54 new york | december 9–22, 2019
mother, Charlotte Fawcett, an artist with a liberal background.
Stanley’s career came first, which led to constant upheaval (the fam-
ily moved 32 times while the marriage lasted, according to Fawcett)
and to Boris’s being born in New York City and brought up in the
U.S., Belgium, and England. (Boris was a dual citizen of the U.S.
and the U.K. until a couple of years ago.) Stanley treated his mar-
riage vows as seriously as Boris would his, and this, along with the
constant moving and not-so-secure finances, likely contributed to
Fawcett’s nervous breakdown in 1974. She would be in and out of
hospital with severe depression for some years before she divorced.
Extremely close to her children, she was suddenly gone from their
lives, and Boris was devastated.
There remains a hint of pathos in those droopy blue eyes of his.
“He’s a much more introspective person than most people assume,”
his former ally told me. “That strange look behind those brows is a
vulnerability. People want to mother him.” And forgive him. Politi-
cal rivals he has betrayed or fired have shockingly positive things to
say about him. He’d follow up a sacking or a public row with texts
begging forgiveness or making amends.
He seems most emotionally comfortable in front of an audience,
cracking jokes. On television, even as he was a journalist and an MP,
he became something of a star in his own right. He regularly went
on a satirical quiz show on current events called Have I Got News
for You? and was as funny as the professional comedians who were
permanent guests. In turn, he was invited back to guest host. He
began cracking people up on various interview shows andbecame
a very rare politician with true pop-cultural appeal. He wasthe kind
of celebrity figure who could advise the readers of GQ thatunder a
Conservative government, “your wife will get bigger breasts and
your chances of driving a BMW M3 will increase.”
NEAR THE END OF HIS SECOND TERM as London mayor,
Johnson broke yet another promise that he would not seek a par-
liamentary seat while mayor and reentered Parliament in the 2015
election, when Cameron shocked himself and everyone else by win-
ning handily. This was not good for Boris’s career, as Cameron’s
right-hand man, George Osborne, was widely regarded as the
successor-in-waiting, and Boris was, in the words of one pol, “deso-
late” at the result. But the victory ensured that Cameron’selection
promise of an E.U. referendum couldn’t be avoided, and almost all
the political elite rallied around the “remain” camp, with most
assuming that Boris would join them and Cameron having no idea
he would be betrayed. In the end, after much dithering, Boris
famously wrote two drafts of his announcement, one favoring
“remain” and one “leave.” “I am a European. I lived manyyears in
Brussels. I rather love the old place,” he wrote in the first paragraph
of his pro-Brexit column. “And so I resent the way we continually
confuse Europe—the home of the greatest and richest culture in
the world, to which Britain is and will be an eternal contributor—
with the political project of the European Union. It is, therefore,
vital to stress that there is nothing necessarily anti-European or
xenophobic in wanting to vote Leave on June 23.” Ultimately, he
would campaign against his own government, becoming at once
the most formidable politician behind the “leave” cause.
The “leave” campaign deceived voters. It famously claimed a
rebate for Brexit of £350 million a week to spend on theNHS, a
sum that represented the gross amount of money Britain gave to
the E.U., and not the net, which was less than half that amount. A
notorious poster raised fears of mass immigration by showing a
trail of dark-looking migrants with the slogan “Breaking Point.”
There were also ugly last-minute scare stories that Turkey was
going to be admitted to the E.U. and millions of Turks would be
arriving soon—a position diametrically opposed to Boris’s long
championing of Turkish E.U. membership. In a campaign he didn’t
personally run, Boris can’t be faulted for things he didn’t say or do,
but he didn’t protest or stop the lies coming. (It is also true that the
“remain” campaign grossly overstated the immediate economic
consequences of voting “leave.”) But the shock surprise of the “leave”
victory and the almost as shocking decision by Cameron to quit the
day after suddenly gave Boris a shot at No. 10.
The day after Cameron resigned, Boris went to play cricket with
his old chum Charles Spencer, rather than rally his allies for a lead-
ership contest. Some of his fellow Tories found the idea of this reck-
less joker as prime minister too absurd, and his closest ally on the
“leave” campaign, Michael Gove, stuck the knife in: “Boris is a big
character with great abilities, and I enjoyed working with him in
the referendum campaign ... But there is something special about
leading a party and leading a country, and I had the opportunity in
the last few days to assess whether or not Boris could lead that team
and build that unity. And I came reluctantly but firmly to the con-
clusion that, while Boris has many talents and attributes, he wasn’t
capable of building that team.”
The backstabbing alienated most Tory MPs, and they gave The-
resa May the job. She hugged Boris close and made him foreign
secretary, but when her Brexit deal emerged as a supersoft one,
Boris took a second big risk and quit the Cabinet in July 2018. May’s
deal then flapped like a fish out of water on the floor of the Com-
mons until it eventually expired.WHEN MAY RESIGNED, JOHNSON EASILY WON the Tory lead-
ership contest to succeed her. But it was a decimated party. May
had backed “remain” in the referendum, and her failure to get
Brexit done had made the Tory base furious and suspicious and the
Conservatives almost a laughingstock. Public support tumbled
from around 40 percent to 22 percent in the first half of 2019, its
lowest share in recent history. Boris pledged he would get a new
deal by credibly threatening to pull the country out of Europe with
no deal—saying he would rather “die in a ditch” than let Britain’s
E.U. membership go past October 31. He also promised there
would be no compromise on the Irish border, which would remain
open after Brexit, even though he offered no solution as to how this
wouldn’t open a huge hole in the E.U. customs union. He attempted
to prevent Parliament from intervening by proroguing it for a lon-
ger time than usual, a move swiftly ruled unconstitutional by the
relatively new “supreme court” of the U.K.
As usual, he broke almost all his promises. Britain is still in the
E.U. long after October 31, with an election on December 12. But on
the one promise no one believed he could fulfill—a new deal with
the E.U.—he succeeded. It turned out that a credible threat to leave
without a deal (which May never made) concentrated minds con-
siderably. And a burst of intense personal diplomacy with the Irish
prime minister, Leo Varadkar—when Boris deployed his maximal
charm—delivered a solution to the core Irish problem: a customs
pseudo-border in the Irish Sea, an idea Boris had dismissed a year
before. Emmanuel Macron congratulated the new prime minister:
“He may be a colorful character sometimes, but we all are at times.
He’s got a temper, but he’s a leader with a real strategic vision. Those
who didn’t take him seriously were wrong.”
It was quite a coup, proof that Johnson could deliver,and the
Tories rallied in the polls as the upstart Brexit Party plummeted.
More important, the deal, unlike May’s, won its first procedural vote
in Parliament, by a big majority of 30, as some Labourites had
backed it. It seemed within Boris’s grasp to get the deal passed by a
slightly extended deadline—some time into November of this year.
And then he made a strategic gamble. Rather than pressing on, he
feared Parliament could still frustrate it down the line, so hedecided
to call an election for a new mandate to “get Brexit done.”
The decision was driven by Dominic Cummings, the controversial
but brilliant guru who had engineered the Brexit vote. Borisbrought
him in to No. 10. Cummings understood that Brexit was the Con-