In his only novel, Seventy-Two Virgins, published in 2004, Boris Johnson uses a strange word. The hero, like Johnson himself at the time, is a backbench Conservative member of the House of Commons. Roger Barlow is, indeed, a somewhat unflattering self-portrait—he bicycles to Westminster, he is unfaithful to his wife, he is flippantly racist and politically opportunistic, and he is famously disheveled:
The Leave campaign that Johnson led to a stunning victory in the Brexit referendum of June 2016 owed much of its success to its carefully calibrated slogan “Take Back Control.” Akrasia, which is discussed in depth by Socrates, Plato, and especially Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, is the contrary of control. It means literally “not being in command of oneself” and is translated variously as “weakness of will,” “incontinence,” and “loss of self-control.” To Aristotle, an akratic is a person who knows the right thing to do but can’t help doing the opposite. This is not just, as he himself seems to have intuited, Boris Johnson to a tee. It is also the reason why he embodies more than anyone else a Brexit project in which the very people who promised to take back control are utterly incapable of exercising it, even over themselves. “Oh God, oh Gawd,” asks Barlow in a question that now echoes through much of the British establishment, “why had he done it? Why had he put himself in this ludicrous position?”
To grasp how Johnson’s akratic character has brought his country to a state approaching anarchy, it is necessary to return to the days immediately before February 21, 2016, when he announced to an expectant throng of journalists that he would support the Leave campaign. This was a crucial moment—polls have since shown that, in what turned out to be a very close-run referendum, Boris, as the mayor of London had branded himself, had a greater influence on voters than anyone else. “Character is destiny, said the Greeks, and I agree,” writes Johnson in The Churchill Factor, his 2014 book about Winston Churchill, which carries the telling subtitle “How One Man Made History.” While the book shows Johnson to be a true believer in the Great Man theory of history, his own moment of destiny plays it out as farce, the fate of a nation turning not on Churchillian resolution but on Johnsonian indecision. For Johnson was, in his own words, “veering all over the place like a shopping trolley.” On Saturday, February 20, he texted Prime Minister David Cameron to say he was going to advocate for Brexit. A few hours later, he texted again to say that he might change his mind and back Remain.
Sometime between then and the following day, he wrote at least two different columns for the Daily Telegraph—his deadline was looming, so he wrote one passionately arguing for Leave and one arguing that the cost of Brexit would be too high. (Asked once if he had any convictions, Johnson replied, “Only one—for speeding…”) Then, early on Sunday evening, he texted Cameron to say that he was about to announce irrevocably that he was backing Leave. But, as Cameron told his communications director, Craig Oliver, at the time, Johnson added two remarkable things. One was that “he doesn’t expect to win, believing Brexit will be ‘crushed.’” The other was staggering: “‘He actually said he thought we could leave and still have a seat on the European Council—still making decisions.’”
The expectation—perhaps the hope—of defeat is telling. Johnson’s anti-EU rhetoric was always a Punch and Judy show, and without the EU to play Judy, the show would be over. But the belief that Britain would keep its seat on the European Council (which consists of the leaders of each member state and makes most of the EU’s big political decisions), even if it left the EU, is mind-melting. Not only was Johnson unconvinced that he was taking the right side on one of the most important questions his country has faced since World War II, but he was unaware of the most basic consequence of Brexit. Britain had joined the Common Market, as it was then called, in 1973 precisely because it was being profoundly affected by decisions made in Brussels and was therefore better off having an equal say in those decisions. Johnson’s belief that Britain would continue to have a seat at the European table after Brexit suggested a profound ignorance not just of his country’s future but of its entire postwar past.
This ignorance is not stupidity—Johnson is genuinely clever and, as his fictional alter ego Barlow shows, quite self-aware. It is the studied carelessness affected by a large part of the English upper class whose manners and attitudes Johnson—in reality the product of a rather bohemian bourgeois background—thoroughly absorbed. Consequences are for the little people, seriousness for those who are paid to clean up the mess. (...)
Johnson has always understood that a vivid lie is much more memorable than a dull truth. He is a product of the tight little world of English class privilege in which the same people move from elite schools to elite universities to (often interchangeable) careers in politics and the media. (Johnson’s contemporaries at Oxford included David Cameron, a fellow member of the aggressively elitist Bullingdon Club; his own main rivals for the Tory leadership, Jeremy Hunt and Michael Gove; and the political editors of the BBC and Channel 4 who now report on him.) From Oxford he soon sailed into a position as a graduate trainee at The Times. It was there that he learned a valuable lesson: it pays to fabricate stories. The Times had to fire him because he sexed up a dull story by inventing lurid quotes and attributing them to a real Oxford historian (who happened to be his own godfather). Instead of ending his journalistic career, this was the seed from which it blossomed.
by Fintan O’Toole, NYRB | Read more:
Image: Andrew Parsons/i-Images/eyevine/Redux
In the fond imagination of one Commons secretary who crossed his path he had the air of a man who had just burst through a hedge after running through a garden having climbed down a drainpipe on being surprised in the wrong marital bed.Barlow, throughout the novel, is in constant fear that his political career is about to be ended by a tabloid scandal. In a moment of introspection, he reflects on this anxiety:
There was something prurient about the way he wanted to read about his own destruction, just as there was something weird about the way he had been impelled down the course he had followed. Maybe he wasn’t a genuine akratic. Maybe it would be more accurate to say he had a thanatos urge. [Emphases added]The novel is a mass-market comic thriller about a terrorist plot to capture the US president while he is addressing Parliament in London. The Greek terms stand out. In part, they function as signifiers of social class within a long-established code of linguistic manners: a sprinkling of classical phrases marks one out as a product of an elite private school (in Johnson’s case, Eton) and therefore a proper toff. (Asked in June during the contest to replace Theresa May as Tory leader to name his political hero, Johnson chose Pericles of Athens.) The choice of thanatos is interesting, and the thought that he might have a death wish will ring bells for those who have followed the breathtaking recklessness of Johnson’s career. But it is akratic that intrigues.
