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TOFFER THAN THE REST

Boris Johnson interview
The Independent on Sunday, September 2004

“I WAS wondering,” says Boris Johnson, “whether it’s in any sense a qualification for being Shadow Arts Minister, that I’ve produced a novel. You know, whether I could begin speeches ‘Fellow artists. . .’.”
  The sentence ends, as many of Johnson’s do, with an infectious guffaw. In person as on television, he laughs at himself before anyone else starts. The habit of self-deprecation is reflected in his debut novel, “72 Virgins”: one of the central characters is a recognisably disorganised MP who, like Johnson, cycles to Westminster. “72 Virgins” also has in common with its author the fact that there is more to it than the oblivious slapstick of Johnson’s celebrated appearances on “Have I Got News For You” (there would have to be: if Johnson wrote like he presented television, the end of “72 Virgins” would appear somewhere in the middle, the middle would have been left on a bus, and the start would be printed upside down and in Norwegian). “72 Virgins” contains an ingenious plot, depicting a terrorist kidnap of George W. Bush during a state visit to London, many excellent jokes, and trenchant views on Islam, anti-Americanism and British politics smuggled beneath the farce. The most obvious question it poses, though, is where did the Shadow Arts Minister, MP for Henley, Spectator editor, Telegraph columnist, GQ motoring correspondent, and father of four find time to write it?
  “I got up very, very early,” he explains.
  It’s 10 o’clock in the morning, and Johnson, 40, looks like he’s been awake for five days or five minutes, and like he slept, whenever he last managed it, in the suit he’s wearing. The shock of blonde hair is in a particularly dishevelled state, resembling more than usual some exotic albino marsupial that has pounced upon Johnson from an overhanging tree and is now struggling gamely for balance.
  “Actually,” he confesses, “I wrote most of it on the beach, last summer.”
  Long holiday, was it?
  “Couple of weeks,” he grins. “Amazing what you can do with computers, isn’t it? Any journalist knows that if you have an article of 500 words, and the subs come back and say put a bit of colour in this, you can easily turn it into 1500 words. Now, I’m not suggesting that’s my method of composition, because of course it’s a massively excogitated work, every sentence licked, like a bear cub, into shape, and. . . no, the trick is just to get up early.”
  There’s the laugh, again, a great gusting thing that threatens to dislodge books from the haphazardly stacked shelves in Johnson’s office at The Spectator. A cynic – and the burgeoning cult of Boris Johnson has its heretics – might interpret it as demonstrative of empty-headed bumptiousness, nervousness of being found out, or incredulous delight at his own fortune. Granted that the bewildering over-promotion of bumbling old Etonians is hardly unusual in the history of these islands, but the available evidence suggests that Boris Johnson has not got where he is by accident. As a columnist, he is always readable, and annoyingly often right. As an editor, he has made The Spectator combative, intelligent, occasionally preposterous and frequently funny. As a politician, the easiest way to assess his rise to prominence in his first term in office is to try, without looking anything up, to name the Deputy Leader of the Conservative Party, and then the Shadow Chancellor and Shadow Home and Foreign Secretaries, and then, just for good measure, the current Arts Minister. However many people reading this would get even three out of five, it is surely less than would know Boris Johnson if they saw him in the street.
  The real question is where Boris Johnson thinks he’s going next.

