Boris Johnson

Boris Johnson: The Performer Who Got Brexit Done

In 1987 *The Times* dismissed a young graduate trainee for fabricating a quotation and attributing it to the historian Colin Lucas. In June 2023 the House of Commons Privileges Committee concluded that the same man, by then a former prime minister, had deliberately misled Parliament, and would have recommended a ninety-day suspension had he not resigned first. Between those two exits Boris Johnson won the mayoralty of London twice in a Labour city, fronted the campaign that took Britain out of the European Union, and delivered a Conservative landslide. Almost no career in modern British politics has been so consistently underestimated, or so consistently proved the doubters half right.

Eton, Balliol and the Union

Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson was delivered on 19 June 1964 on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, which gave him American citizenship until he renounced it in 2016. His father, Stanley Johnson, was an economist and writer; his mother, Charlotte Fawcett, was a painter and the daughter of Sir James Fawcett, president of the European Commission of Human Rights. His siblings Rachel, Leo and Joseph all became public figures in their own right.

He went to Eton as a King's Scholar in 1977 and to Balliol College, Oxford, in 1983 to read Literae Humaniores, taking an upper second. The classics stayed with him as a lifelong rhetorical toolkit. So did two Oxford institutions: the Bullingdon Club, the drinking society whose photographs later followed him everywhere, and the Union, whose presidency he won in 1986 after a campaign that taught him how to assemble a coalition out of people who did not agree with each other.

A Journalist in Brussels

After the *Times* sacking he joined *The Daily Telegraph*, and from 1989 to 1994 filed from Brussels. The despatches built the Eurosceptic reputation that defined the rest of his life and, in the judgement of many colleagues, a house style of Euro-scepticism for the entire British press. He rose through the paper to assistant editor and chief political columnist and won Commentator of the Year. From July 1999 he edited *The Spectator*, where circulation rose about ten per cent to 62,000 and the magazine turned profitable, though he was criticised for publishing racist and antisemitic material by the columnist Taki Theodoracopulos. He wrote books throughout: verse in *The Perils of the Pushy Parents* (1995), a novel, *Seventy-Two Virgins* (2004), and popular history in *The Dream of Rome* (2006) and *Johnson's Life of London* (2012).

Henley, and Then City Hall

He entered the Commons for Henley in 2001 and was, by the standards of ambitious MPs, conspicuously idle: he missed committee meetings, attended around half of votes and made speeches colleagues judged lacklustre. He voted for the Gender Recognition Act 2004 and for repealing Section 28. He held junior shadow posts under Michael Howard and David Cameron - vice-chairman, then arts, then higher education.

City Hall changed the assessment. Selected in September 2007, he beat Ken Livingstone in May 2008 with 43 per cent of first preferences to Livingstone's 37, reaching 53 per cent after second preferences, and won again in 2012. He banned alcohol on public transport, extended Oyster pay-as-you-go, commissioned the New Routemaster bus and the Thames cable car, and introduced the cycle-hire scheme that Londoners named Boris Bikes over his own objections. The controversies ran alongside: an unpermitted garden shed, cronyism allegations over Veronica Wadley's Arts Council appointment, taxi expenses, and his dealings with the entrepreneur Jennifer Arcuri, over which an Independent Office for Police Conduct report in May 2020 found he had failed to declare a conflict of interest. A claim that serious youth crime had fallen was shown to be false, though overall crime did decline.

Vote Leave

He returned to Parliament in 2015 for Uxbridge and South Ruislip and in February 2016 declared for Vote Leave; sterling fell around two per cent against the dollar on the news. The campaign that followed was ferocious and, in parts, indefensible: an article suggesting Barack Obama's part-Kenyan ancestry shaped his view of Britain and the EU was widely condemned as racist, and Johnson endorsed the campaign's claim about Turkish accession, which critics said implied eighty million Turks would migrate to Britain. He called 23 June 2016 Britain's independence day. James Murdoch has said Johnson did not believe Leave would win. When it did, Michael Gove's public withdrawal of support ended his leadership bid within days.

