Seeing Boris Johnson’s byline in the Daily Mail, I felt a flare of the affection which made me break free from my blue-collar tribalism and vote Tory for the first time in 2019. I remember thinking that the experience was rather like losing one’s virginity; worrying about it for months, then secretly planning it, then taking the plunge and thinking the morning after – ‘Gosh, that was nothing to be scared of – I might even do it again!’
I’ve been quite the reprobate myself during my long, louche life, and I’ve certainly lied and adulterated, so of course I can’t condemn anything that I’ve done too, as that would make me a filthy hypocrite. What I can’t forgive in a politician is sanctimoniousness – and he had none.
Another reason I’ve found Johnson’s presence on the public stage appealing is that living in an age which witnesses his antics is like living in a novel. (You can’t say that about Starmer or Sunak, who have about as much dramatic hinterland as a balance sheet.) I first met him when he was nineteen, when I went to visit my best friend at Oxford in the 1980s, and I remember thinking even then that he was going places. When I think of this rake’s progress, I feel pleasantly vertiginous, as if as my life has been lived out in a roman-fleuve, probably by Anthony Powell. Or that I’ve been a bit-player in de Maupassant’s Bel Ami, that cracking tale of a power-mad hack on the make, whose alternate title was The History of a Scoundrel.
I thought it a shame that he was forced out of office by a sour-faced posse of witch-hunters and then found wanting by another legion of lemon-suckers. It’s especially galling that the super-sanctimonious Harriet Harman – now treated as a secular saint – was in charge of the proceedings. But I wasn’t going to sit around sobbing as I knew he’d have a far more enjoyable life than his bed-wetting detractors – people of the type who lie awake at night worrying that someone, somewhere is having fun. And now here he is, popping up as the Daily Mail’s new star columnist! His writing is as funny and fresh as ever – and he’s writing about taking the slimming wonder-drug Ozempic, which for the past three weeks I’ve been taking too.
I’ve had an interesting relationship with my weight. In my teens, I was so thin that my mother would cry when I went home to visit. In my twenties, I started to ‘fill out’ a bit, which was strange as I was a coke fiend. In my thirties I got so fat that a magazine printed a photograph of Jabba the Hutt holding court and said that it was me with my fan club. In my forties, a private doctor prescribed me a drug called Reductil; the effects were so rapid and extreme that I started to wear tight black yoga shorts under my skirts, as there was a chance that a waistband which fitted me in the morning would be down around my ankles at sundown and I’d have to cooly step out of the errant garment and chuck it in the bin. Like most good things, it was banned and I packed it all back on. In my fifties my son died and I lost a third of my body weight; the fact that the worst thing that ever happened to me was also the thing which caused the most people to say ‘You look great – I didn’t recognise you!’ has made me sceptical about weight-related happiness.
Nevertheless, when everybody started talking about these new-fangled semaglutides, I had to have a go. I bought a month’s supply of the starter dose online and I’m just heading into my final week before I need to decide whether I’ll move on to the higher level. Though I’ve lost two pounds a week for three weeks with no exercise besides a bit of high-spirited splashing about in the sea most days. I’m thinking I might give the next level a miss. Unlike poor Boris, I’ve never felt nauseous on these meds – but then, his life isn’t exactly stress-free at the moment. The only thing I don’t care for about this remarkable medicine (a piece in the Atlantic begins ‘Did Scientists Accidentally Invent an Anti-addiction Drug? People taking Ozempic for weight loss say they have also stopped drinking, smoking, shopping, and even nail biting’) is that it’s made me less convivial. I was dismayed last week when, lunching with a charming and highly entertaining young couple visiting from Essex, I consumed three prawns, two bites of a lemon sponge and a pathetic one bottle of rose wine. I was back at my desk within two hours, whereas once I’d have been roistering till dawn.
Maybe if it felt speedy like the amphetamine-based weight-loss meds of the past I might be more tempted to stick to it – I do like a rush. But it feels exactly like Reductil did – like one has a sort of Jiminy Cricket on one’s shoulder, a little voice in the ear saying ‘Are you sure you want that?’ The reason I got fat is that I am a thoughtless eater, my appetite like a magpie, snatching at pretty things. Now I look at rows of cakes in the Real Patisserie’s window and they look to me like piles of differently-coloured birdseed – that dry, dusty and resistible.
I have nothing but good things to report about the semaglutides – right drug, wrong time. It’s just not the med for me when I want to be romping around the watering holes of my city by the sea having fun. I’m already back into my sea-swimming habit and I’ve been delighted to find that I can easily fit into a the very largest size of Norma Kamali swimsuit. Besides, my younger husband – who regularly used to be mistaken for my son – has really piled on the timber in the past few years: ‘You look prosperous – not fat!’ I tell him happily. When I took Reductil, I was still youthful – wearing nice clothes again was a novelty. But I’m going to be 64 next month and I can’t help thinking that wanting to get all gussied up at my age is a bit pathetic.
Though Prime Minister Johnson might have felt it necessary to lead by example his nation of porky malingerers, Journalist Johnson has no such responsibilities
Which brings us back to Boris and his smashing new Mail column; ‘I was going to search for the hero inside myself – the one that was three stone lighter. I was going to locate that svelte and dynamic version of Johnson, imprisoned for decades in pointless extra body weight, and I was going to set him free.’ But he concludes that though this really is a wonder-drug – capable of saving the NHS millions and hopefully getting millions back to work – it’s not for him. Despite the travails of his career, I suspect that – like me – he’s too content in his private life to want to be a ‘better’ version of himself. Why bother?
Though Prime Minister Johnson might have felt it necessary to lead by example his nation of porky malingerers, Journalist Johnson has no such responsibilities – and he always was like a journalist pretending to be a politician, though he has been the latter for longer. The capacity of we hacks for carousing and corruption is legendary; we consistently rate second only to politicians in the list of professions the public distrust. Never mind; we have our own church (St Bride’s of London) and our own patron saint (Saint Francis de Sales) – and for a while we had our very own Hack Prime Minister, one of us in his perfidy and his charm. I hope he gets back into politics, if that is what he wants, but I’m glad to have him here again, on the only slightly less shadier side of the street. Welcome back, Bouncing Boris.
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