“Voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW M3.” A funny man moves into 10 Downing Street today. Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, 55, is more than a mere comedian. He has written 11 books and sired at least six children, two out of wedlock (according to a 2013 court case). As a journalist writing from Brussels he influenced the rise of Eurosceptism in the UK. He affects a shambolic, buffoonish persona and clearly, if you’ve read his book, fancies himself as a second Churchill. Boris was a successful Mayor of London, but a patchy, unfocused, poor Foreign Secretary. Now he is Prime Minister, an ambition he has held for 50 years. The Donald says Boris is the UK’s Trump. What codswallop. Donald is thick as two bricks, while Boris has an intellect that’s solid steel.
More Boris quotes:
• “There are no disasters, only opportunities. And indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters.”
• “My speaking style was criticised by no less an authority than Arnold Schwarzenegger. It was a low moment, my friends, to have my rhetorical skills denounced by a monosyllabic Austrian cyborg.”
• “Ping-Pong was invented on the dining table in England in the 19th century and it was called Wiff-Waff. And there I think you have the difference between us and the rest of the world. The French looked at a dining table and saw an opportunity to have dinner. We looked at it and saw an opportunity to play Wiff-Waff.” Boris used a version of this when accepting the Olympics from Peking when he was Mayor of London. Naturally the Chinese believe Ping-Pong is all theirs. Johnson closed the Peking speech by saying, “Wiff-Waff is coming home.”
The new First Lady of the UK, if we set the Queen aside for a moment, will be Carrie Symonds, 24 years Boris’s junior. She quit as chief spin doctor for the Conservative Campaign Headquarters last year around the time she began dating Johnson. Carrie is expected to move into Downing Street discreetly away from paparazzi cameras. They will be the first unmarried couple to co-habit in No. 10. Carrie is the daughter of Matthew Symonds, a founder of The Independent, and Josephine Mcaffee, one of the paper’s lawyers.
Boris has been married twice and has had multiple mistresses. He can be sensitive about his private life. After The Telegraph ran a story on his personal life he sent an editor an email, saying “Fuck off and die.” Boris was married firstly to Allegra Mostyn-Owen, a union that lasted six years. Within weeks of divorcing Allegra in 1993, he wed Marina Wheeler. Five weeks later their first child was born. Marina and Boris were to have three more kids in a marriage that lasted 25 years, despite his many affairs. UK newspapers alleged he had relationships with journalist Anna Fazackerley and Helen MacIntye, an arts consultant. With Helen he fathered a daughter, whose existence became the subject of a court case in 2013. The judge ruled the public had a right to know about Johnson’s “reckless behaviour”.
People either love Boris or hate him. Private Eye editor Ian Hislop said, “He’s the only feel good politician we have, everyone else is too busy being responsible.” Biographer Sonia Purnell said Boris developed the shambolic, bumbling, upper-class persona while at Oxford. She calls it “Brand Boris.” Journalist Dave Hill described Johnson as “a unique figure in British politics, an unprecedented blend of comedian, conman, faux subversive showman and populist media confection.” Former Editor of Boris Max Hastings seems to hate him: Boris’s public image is “a facade resembling that of PG Wodehouse’s Gussie Fink-Nottle, allied to wit, charm, brilliance and startling flashes of instability.” Boris is habitually late and usually unbriefed, Sonia wrote. He doesn’t care about his dishevelled dress and resembles a human laundry-basket. She wrote he regularly forgets to shower. Another biographer Andrew Gimson (whose book is admirably written) said Johnson is a humane man with “an excessive desire to be liked”.
Born in New York to wealthy British parents, Boris was the first of four children. His sister is Rachel and his brothers are Leo and Jo. Boris describes himself as “a one-man melting pot”. He has Russian, Turkish, Jewish, Muslin and Christian forebears. He studied at Eton College and Balliol College, Oxford where he read classics and was elected President of the Oxford Union. He partied with the upper-class mob known at The Bullington Club, infamous for drunken vandalism. His best friends at school were Darius Guppy and Charles Spencer. Guppy was to cast a dark shadow over Boris. In a scandalous, recorded phone conversation Guppy told Boris he was being investigated by the News of the World’s Stuart Collier over criminal activities. Guppy asked Johnson for Collier’s address so he could have him beaten up. In the recording Johnson expressed concern that he would be associated with the attack. Later Boris said he never provided Guppy with the address.
In journalism Johnson has worked for The Times — which sacked him for falsifying a quotation — and the Daily Telegraph. As the paper’s Brussels correspondent he poked fun at European Union policies, writing about EU plans for prawn crisps, English sausages and the size of condoms. Chris Patten said Johnson was “an early exponent of fake journalism.” Typical Boris quote about those times: “Everything I wrote from Brussels, I found was sort of chucking rocks over the garden wall and I listened to this amazing crash from the greenhouse next door in England. Everything I wrote from Brussels was having this amazing effect on the Tory Party and it really gave me this I suppose rather weird sense of power.” In 1999 he became editor of the Spectator, holding the position for six years. As a Telegraph correspondent, Boris has been praised for eclectic and distinctive writing but also criticised for using colourful and derogatory language, eg referring to Africans as “piccaninies”with “watermelon smiles” and writing that gay men were “tank-topped bumboys”. Boris has been an MP for 11 years, showing social liberal tendencies on matters such as LGBT rights. As Mayor of London, he introduced new Routemaster buses, cycle hire, Thames cable car and banned alcohol from public transport.
When Theresa May became Prime Minster she made Johnson Foreign Secretary, apparently to get him out of the country as much as possible to limit his political manoeuvring against her. The news that Boris had taken over at the UK Foreign Office led Carl Bilt, Swedish Prime Minister, to say, “I wish it was a joke.” Johnson served in this position for two years. It was a lacklustre performance. He was often late, hadn’t studied his papers and made gaffes, notably about the British woman Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, jailed in Iran. Boris resigned after two years in protest against May’s Brexit polices.
Boris Johnson as Prime Minister is likely to be entertaining, humorous and popular, but he will also face accusations over the character flaws that will become increasingly evident. Another Boris quote: “My chances of being PM are about as good as finding Elvis on Mars or my being reincarnated as an olive.” What will the Queen think of the tousled-hair, buffoonish character she is about to appoint as her 14th prime minister? Quite likely, “How long are you going to last, my boy?”
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