50 newyork| december9–22, 2019
Union, he routinely cracked everyone up, his debating technique less
forensic than simply funny—saying something in an absurdly aris-
tocratic and formal way and then adding some pop-culture refer-
ence as a punch line. He has never let go of that rhetorical formula.
Not everyone liked him, of course, and he had a hard time getting
elected. In his first attempt to become president, he lost to an earnest
middle-class student who mocked his Etonian Toryism. So Boris,
with his usual disaffected aplomb, reinvented himself as a Social
Democrat, got elected and then declared his Tory allegiance.
He seemed to have come to Oxford fully formed, a handsome
blond who joined the Bullingdon Club, a selective, upper-class, all-
male clique that held dinner parties in various restaurants and was
known for getting plastered and vandalizing the joint. It repre-
sented to me the worst elements of private-school privilege and
exclusion. That I didn’t reflexively despise Boris—as I didmost of
them—is testimony to his personal charm. His chums—Viscount
Althorp (now Charles Spencer), Princess Diana’s brother;and the
eccentric British-Iranian Darius Guppy (later jailed for fraud)—
seemed to have little in common besides going to Eton.
He did not, however, achieve a first-class degree, a rare occasion
in his life when winging it failed. In his chosen profession as a jour-
nalist, he worked for the Times of London and the Daily Telegraph,
often finding stories where others didn’t but also just making stuff
up. In one Times story, he invented a quote to sex up the piece, then
lied to his editors about it. He was fired when the person he “quoted”
complained, but, using his connections, he managed to get a second
job, at the Telegraph, the solid Tory non-tabloid. In a stroke of edit-
ing genius, he was assigned to cover the E.U. in Brussels, where his
environmentalist father had been one of the first British officials to
work for the European bureaucracy (assigned to controlling pollu-
tion), where boy Boris thereby attended elementary school for two
years and where, as a journalist, he also proceeded to just make stuff
up. But this time, the stuff he embellished or concocted—about the
overweening ambitions of the E.U. and the absurdities of various
E.U. regulations, on, say, the size of condoms—was almost designed
to tickle Tory Telegraph readers.
Johnson had demonstrated no previous hostility to Europe and
in fact was a passionate enthusiast for many aspects of European
culture and history. In this way, he was a somewhat typical British
elite of his generation, a comfortable cosmopolitan. Indeed, his
great-grandfather Ali Kemal was a high-ranking Turkish politician
who opposed the rise of Atatürk and was thrown to the mercies of a
bloodthirsty mob as a result. So there was some irony in Boris’s
becoming the xenophobic, Euroskeptic right’s favorite writer. He did
it not with anger or polemic but with unrelenting scorn and humor.
In time, his editor, Max Hastings, saw Boris’s antics for what they
were, calling him a “cavorting charlatan” and lamenting that “we can
scarcely strip the emperor’s clothes from a man who has built a
career, or at least a lurid love life, out of strutting without them.” Still,
Hastings didn’t fire one of the most popular writers in his paper.
But in 1999, Conrad Black, the Trump-pardoned fraudster, lured
him to be editor of the Spectator, which Black owned. The core ques-
tion before Boris got the job was whether he would stick tojournal-
ism and stay out of elected office. Even for a lively magazine like the
Spectator, there was an obvious concern that an elected politician as
editor would severely cramp the independence it had long prided
itself on. “He gave us his solemn word of honor that he would not
seek selection for any party, including the Conservatives,” Black sub-
sequently told Gimson. But about two weeks after this promise,
without telling Black, Boris applied to be the Tory candidate for two
different seats. Somehow he charmed his way out of a pink slip.
It was during his editorship that the Spectator became known as
the Sextator in the tabloids, an august old journal suddenly rife with
scandalous affairs involving no fewer than five staffersand the
home secretary. By this time, Boris had already had two wives (he
committed adultery on his first with his second) and four young
children and was still very busy adding many more “notches.” Even
now, he is living in No. 10 Downing Street with a girlfriend, Carrie
Symonds, who is slightly older than his children, while fending off
stories of past trysts with an American model and tech consultant,
Jennifer Arcuri.
In all this, he is no socially conservative hypocrite and rather a
bon vivant. Boris defended Bill Clinton’s shenanigans in the 1990s,
blaming Monica Lewinsky for the affair, excoriating the press for
its prurience, and defending the desirability of lying about extra-
marital dalliances. And he did indeed lie about his. Confronted by
rumors of an affair with Petronella Wyatt while he was editing the
Spectator, he denounced the story as “an inverted pyramid of piffle.”
It wasn’t. Wyatt had one abortion and one miscarriage, and the
affair soon became public knowledge. At the same time, his attempt
to be in Parliament while being a journalist began to crumble under
the weight of its contradictions. When he was promoted to become
Tory spokesman for the arts, his own magazine tripped him up. An
unsigned 2004 editorial—not written by him—lamented the ten-
dency of the inhabitants of Liverpool to be overly sentimental:
“They see themselves whenever possible as victims, and resent their
victim status; yet at the same time they wallow in it.” As editor, Boris
nobly took full responsibility for the piece and never outed its actual
author, a reactionary blowhard named Simon Heffer.
But the Tory leader of the time, Michael Howard, demanded
Boris go to Liverpool and apologize personally. He did ... and he
didn’t. In scenes reminiscent of Veep, Boris dutifully went to Liver-
pool but couldn’t help himself and, when pressed, defended the
editorial. In a subsequent column, he called his endeavor “Operation
Scouse-Grovel”—scouse being a slang word for a Liverpudlian. An
angry Howard soon fired him for the Wyatt affair, and the press
turned viciously against Boris. It wasn’t long before he was also fired
from the Spectator despite having grown its circulation substantially.
And when David Cameron—a younger fellow Etonian—won the
leadership of the Tories in 2005, Boris was left out of the top tier of
his opposition team. His political and journalistic future looked dim.THE SMOOTH MODERATION OF CAMERON, who as prime
minister oversaw an austerity response to the financial crisis, wasn’t
very compatible with Boris’s berserker temperament, but his poli-
tics were rarely to Cameron’s right until Brexit, despite the way
they’ve been described in both Britain and the U.S. over the past
few years. It’s an understandable misreading: In that time, Boris
has allied himself with many of the most hard-core Euro-obsessives
and social conservatives in the Tory party and seemed prepared
earlier this year to lead the U.K. out of the E.U. without a deal—the
most extreme Brexit position available then. He expelled from the
party 21 moderate, rebellious Conservative MPs (who refused to
entertain a “no deal” outcome) in the Brexit battle and formed a
Cabinet that included many hard-core social conservatives. On top
of which, he has been lambasted for a number of passages from his
long journalistic career that suggest racism, classism, sexism, and
homophobia—and that he viewed as satirical excesses. Trump
deploys the same defense, but outside of Boris’s purple prose—
“tank-topped bum-boys,” burka-wearing women looking like “let-
ter boxes”—the evidence of his bigotry is a little thin. A bigot would
be unlikely to win two elections as mayor of London, a vast multi-
racial, multicultural metropolis. And his Cabinet is the most ethni-
cally diverse in British history.
Or take gay rights. Back in 2003, Johnson was one of a handful
of Tories who rebelled against Conservative Party policy, voting for
an end to the Thatcherite ban on teaching about homosexuality in
state schools. Like many pols, he couldn’t handle marriage equality
at first, but then he adjusted, becoming in 2010 one of the first senior
Tory politicians to entertain it. As London mayor, he marched in