Over at Quillette, a profile of Boris Johnson has some lurid passages. Here is a memory of him from 1983, debating at Oxford:
With his huge mop of blond hair, his tie askew and his shirt escaping
from his trousers, he looked like an overgrown schoolboy. Yet with his
imposing physical build, his thick neck and his broad, Germanic
forehead, there was also something of Nietzsche’s Übermensch
about him. You could imagine him in lederhosen, wandering through the
Black Forest with an axe over his shoulder, looking for ogres to kill.
This same combination—a state of advanced dishevelment and a sense of
coiled strength, of an almost tangible will to power—was even more
pronounced in his way of speaking.
This writer, Toby Young, then says that Boris argued all over the shop, appeared unprepared, and prompted laughter, but he (Toby) still seemed to find it all a cunning plan:
You got the sense that he could easily have delivered a highly
effective speech if he’d wanted to, but was too clever and
sophisticated—and honest—to enter into such a silly charade. To do what
the other debaters were doing, and pretend he believed what was coming
out of his mouth, would have been patronising. Everyone else was taking
the audience for fools, but not him. He was openly insincere and, in
being so, somehow seemed more authentic than everyone else.
To say I was impressed would be an understatement.
Now, to be fair, Young makes it clear in the rest of the article that he has plenty of reservations about how Boris will perform as PM, but at the end of the day, it's the feelz:
The rational part of my brain is still full of doubts and uncertainties.
What sensible person would look at Boris’s peripatetic career and
rakish personality and conclude that he is the right man to lead Britain
at this moment of maximum danger? But at a more primitive level, a
level impervious to reason, I cannot help but believe. From the first
moment I saw him, I felt I was in the presence of someone special,
someone capable of achieving great things. And I’ve never quite been
able to dispel that impression.
Update: following Jason's assurances about how good the UK Spectator is, I see that it has a
Nick Cohen anti Johnson/Brexit column which reads in part:
Brexit was won with an impossible promise
that we could have wrenching economic and constitutional change without
suffering. Now the men and women who sold the false prospectus have 100
days to try to make good on their word. They will either succeed and
leave the little people to live with the consequences or be thrown out
of power and freed to play the role of martyr that appeals as much to
the Brexit right as the Corbynite left.
As they chunter in their think tanks and
newspapers and rage on the Web, they will say that they at least
remained pure, they at least remained true to the lies they told to
themselves as much as others. They were riding the unicorn to a glorious
future until they were betrayed by the EU, by the remainers, by the
elite. By anyone but them.
22 comments:
He has gotten into trouble in the past because he is lazy in preparation and is not a detail man.
Now Brexit requires detail.
It seems pretty universally regarded that he is not a good parliamentary performer, I would presume because of the lack of preparation issue too. If that Toby Young is anything to go by, it seems that people who admire him keep seeing some hidden depths or greatness that has resolutely stayed hidden behind the clown mask.
They don't seem to consider that there actually is no great thing lurking there.
he seems to piss the right people off, like Trump.
Go Boris!
He gives you good feelz too, hey Jason? And you have the hide to complain about the Left!
Perhaps I should just be using "feels" - but I thought "feelz" was used at Catallaxy. Could be wrong.
No, Toby Young's analysis is astute. Johnson's shambolic public personality is quite carefully cultivated.
The question is more as to whether this is a dirty trick on Johnson's part - to make the Tories/Labour/the EU underestimate him? to make himself more likable in the public eye? But if you have been adopting such a persona since teen years then it is effectively part of your actual personality, no? And it wouldn't work with most politicians - Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, Jeremy Corbyn, Theresa May would be absolutely hapless trying to play the part that Johnson is playing. In that sense you might say the role Johnson plays is quite sincere, since it fits his eccentric but brilliant character and eclectic background.
I can't remember where exactly I found it now, but there was an interesting article a few weeks ago by a UK contemporary of Johnson's, talking about how he observed Johnson, on two separate occasions, giving awards to two separate parties, give an improvised speech moments after appearing to know nothing about the subject he was to give a speech on - and bring the house down with his hilarity. The speech, the reporter notes, was exactly the same.
Calculated on Johnson's part? Yes - but repeating their lines like that is something all good politicians do.
he was editor of the Spectator, he is no intellectual slouch
Tim, I don't doubt at least a significant element of deliberate cultivation in public persona: and the question is to what purpose and to what end.
I think it quite likely there is no substance behind it - just a vain personality who (like Trump) finds details boring or beneath him (who knows?) who found from a young age that playing the shambolic eccentric makes people laugh and gets him attention, which he has used to climb the political totem pole and using pure opportunism on policy to advance his career (like Abbott and climate change).
"editor of the Spectator, he is no intellectual slouch".
I am tempted to lulz about that. Did you find Abbott's books a good indication of his Prime Ministership too, Jason?
PM's do not have to be intellectuals to be successful. Surely Thatcher is an example of that.
Look, can I just clear something up here? Since when does "but he makes people laugh" count as a sign that a guy is PM material?
