‘Them’s the breaks’. Those three words speak volumes about Boris Johnson’s ability, his character and his fears.
The words show Johnson retains the talents that made him a successful columnist. I know a lot of people don’t like this, but he was a good columnist, in the sense that he consistently said things that people were interested in hearing and talking about. Amid the eternal babble of the media, being able to find a phrase, a word, a sentence or a paragraph that captures attention and captures ideas – consistently – is no small skill.
‘Them’s the breaks’ is already doing exactly what its author intended. It’s becoming the headline on stories about Johnson’s departure from No. 10. It’s framing that departure, shaping the story.
That framing is doing a lot of quite complicated things, all of them quite deliberately intended. ‘Them’s the breaks’ says that Johnson’s departure is just one of those things, the sort of unfortunate turn of events that could happen to any of us. Oh well, these things happen. Mustn’t grumble. Triumph and disaster both the same, and so on.
There will no statues erected of Boris Johnson, and most of the books will record him as a failure
‘Them’s the breaks’ casts Boris Johnson as a batsman who went for a match-winning to drive the boundary but somehow edged the ball to second slip where it might even have touched the grass before being caught. Oh bad luck, old chap – good on you for trying.
‘Them’s the breaks’ leads us away from the fact that Johnson is out because he turned up late without his kit, ran out most of his batting partners, repeatedly refused to walk and told the umpire to do one.
Those three words also lead us to a certain idea of Johnson the man: a happy-go-lucky English bluffer who thought he’d have a crack at this governing lark but couldn’t quite make a go of it. Oh well, onwards and upwards and all that.
To a lot of people, this idea of Johnson as an amateurish dilettante who doesn’t really care is wildly infuriating. They see Johnson has just another member of the gilded Etonian-PPE elite who treat politics and government as a game for gentlemen to try for a bit before receding into comfortable early retirement. They rage that these people just don’t care.
That anger is wholly justified, though I think it was more deserving in the case of David Cameron, whose decision to walk away after lighting the referendum binfire was historically cowardly.
Oddly, I think Johnson chose to deploy ‘them’s the breaks’ because he’d rather be thought of as a Cameron-like game-player, a languid toff who can see his career and country go up in flames then shrug and head off for a nice weekend in the country.
But I’m not sure that’s what Johnson really is. I think he does care, about some things. Not his country, obviously, nor his party. His disregard for such things is manifest and inarguable: even he paused before using the laughable word ‘duty’ in his speech.
No, I think he cares about the other members of that gilded elite, to which he’s never really, truly belonged. In previous jobs, I spent a fair bit of time with the Tory aristocracy, and I also edited Johnson’s column at the Daily Telegraph. The impression I came away with was that, just as he never felt comfortable or accepted in Parliament, he never felt like he’d really joined the top set.
Yes, he went to Eton and the Bullingdon with them, but he was never truly People Like Us. His family had neither the money nor the breeding that Cameron was born to. Some people even say that the very name ‘Boris’ came about because the other boys started using it to bully the young Al Johnson: he adopted the name and the persona of Boris in to roll with the punches and fit in.
‘Them’s the breaks’ is how Boris Johnson would shrug off the crushing failure of his political career. But I suspect Al Johnson isn’t so nonchalant. I think he cares, deeply, about his failure. I think that person, a quiet, lonely type, is burned by the idea that Dave and men like him are laughing at him again, just as they did when they found the name Boris in his passport.
And worse, I think he cares about the way history will remember him. There will no statues erected of Boris Johnson, and most of the books will record him as a failure. He’ll spend a lot of the rest of his life trying to change that. ‘History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it’, said Winston Churchill, another depressive loner with an eye on posterity.
And ‘them’s the breaks’ is the start of Boris Johnson’s attempt to dictate the story of his premiership and his personality. It’s a lie, of course, which is fitting, but also revealing.
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