first attempt had been “just what the doctor ordered”. Given that he ran again – and subsequently ran to be an MP, mayor of London, Conservative Party leader, Prime Minister – it appears that the patient really felt otherwise. Winning, not failing, was what really salved the wound, however briefly. He may have hit on the mot juste hereabouts when he characterised Bill Clinton’s “ego-sexo-psycho-drama”.

At one point in the Oxford essay, Johnson recalls waking up every morning “to the shock that you are still a prisoner of your ambition”. Storr wrote that ambition, in its “demonic” form, drives “the subject to achieve more and more” while “never bringing contentment and peace, however great the achievement”. Decades later, Johnson remains as much a prisoner as ever. Along the way, he convinced himself that, in becoming the closest he could to world king, he would finally achieve a sense of liberation or relief, and not simply force a troubled populace to join him in his cell.