The Leave campaign that Johnson led to a stunning victory in the Brexit referendum of June 2016 owed much of its success to its carefully calibrated slogan “Take Back Control.” Akrasia, which is discussed in depth by Socrates, Plato, and especially Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, is the contrary of control. It means literally “not being in command of oneself” and is translated variously as “weakness of will,” “incontinence,” and “loss of self-control.” To Aristotle, an akratic is a person who knows the right thing to do but can’t help doing the opposite. This is not just, as he himself seems to have intuited, Boris Johnson to a tee. It is also the reason why he embodies more than anyone else a Brexit project in which the very people who promised to take back control are utterly incapable of exercising it, even over themselves. “Oh God, oh Gawd,” asks Barlow in a question that now echoes through much of the British establishment, “why had he done it? Why had he put himself in this ludicrous position?”To grasp how Johnson’s akratic character has brought his country to a state approaching anarchy, it is necessary to return to the days immediately before February 21, 2016, when he announced to an expectant throng of journalists that he would support the Leave campaign. This was a crucial moment—polls have since shown that, in what turned out to be a very close-run referendum, Boris, as the mayor of London had branded himself, had a greater influence on voters than anyone else. “Character is destiny, said the Greeks, and I agree,” writes Johnson in The Churchill Factor, his 2014 book about Winston Churchill, which carries the telling subtitle “How One Man Made History.” While the book shows Johnson to be a true believer in the Great Man theory of history, his own moment of destiny plays it out as farce, the fate of a nation turning not on Churchillian resolution but on Johnsonian indecision. For Johnson was, in his own words, “veering all over the place like a shopping trolley.” On Saturday, February 20, he texted Prime Minister David Cameron to say he was going to advocate for Brexit. A few hours later, he texted again to say that he might change his mind and back Remain.
Sometime between then and the following day, he wrote at least two different columns for the Daily Telegraph—his deadline was looming, so he wrote one passionately arguing for Leave and one arguing that the cost of Brexit would be too high. (Asked once if he had any convictions, Johnson replied, “Only one—for speeding…”) Then, early on Sunday evening, he texted Cameron to say that he was about to announce irrevocably that he was backing Leave. But, as Cameron told his communications director, Craig Oliver, at the time, Johnson added two remarkable things. One was that “he doesn’t expect to win, believing Brexit will be ‘crushed.’” The other was staggering: “‘He actually said he thought we could leave and still have a seat on the European Council—still making decisions.’”
The expectation—perhaps the hope—of defeat is telling. Johnson’s anti-EU rhetoric was always a Punch and Judy show, and without the EU to play Judy, the show would be over. But the belief that Britain would keep its seat on the European Council (which consists of the leaders of each member state and makes most of the EU’s big political decisions), even if it left the EU, is mind-melting. Not only was Johnson unconvinced that he was taking the right side on one of the most important questions his country has faced since World War II, but he was unaware of the most basic consequence of Brexit. Britain had joined the Common Market, as it was then called, in 1973 precisely because it was being profoundly affected by decisions made in Brussels and was therefore better off having an equal say in those decisions. Johnson’s belief that Britain would continue to have a seat at the European table after Brexit suggested a profound ignorance not just of his country’s future but of its entire postwar past.
This ignorance is not stupidity—Johnson is genuinely clever and, as his fictional alter ego Barlow shows, quite self-aware. It is the studied carelessness affected by a large part of the English upper class whose manners and attitudes Johnson—in reality the product of a rather bohemian bourgeois background—thoroughly absorbed. Consequences are for the little people, seriousness for those who are paid to clean up the mess. (...)
Johnson has always understood that a vivid lie is much more memorable than a dull truth. He is a product of the tight little world of English class privilege in which the same people move from elite schools to elite universities to (often interchangeable) careers in politics and the media. (Johnson’s contemporaries at Oxford included David Cameron, a fellow member of the aggressively elitist Bullingdon Club; his own main rivals for the Tory leadership, Jeremy Hunt and Michael Gove; and the political editors of the BBC and Channel 4 who now report on him.) From Oxford he soon sailed into a position as a graduate trainee at The Times. It was there that he learned a valuable lesson: it pays to fabricate stories. The Times had to fire him because he sexed up a dull story by inventing lurid quotes and attributing them to a real Oxford historian (who happened to be his own godfather). Instead of ending his journalistic career, this was the seed from which it blossomed.
by Fintan O’Toole, NYRB | Read more:
Image: Andrew Parsons/i-Images/eyevine/Redux