SOMETHING of the secret of Johnson’s success is instantly discernible: the irrepressible energy of the man. Often, during the interview, he stands up and paces behind his desk; when he sits, he arranges stray pens in geometric patterns and fiddles vaguely with his computer mouse, as if not entirely sure what it is or does. In a previous book, a collection of journalism titled “Lend Me Your Ears”, Johnson prefaced the section of profiles – a diverse collection, including F.W. De Klerk, Chris Evans, Martin McGuinness and Ulrika Jonsson – with an essay on the set-piece interview which included the following observation: “The interviewer fawns, he beams, he keeps one eye on the little red light on his tape recorder; and then he pounces.” When Johnson is the interviewee, any efforts at such predatory guile are swatted away; he has sat on my side of the desk too often.
  “I love reading these things,” he says of the profiles of him, which have recently included a largish hagiography in Vanity Fair, “because they’re all very formulaically composed. So all the errors of fact have now become permanently embedded. It’s always said that my father was working for the UN, and he wasn’t. You know how it is when you actually know something about a subject and you read an article about it. Almost everything in the article is wrong. Anyway, as my mother said to me recently, it will all stop very soon. I’m sure she’s right.”
  With due respect to Mrs Johnson, she probably isn’t. As we speak, Johnson is contemplating the return of Parliament. During this session, Plaid Cymru will be steering an attempt to force a debate on the impeachment of the prime minister; Johnson is one of several MPs supporting the move. The charge is that Tony Blair told the Commons total whoppers about Iraq’s weapons capability in order to gull the country into a war it manifestly did not want – but which, I feel obliged to point out, Boris Johnson did.
  “I’ve been consistent on this,” he says, and the Blithering Boris of popular repute vanishes. “I wrote a column ages ago: ‘Saddam has to go, but don’t lie to us about the reasons’. I think Blair should be held to account for misleading parliament, and it’s frustrating that people like me are impeded from doing that because we support the war. This is not about the rights and wrongs of the war. This about spin, about the way the prime minister treated the Commons and the nation on the eve of a very important decision.”
  How does this work? Does Blair end up in the stocks, or what?
  “No, no. Impeachment comes from the French word empeach – to snag, or snare. It means ‘Whoa. Hold on. Come back and explain yourself.’ People always think it means ‘forced to resign’. So it’s a misunderstanding to think we’re calling for Blair’s head. I want detail about why he felt it necessary to mislead us. I’d like him to articulate why he flammed up the WMD stuff, so that we hear from his own lips what the real reasons were. I don’t know how the whole impeachment thing will work. I rather suspect it won’t. If you want my honest hunch, it’ll fizzle. But it’s worth repeating that we were short-changed. He told us this was privileged information, which he had on the best authority. I’d love – love – to have a proper interrogation of this guy. I mean, why did he do it?”
  Johnson’s tone is telling. He doesn’t sound like he’s trying to score points; he sounds like he genuinely wants to know. This is not the rhetorical grand-standing of a politician, but the curiosity of a journalist. Johnson has defended this dual role before by pointing out some illustrious antecedents – Disraeli, Churchill – but there must surely come a point at which the pomposity and dissembly of politics becomes irreconcilable with the irreverence and inquisitiveness of journalism.
  “I haven’t found it, so far, at all difficult,” he claims. “There have a few bust-ups when we’ve carried articles which were thought to be mildly critical [of the Conservative Party]. But I hope I’ve done more good for our cause than harm.”
  He must, though, find himself trimming his journalistic sails. How often does the “delete” button get tapped on the grounds that if this thought or that joke appears in print, you’ll never be prime minister?
  “It’s too late for that,” he smiles. “That horse has long since bolted. And I think that’s bollocks, actually, because you’ve got to trust your own instincts, haven’t you? If you think you’re right, you should bang it down.”
  Grasping for a more likely hypothetical scenario, I ask if it would be possible to remain editor of The Spectator while being, say, Shadow Home Secretary. Johnson collapses abruptly into total hysterics; it takes him some while to compose himself.
  “You’re right, you’re right,” he says dabbing at his eyes with his cuffs. “The horses are starting to get further and further apart, and the straddling operation is becoming increasingly stressful on the, erm. . . crotch region. But at the moment it’s still good for both. The magazine is going fine.”
  This is true. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, The Spectator is averaging 63,000 sales a week, a long march ahead of its left-wing rival, The New Statesman, on around 24,000. And, like its editor, The Spectator has a brand recognition out of proportion to its status. For much of the summer, British newspapers were filled with lurid, and heart-stoppingly tedious, coverage of the marital travails of Associate Editor Rod Liddle, and the alleged relationship between Spectator publisher Kimberley Fortier and Home Secretary David Blunkett.
  “This business of which I cannot speak,” says Johnson. “Baffling. Baffling. All I can conclude is that The Spectator is the object of fascination. I still don’t know. . . I mean, call myself a journalist, but I still don’t know the truth about any of it.”

