While half watching Dominic Cummings’s interminable search-and-destroy mission last week, I read the famous 2019 Guardian article by Max Hastings denouncing Johnson in similar terms—unfit, incompetent, deceitful—on the eve of his triumphal entry into No 10 after evicting Theresa May.
I read it because I am writing a profile of Johnson for this magazine’s summer edition, so have been reading the thousands of pages written about him; a penance worthy of the church which has just married the prime minister for the third time, in Westminster Cathedral no less, thanks to a loophole by which the Vatican does not recognise his earlier non-Catholic marriages—a supremely ironic and characteristically Johnsonian manipulation of a venerable institution older even than Eton College.
The best sourced of the biographies is Sonia Purnell’s Just Boris: The Irresistible Rise of a Political Celebrity. Published in 2011, when David Cameron was in his pomp and Johnson had yet to be elected to a second term as mayor of London, Purnell predicted his likely insurgent bid for the Tory leadership on the basis of his extraordinary talent for seduction, manipulation, branding, and relentless milking of elite contacts since Eton and Oxford. “Resourceful, cunning and strategic… the fact that Boris ultimately wants Cameron’s job is not in dispute,” she wrote, cannily.
However, what struck me was that, according to Purnell, the key figure in Johnson’s career launch and whole incarnation as today’s “Boris” turns out to be… one Max Hastings. The same Hastings who by 2019 was describing his one-time protégé as “a cavorting charlatan” exhibiting “moral bankruptcy rooted in a contempt for truth” who “cares for nothing but his own fame and gratification.”
“I have known Johnson since the 1980s, when I edited the Daily Telegraph and he was our flamboyant Brussels correspondent,” wrote Hastings in 2019, launching his ineffectual thunderbolts.
You need to read this sentence twice, and cross-refer to Purnell, to realise that Hastings didn’t just know Johnson in the 1980s, he appointed him as his paper’s “flamboyant Brussels correspondent,” where Boris made his name and brand by flamboyantly inventing stories about banning bent bananas and successive EU plans for federal domination, preparing the way for Farage, Brexit and his own rise to power, a culmination that is now so strongly deprecated by the ex-editor of the Daily Telegraph who made it all possible.
Moreover, Hastings didn’t just send Johnson to Brussels, he recruited him to the Telegraph in the first place. He did so days after he had been sacked by the Times for making up quotes after only a few weeks in post. “Without Hastings’ patronage, it is quite possible that Boris would have been lost forever to journalism,” writes Purnell. It was Boris’s Etonian charm what did it.
If Johnson’s ethics, which Hastings now deplores, weren’t sufficiently apparent at the start, they were soon made crystal clear to him. We know this because Purnell documents that he was sent personally—and anonymously—the notorious tape of the phone conversation in which Boris and his Etonian best friend Darius Guppy discuss hiring a heavy to “beat up” a journalist who had crossed Guppy’s path. “Ok, Darry, I said I’ll do it and I’ll do it. Don’t worry,” says today’s prime minister.
What happened next? (Before “Darry” went to jail for serious fraud, that is). “Hastings’ response was to fly Boris back to London for a serious discussion,” writes Purnell. “Anyone might have expected a dramatic showdown and even a resignation or a sacking at the end of it.” But it appears from Hastings’ account that the “interrogation” brought out “all Boris’s self-parodying skills as a waffler. Words stumbled forth: loyalty… never intended… old friend… took no action… misunderstanding. We dispatched him back to Brussels with a rebuke.” “And so Bumbling Boris won the day,” Purnell relates.
So who bears prime responsibility for the “morally bankrupt cavorting charlatan” reaching No 10?
Actually, a second suspect besides Max Hastings is now in plain sight: Dominic Cummings, of course. He was engineer of the 2016 Leave campaign with Boris as its star attraction, who then engineered the same Boris’s assault on Theresa May to make him prime minister, whereupon Boris’s chief strategist became, yes, Dominic Cummings. All of which made last week’s performance as hypocritical as it was ineffectual.
The Greeks, so beloved of Johnson, had a word for such behaviour. Hubris: believing you can control powerful forces you create and unleash, knowing they are volatile and self-serving. And where does hubris end? Well, in the Resistible Rise of a Political Celebrity.
