Harry Mount

Give us a break!

Our Stakhanovite age values effort over results. We’d do better to play a bit more cricket

As Boris Johnson will know from his love of Greek tragedy, hubris leads to nemesis. And it is Boris’s own hubris — in playing cricket with Lord Spencer the weekend after Brexit, and not finishing his leadership speech on time — that supposedly led to his downfall.

I well know from working with Boris at the Telegraph that prompt timekeeping is not his forte. For five years, my Wednesday nights were destroyed as Boris regularly missed the 7 p.m. deadline for delivering his column. ‘It hasn’t arrived,’ I’d say to him over the phone at 7.01 p.m.

‘Ah, Christ, sorry,’ said Boris, ‘Bloody internet! It must be pinging its way down those threadbare copper wires as we speak, old man.’

In fact, he hadn’t finished writing the column. I could hear him tapping away at his keyboard on the other end of the phone, while insisting he’d already sent it.

The lateness wasn’t because he was lazy. One of Boris’s brilliant ruses is to give the impression of idle chaos, in order to disguise the diamond-hard ambition that lurks beneath. He gets up at 5.45 a.m. every day. And on those Wednesday evenings, he had already put The Spectator to bed, been to Prime Minister’s Questions and perhaps written his GQ car column.

And yet he was vilified for his supposed laziness last week — for captaining a team of Johnsons against Lord Spencer’s XI at Althorp; for only having done 500 words of his 1,500-word leadership speech on the Wednesday evening before the Thursday deadline to submit his nomination.

Did Pericles, Boris’s hero, submit a draft of his funeral oration over the Athenian dead in 431 bc? Did his other hero,-Churchill, have to fact-check his speeches: ‘I’m sorry, Winston, but when you say “We shall fight on the beaches”, can you specify precisely which ones?’

Boris is an unfair victim of today’s Stakhanovite age, where work is seen as a good in itself.

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