Foreign Secretary

Theresa May appointed him Foreign Secretary in July 2016, a move analysts read as containment: with separate secretaries of state for Brexit and international trade, the office had been hollowed out. The tenure was defined by incidents. He had won a competition for offensive verse about Recep Tayyip Erdogan shortly before an awkward visit to Turkey and dismissed it as trivia. He told the Foreign Affairs Committee that Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe had been "simply teaching people journalism," a remark her family said worsened her position in Iran, and he later claimed he had been misquoted. He recited Kipling in a Myanmar temple, to the British ambassador's visible discomfort. He said Libyan Sirte could become a new Dubai once investors had cleared the dead bodies away. He compared Vladimir Putin's World Cup to Hitler's Berlin Olympics. He resigned in July 2018 over the Chequers plan.

Downing Street

He became prime minister on 24 July 2019, reopened the withdrawal negotiations that September, and prorogued Parliament in a manoeuvre the Supreme Court ruled unlawful. He then called a December election, won it in a landslide and passed his revised withdrawal agreement. Within months COVID-19 arrived; his government took emergency powers under the Coronavirus Act 2020 and ran one of the fastest national vaccination programmes in the world. After Russia's invasion of Ukraine he imposed sanctions and authorised weapons and aid, a record his supporters rate as his best.

What ended him began as a series of newspaper stories about gatherings held inside Downing Street during lockdown. Eighty-three people were fined, Johnson among them, in April 2022 - the first sitting prime minister sanctioned for breaking the law. He survived a confidence vote in June 2022, but the appointment of Chris Pincher as deputy chief whip despite prior knowledge of misconduct allegations triggered mass ministerial resignations in July, and he announced his departure. Liz Truss succeeded him. The Privileges Committee reported in June 2023 that he had personal knowledge of the breaches, that his failure to seek proper assurances amounted to a deliberate closing of his mind, and that it was highly unlikely he genuinely believed what he told the House. It also found he had misled the committee itself and been complicit in a campaign of abuse against its members. He resigned as an MP before publication, calling the committee biased.

Why Boris Is Called a Genius

Whatever Johnson has, it is not the genius of analysis - his own colleagues rated his command of detail poorly, and the diplomatic record of 2016 to 2018 is a list of unforced errors. The case for the word rests entirely on persuasion, and specifically on one unusual and genuinely rare faculty: the ability to make people who disagree with each other vote for the same thing. He won London twice as a Conservative in a Labour city. He assembled a Leave majority out of constituencies with nothing else in common. In 2019 he converted a paralysed parliamentary position into a landslide with a three-word slogan. That capacity to reach voters far outside his party's normal reach is the quality his supporters mean by brilliance, and it is real.

The method underneath it is worth naming honestly, because it is not intellect but performance: a classical education deployed as light entertainment, calculated dishevelment, comic timing, and a willingness to say the vivid thing rather than the accurate one. That last habit is where the case collapses. His career is bracketed by two findings of dishonesty - a sacking for inventing a quotation in 1987 and a parliamentary finding of deliberate deception in 2023 - and between them sit the Obama article, the Zaghari-Ratcliffe remark and the Arcuri conflict of interest. Critics accuse him of lying, cronyism, elitism and bigotry, and much of the documentary record supports them. The honest verdict is that Johnson possessed an exceptional political instrument and used it without the restraint that would have made it durable. He is evidence that persuasion and judgement are separate faculties, and that a country can be moved a very long way by someone who has only the first.

Legacy

Johnson leaves the shortest list of enduring policies of any recent long-serving British politician and one of the largest marks on the country. Britain's departure from the European Union was not his idea, but it is unlikely to have happened without him, and it has reordered British trade, politics and constitutional argument. The vaccination programme and the early, unambiguous support for Ukraine stand to his credit. Against them sit a Supreme Court finding that he had acted unlawfully in proroguing Parliament, a police fine, and a Commons committee's conclusion that he lied to the House he led. His defenders and his critics have never really disagreed about the facts, only about how much the charm should be allowed to count against them.

Achievements

• Mayor of London (2008–2016)
• Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (2016–2018)
• Member of the Privy Council of the United Kingdom (from 2016)
• member of the 57th Parliament of the United Kingdom (2017–2019)
• Ig Nobel Prize — 2020
• Order of Liberty — 2022
• Educated at Eton College and Balliol College