But that’s interesting - being a politician is in part technocrat, in part being a.... well, a rhetorician, someone skilled in the old humanities, able to speak well and deftly and persuasively in public, with a grasp of philosophy and the arts. Given the nature of the two roles, it’s surprising they overlap at all, much less often enough to give us politicians like, say, Obama.
Comic is a position that very much falls into the ‘rhetorician’ description.
Incidentally, I read a piece recently that notes that amongst the Tories, the Brexiters tended to be humanities students at Oxford - while the Remainers tended to specialise in subjects such as politics and economics. It’s the technocrat/rhetorician split again.
Thoughts. I have them!
In other words, it's a Right wing "feels" thing.
It pretty much has to be, because I am unaware of any economic analysis that predicts it will not have an economic cost.
Not so much. Rhetoricians are skilled at changing minds when hustling for votes.
Perhaps in a benevolent dictatorship such strange souls could be dispensed with but I don’t think that’s possible. Communicating ideas and keeping people on side will always be important in politics.
I think you are talking Johnson; I was talking Brexit (as Right wing feels).
I will admit: Johnson could be worse - he could be dumb Trump /GOP level bad on climate change and the environment, and immigration too.
But their are so many who have worked with him that now cannot stand him (come to think of it, he's like Rudd that way!) that I find it impossible to dismiss their pessimism about how bad a PM he could be.
Steve what's so Funny? The UK spectator is nothing like the oz or even US version. It's a top notch mag comparable to the Economist if not better. And it's actually very politically eclectic. I have a colleague whose politics leans towards the Bernie Sanders left who subscribes to it for its cultural politics. It's a highly literate and erudite publication whatever your politics
I'll take your word for it that the UK Spectator is a better magazine than the Australian one - which wouldn't be hard.
But even so, I would not assume the role of editor shows particular smarts - I don't know how magazine publishing works, of course, but the content of each magazine is surely literally edited by a team of subeditors with the top boss editor pointing out general tone and direction he would to see the magazine take?
Oh, and look here what the Wikipedia entry says about his time in the role:
"His editorship also drew criticism; some opined that under him The Spectator avoided serious issues,[123] while colleagues became annoyed that he was regularly absent from the office, meetings, and events.[124] He gained a reputation as a poor political pundit as a result of incorrect political predictions made in the magazine,[123] and was strongly criticised—including by his father-in-law Charles Wheeler—for allowing Spectator columnist Taki Theodoracopulos to publish racist and antisemitic language in the magazine.[125][126]"
Honestly, I only looked that up after I wrote the first part of this comment about how I assumed all editors delegate - it would seem many felt he even took that too far if he was skipping meetings, etc.
You also keep trying to make out that critics think he is dumb, and they are wrong about that, whereas I think most criticism of him is about character traits such as lying, cheating, being lazy, etc.
Why crib notes from Wiki? Go straight to the source and read his former colleague Max Hastings many and prolific criticisms of him.
I subscribed to the Speccy during the Boris years and it was a fine journal. (The Australian journal is just a piece of fluff wrapped around the British original anyway). Johnson contributed regular articles on top of whatever editorial roles he may have had (in contrast to Obama who, apparently, when editing that Harvard journal - Harvard Law? - only ever really wrote one piece and apparently didn't seem to be much interested in the position).
The wiki notes are silly anyway. It's an ancient tradition in the British media that the Spectator *will* publish a column by Taki and the rest of the media *will* kick up a stink about him. He's still in the mag today I believe.
I did a post specifically on Max Hasting's recent attack on Johnson in The Guardian, Tim.
Wasn't Hastings his boss at The Telegraph? If so, I don't know whether his has any comments on Boris' performance as editor of the Spectator.
Nothing you have said seems to affect what I have been arguing anyway: no one is saying he is as dumb as (say) Trump; nearly everyone can see that there is large performance element in his public persona; most think he did OK as London major; most think he has not done well as a Parliamentary performer; and most think he was a positive embarrassment as Foreign Secretary, where long standing criticisms of how he operates (lazy, careless, prepared to lie - essentially character traits) came to the forefront.
I think this is looking like Abbott in another key respect I haven't mentioned yet: he was a classic example of the Peter Principle - rising above the level of his political competence. Johnson probably already reached that in his Foreign Sec job, so it is hard to see how getting the top job is going to show a turn around in political competence.
And no amount of "but he's really quite clever in his own way" answers this analysis, as it seems to me to be not addressing the thrust of the argument.
Nah I said my piece on Boris way up the thread. I agree there's some causes for worry. Still, Toby Young's analysis is on the money. "He was openly insincere and, in being so, somehow seemed more authentic than everyone else." That's Johnson's difference in style - in that sense, it's very comparable to Trump-brand-rhetoric (who deliberately goes out of his way to avoid any conventional political haggling due to how insincere it has come to sound).
It's just on more general grounds Boris is hugely interesting. He's one of the gigantic characters of modern political history, if not for achievement, then simply for his outsized character - something which the progressive left loves when it's on their side, but find unforgivable when it's in opposition to them.
"then simply for his outsized character"
Does the Left really endorse it on their side without considering achievement? I mean Hawke certainly was certainly forgiven his drinking and philandering, but he was seen as effective in all his roles from a young age, no?
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