When I was 18, I had my first tutorial on Anglo-Saxon history. I cannot remember the details but the don talked of the king of Mercia, or some such, marrying his daughter to the son of the king of Northumbria, or somewhere or other, because of the political advantages the union would bring the two crowns.
The teenage Cohen listened appalled. ‘You mean,’ I cried, ‘they didn’t love each other?’
In a voice so acid, it might have burnt through the hull of a battleship, the don hissed: ‘I do not subscribe to the Mills & Boon school of British history.’
After that encounter, I stopped subscribing too.
Views of the veracity of the man it appears will be our next prime minister fall into two camps. Many of my darling colleagues are in the Mills & Boon school of British journalism. The incurable romantics hold that when Boris Johnson says he believes it is Britain’s best interests to leave the European Union, he means it, in a truly caring way. The rest of us think that Boris Johnson sincerely believes that it is in his best interests to pretend to believe that it is in Britain’s best interests to leave the European Union.
I feel terrible saying this: cheap and coarse. It’s like telling a love-struck girl that the man she has pinned her hopes on is nothing more than a cad, rotter and bounder of the worst sort. But just as you can’t let a woman ruin her life without saying something, so I can’t let my colleagues ruin their reputations without trying to save them from themselves.
Let me start gently by reminding them that even Boris Johnson’s most adoring fans, most of whom appear to write for this magazine, should be able to concede that he’s a useless parliamentarian. A waste of time and space. An embarrassment to everyone who hears him speak. Just dreadful.
There. That wasn’t so hard was it?
Next, remember that if Johnson can persuade his fellow Conservative MPs to make him one of the two candidates they put before the party’s members, he should win. Conservative activists think Johnson is their friend. They and political journalists (it is often hard to distinguish between the two) don’t call him ‘Johnson’ or ‘Mr Johnson’ or ‘that bastard’ as proper reporters do. They scrape an acquaintance by calling him ‘Boris’, as if the presumption of first-name terms will bring an intimacy he will never grant them.
Ever since he returned to Parliament, his problem has been how to persuade unimpressed Tory MPs to allow him into the contest. If Johnson had backed remain like Theresa May, Sajid Javid and George Osborne, he would not have distinguished himself from his rivals. By coming out for ‘out’, he can hope to secure the backing of the Tory right. From the point of view of his self-interest, supporting Vote Leave makes sense. (The national interest is another matter.)
Ross Clark of The Spectator won’t have it. He chides Matthew Parris and me for highlighting Johnson’s caddish career. The reason why Johnson has changed his tune on Europe so often, Clark maintains, is not that he is a fool who does not know his own mind or an opportunist restlessly seeking advantage. Rather beneath that clownish exterior is a thoughtful man who has been torn as he considered a complicated question.
Of course ‘Boris can be a slimy opportunist,’ Clark concedes, and all credit to him for that, for it is more than many hacks will do. But:
Boris’s position on the EU is not dishonest. He has flip-flopped on the EU because he is genuinely torn — and as such reflects the position of a huge proportion of the population. A man solely driven by desire to be PM would not have come out in favour of Brexit. Being on the losing side of the referendum — as is still more likely than not — will hardly boost his chances of becoming Tory leader..
Clark surely cannot believe that. Does he imagine that if we vote to stay in the EU, sporting ‘out’ activists will accept the result with good grace? I think it slightly more likely, that, like Scottish nationalists, they will seethe with resentment and the desire for vengeance. Stab-in-the back and betrayal myths will fill the right-wing press. The right will say that Cameron cheated his way to victory. That democracy was subverted and the vote was a sham. Close readers of the Mail and the Telegraph can see the foundations for the cover story being dug already. They will support a towering rage if ‘out’ loses.
Whatever happens, however, Johnson can’t lose. If we vote to leave, David Cameron will resign, and Johnson can hope that grateful Eurosceptic MPs will nominate him and Conservative members would vote for him. He could be Prime Minister in time for Christmas. If we vote to stay, he can hope that the same embittered MPs and activists would nurse their grievances and parade their wounds until Cameron retired, and then acclaim Johnson as their redeemer and avenger.
If Ross Clark or any other journalist doubts me, follow the advice of my old history tutor and consider the evidence.
In early February, Johnson wrote a piece in the Telegraph, which was everything his supporters could have wanted. He was measured as he weighed the pros and cons of leaving the EU and torn as he confessed that he could not make up his mind.
Yet on 22 February, when our Home Counties’ Hamlet finally resolved his doubts, his announcement that he was backing leave was accompanied by Trumpian lies that would have embarrassed a tabloid. It is not true, as Johnson said, that the EU stops children under eight blowing up balloons or prevents the rest of us recycling teabags. Nor is it the case, as he has said on other occasions, that EU regulations cost us £600 million a day or that even in death the EU will dictate the size of our coffins.
The fact that he descended to the level of a mobbish demagogue tells you all you need to know about his character and tactics. This is not an honest man with honest doubts. This is a chancer, who has seen his main chance, and will delight his core vote with fantasies, if mendacity will bring him power.
I am not going to become high-minded about journalism. It’s not a profession, just people writing and talking. But at its lowly best it fosters a suspicion of the powerful and a vague preference for hard facts above convenient prejudice.
‘Boris’s’ media darlings display neither. I hope for their sakes as well as the country’s sake, that they do not have to wait until he is Prime Minister before they realise that they have loved a worthless man.
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