Boris Johnson’s performance art

Is the media campaign to promote his new memoir also a return to politics?

Photo by Frank Augstein - WPA Pool/Getty Images

In his first Commons statement as our prime minister, Boris Johnson said that in 2050 “I fully intend to be around, though not necessarily in this job.” Not necessarily. The media round to promote his new memoir, Unleashed, has been similarly playful about a return to Downing Street. This included an appearance last night (10 October) at the Cheltenham Literary Festival, to an audience that compared their Unleashed copies on the expectation that he would not have bothered to do the signatures himself.

It was the latest part of a promotional roadshow that has been shadowed by cancellation and confusion. The interviewer at Cheltenham was supposed to be Beth Rigby, but she pulled out because Johnson’s team would not allow recording (she was replaced with Juliet Samuel). The BBC’s interview was canned because Laura Kuenssberg accidentally sent Johnson her notes (Johnson went on ITV the next night instead). This week he made various radio appearances and compared the Downing Street flat to a “crack den”. Earlier, the newspapers discussed “bombshells” from the memoir. Despite the apparent chaos, it’s worth remembering that any Johnson media round has a purpose in which the political and the personal are perfectly fused. His first climb up what he would call the cursus honorum (we’d call it the greasy pole) was supercharged by TV appearances that began in the late Nineties. Now, he is recycling parts of the old routine, abandoning others and flourishing some new, sharper manoeuvres. The first time we doubted his designs on No 10 – fool us once. The question this time is not if he wants it, but whether it’s lost forever.

To judge by the noise alone, it’s clear that Johnson remains impossible to ignore, for politics or the public. And it’s hard not to notice that this media flurry has occurred during the Conservative leadership contest. In interviews so far, he has refused to pick between the candidates, but each of the last four, the Sunday Times reported, had sought his endorsement. July was the party’s worst defeat in a century; Johnson brought its greatest victory in a generation. He won 365 seats; the Tories now have 121. The next leader will hold fewer seats total than were lost between Johnson’s general election and July’s. There will be a new leader but no new “Big Dog”.

In the BBC Radio 5 Live interview, Matt Chorley not only said Johnson needed no introduction but actually forgot to introduce him. “Everyone knows who he is and has a view on him,” Chorley said. And the party, the press and the public hold stronger, more involved feelings about Johnson than any other British politician – including the prime minister. Years ago, Keir Starmer’s current foreign secretary, David Lammy, called Johnson “devoid of substance”. It’s far from an original insult, or an effective one. Johnson first rose exactly by presenting a void of substance and letting what the French call l’appel du vide, the call of the void, compel his audience to explain him.

“Oh no no, don’t just say yes to everything!” Sue Lawley protested on Desert Island Discs. In his Have I Got News For You appearances he permitted every suggestion, interruption, refutation, and instruction – or accusation. Lynn Barber found him “so ready to retract an opinion, or agree with criticism, that it is very difficult to sort out what he really believes”. Picasso gouged hysterical prices from art dealers not because they didn’t know the number he wanted, but because he himself didn’t know it. Johnson similarly allows endless speculation. What weak conclusions could be reached about him came only after so much thought had been invested that he was already more meaningful than his rivals.

He got at least one laugh from all his interviewers, and plenty from the crowd at Cheltenham. His hair is still messy, and he still deploys the bombastic emphasis that spawned YouTube channels dedicated to seconds-long clips entitled “Boris Johnson saying [word].” No other UK politician has a single image that would have fit in ITV’s pre-interview montage of Johnson hanging from a zipwire, driving a digger through a wall, chucking a basketball over his head and bringing tea to reporters. He remains strikingly genial, and you wonder if his interrogators are somehow still leaving sessions with the feeling that they were too cruel to him.

This all has its uses. His biographer Andrew Gimson says Johnson became Tory leader after ten years repeating at party conferences that he would make members feel good about being Conservative. Then he promised the country he would make them feel good about Brexit. It seems he continues to believe this small voice of buoyant optimism is a winner. He calls himself “relentlessly positive” and insists “this is an amazing country. Read Unleashed and I hope that you will find a hymn of praise to this country for what it could be and will be if people look at the programme I’m setting out.”

The media constantly asks why Starmer showed no charisma, then why he told no story. Labour judges that those charms had expired. In their analysis the public is sick of thinking about politicians and about politics. The message that life will worsen and not improve for some time does not aid sunnier thoughts, but it permits fewer thoughts. And a population weary of hope and cheer is not obviously promising for Johnson – especially if it was he who exhausted them. As Starmer said, “With Boris Johnson it was all about character. It was overpromising something, not really delivering on it, and then descending into character the whole time.”

All Johnson’s interviewers have said that he disappointed Britain, and the facts of Partygate and Brexit will stay hung on him. Voting Johnson has been a way to feel better about voting Conservative and voting Brexit, but it can never be a way to feel better about voting Johnson. Nonetheless he will almost certainly try. He is “more or less programmed, by the way, to want to have these things”. He is still five years younger than his hero Winston Churchill at the start of the first of his two premierships. This media campaign is a chance to try new lines: Leave wasn’t a government in waiting; Cameron failed to order a Brexit strategy; vaccines and Ukraine were triumphs; Sue Gray led the Partygate investigation; subsequent Tory leaders abandoned his winning mandate; Britain is still great.

Predictable, but there is also something new, more ironic. Johnson seems more willing to flash cynicism than ever before. He provoked Chorley by describing his recent life as “blameless obscurity”. Twice on his media rounds, asked if he again wants the top job, he has, just as he used to, compared his chances to those of being reincarnated as an olive, blinded by a champagne cork, locked in a disused fridge or decapitated by a frisbee. He began “as I think I’ve said before”, then recited not one item but the full list, in a tone that made plain they were memorised tools, knowing that these distractions had smuggled him into Downing Street before and, more unnervingly, knowing that we knew it. At one point last night the host exclaimed, “That’s what you said before you became prime minister!” Johnson answered: “Good point.”

At the night’s end his glass of wine, which Juliet Samuel initially noted as promising candour, had been lifted but not drunk from three times, and was carried offstage full. There was plenty left in there. There is plenty left in him. The old show won’t dazzle again, but he will try a new one. On Desert Island Discs in 2005: “I’ve got a lot of energy.” On Steve Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO podcast this week: “I’ve always had a lot of energy.” The question is who, us or him, will see the other more clearly. Along with his first words as our prime minister, we should remember his last. “Hasta la vista, baby,” means until next time, baby.