THE telephone on his desk rings. He answers it.
  “Bruce!” he exclaims delightedly. “How are you?”
  There is a brief pause.
  “Sorry. . . which one?”
  There is longer pause, during which Bruce presumably narrows it down a bit.
  “Oh, good. Ah. Listen, do you want to umpire a cricket match? Ah. Bugger.”
  Johnson hangs up.
  “Where were we?”
  This is perfect Boris Johnson: the confusion, the cricket, the endearingly indiscriminate charm, the irresistible evocation of a younger Rowley Birkin QC from “The Fast Show”, the sense that, were Hillaire Belloc still alive, Johnson would be inspiring yards of cautionary doggerel – along the lines, perhaps, of the lachrymose Lord Lundy, another self-destructive “next prime minister but three”, but in Johnson’s case scuppered by an ungovernable propensity to laugh rather than cry. Boris Johnson has become a national treasure by being the last unembarassed Englishman, a throwback to a period in which much of the world was run by agreeable chaps from Oxbridge; it’s not difficult to picture Johnson as some well-meaning functionary of Empire, patiently explaining Leg Before Wicket to gimlet-eyed Pashtuns, or gazing glumly over the lip of a steaming cauldron at a tribe he has inadvertently offended.
  Johnson is the only Tory whose appeal transcends politics (aside from his own homepage and blog at www.boris-johnson.com, he has a fan site at www.boriswatch.com) and age. It may be the influence of his young family, but his newsreel narrator’s accent often embraces youthful neologisms; he talks, unselfconciously, of “bigging up” his vision for the Arts. During the Conservatives’ last term, they bashed through the Criminal Justice Act, in part a legislative pogrom against the then-prevalent rave culture; Johnson recently recorded a dance track with the DJs Phantom Beats. As yet untitled, it is constructed around an interview Johnson gave to Phantom Beats, extemporising on various topics. “We’ve been playing it in Spain.” Matt of Phantom Beats tells me. “It’s going over brilliantly.” Matt stresses that it’s not a joke. “Boris is the one person who could have got away with it,” he enthuses. “And, you know, I suspect him of having left-wing tendencies.” To my relief, Matt reassures that at no point was Johnson invited to rap.
  There are people, I tell Johnson, who think it’s all a cunning sham, that you’re clowning your way into our hearts, then into power, at which point you’ll tear off the mask to reveal the fangs.
  “Ah,” he says. “So I’m a brilliantly confected candyfloss thing? I see. Well, we’re now in a strange world of meta-psychology. I suppose we’re all self-invented to an extent, aren’t we?”
  Johnson’s decision to enter politics says more about him than any of his catastrophic attempts to host “Have I Got News For You”. If he was merely an attention-seeking buffoon, journalism is an easier environment in which to be one. When Johnson talks about his other job, he does so with a passion and seriousness which might surprise people who’ve only seen him squinting helplessly into the wrong camera.
  “Lots of journalists,” he says, “go through a period of thinking all they’re doing is slagging people off, or showing off, so they get this weird urge to go and work in some remote place, or something like that. I got that in my mid-30s. So that’s part of the reason for doing this. And it has been much better than it was built up to be. Let’s face it, it gets a terrible press. Before I became an MP, people told me I was mad, that I had this wonderful job in journalism. But it’s the most rewarding thing I’ve done. Looking at things in a political way is completely different. It’s reality, it’s peoples’ lives, and you have a role in it. I’ll tell you one thing, you become an absolute lion for public spending.”
  Given that he ran to change things, then, I wonder whether the futility of being a Conservative MP bothers him.
  “What do you mean?”
  I mean that your parliamentary party barely bats down to number four, and you won’t win the next election.
  “Everything to play for.”
  Seriously?
  “Absolutely.”
  You’d need a bigger swing than the Russian revolution.
  “Ah. Is that true?”
  Figure of speech.
  “Well, you never know. We need to communicate to the electorate how we’re going to make their lives better, convince them that there’s a serious alternative government. They could get rid of all this misery and spin-bollocks and the anxiety about are they being led by a liar. . . they could change all that overnight.”
  It’s not until I transcribe the tape that I notice the repeated reference to the electorate as “they”. Boris Johnson’s popular touch may still need some honing.
 
IN May this year, Johnson unveiled his manifesto for the Arts, a six-point plan which included some uncommon sense (a Windows spellcheck in English, so British schoolkids don’t get pulled up for spelling “neighbour” correctly, a restoration of Classics to the curriculum), some interesting flights of fancy (a national poetry Olympiad “to restore rhyme and scansion”) and one detour into the realm of lunacy (resolving the wrangle over the Elgin marbles by sending Greece a replica). Michael Portillo once famously told Johnson that he would have to choose between politics and comedy, and he might have been right, but there are many, including those who wouldn’t vote Tory with a gun at their heads, who would think it a shame if he did.

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