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63 About this deal
Events have flowed so bizarrely over the past four years that it's easy to become confused. This book is going to be a godsend to people writing about this era because the authors have recorded the views and thoughts of the participants before time and hindsight rewrite them. This is a tale about the court of a would-be-king, Boris, who just happened to be Prime Minister and therefore should have been working from a different job description. I think it also overestimates Johnson's role in the Ukrain war, giving him far too much credit. Many of us saw it as a way for him to escape from the reality of the mess he had made domestically and allow him to emulate Churchill. I can understand why his forthright stance made him popular in Ukraine, but how do we balance his actions against his close association with oligarchs and Russian money? Johnson’s eventual solution to getting Brexit done as prime minister was to bring in Cummings to do the work that he had no appetite for, in the full knowledge that his chief adviser was a wholly destructive force. That, Seldon, suggests to me, was another first for British political leadership: He was exceptional. . .. he was ‘exceptionally bad’ as commented by Jenny Jones on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Any Questions’ in July, 2022:
They shared a willingness to take enormous risks with the constitution, as with their casual relationship with the truth and malleable principles,” state the authors in their introduction. “Their ferocious sexual and financial appetites led them into deep and repetitive trouble. Both thought nothing of using powers of patronage to make outrageous appointments which were nakedly to their own benefit. Both indeed rather enjoyed being outrageous.” I think readers will be aware that I was never Johnson’s biggest fan. He cynically supported Brexit because he thought (correctly) that it would make him Prime Minister (though he screwed up on the first attempt in 2016), building on a career of lies about Europe and about his personal life. In office as Foreign Secretary, he displayed casual incompetence to the point where he endangered the life of a British citizen held captive in Iran. He endorsed Theresa May’s Brexit deal with the EU, before deciding that it would be more convenient to resign in protest, disrupting and upstaging a Balkans conference in London that the UK had laboured on for months. From then on, it was only a matter of time before he got to Number 10. I suppose at least Cummings did believe in Brexit, although ultimately, really, did he?” he says. “From everything we heard [for the book] it just seemed Cummings was full of hatred. He probably hates himself; he certainly hates other people. He wants to destroy everything. Johnson in his own way never knew what he stood for, but he shared that contempt for the Tory party, contempt for the cabinet, contempt for the civil service, contempt for the EU, contempt for the army, contempt for business, contempt for intellectuals, contempt for universities.” Boris Johnson was a man fit to lead and perform, but never to govern and articulate. A chronic people-pleaser, with an awful taste in colleagues and an even worse taste in advice, his premiership was defined by circumstance so much more than his own decision. Here was a prime minister with a potential for greatness, surrounded by supremely able people, who waffled and squandered his way to an early grave at the hands of people he could never let down. As much as he longed to be a Thatcher or a Churchill, he was so much the Brown or Callaghan he had dreaded from the start. Covid proved him very wrong on that, though interestingly this account doesn’t pin the blame for the early mistakes made fully on Johnson. Neither does it allow him to take the credit for the thing he is proudest of, the vaccine programme, saying that this falls to Emily Lawson who actually put together the successful campaign.Johnson’s inadequacies meant that Cummings was perhaps a necessary evil. To the extent that Johnson had priorities, he could achieve little without Cummings’s support. The prime minister was incapable of determining what he wanted to achieve and how to achieve it and needed someone else to do the work. He did not understand the detail and could not be bothered to master it. Well,” he says, “this is the reason why for the moment Starmer is disappointing, because there is this enormous desire for renewal. But Starmer seems micro when he could be macro, cautious when he could be passionate, dull where he could be inspirational.”
A brilliant book about a man who had the potential to be one of the great Prime Ministers of the UK and had the opportunities to be, but ultimately let himself down due to his self-centredness and his inability to tell the truth at any time. The related tragedy was the national one, in which we are still living. Whatever you thought of Brexit, Seldon argues – he thought it was a bad idea – it did provide “the overdue opportunity to modernise the British state and Britain’s institutions. There was a desperate need to bring the civil service up to date,” he says. “To forge better connections between universities and public life, to rejuvenate professions.” Could he have been a better leader, if he had paid more attention to his briefs, liaised closer with his own cabinet ministers, MPs and cabinet staff, despite Covid and the war in Ukraine? There are a couple of points to be said in Johnson’s favour. He did win an election with a clear majority, which is a notable achievement even in the supposedly decisive British system (helped of course by the incompetence at the time of Labour and the Lib Dems). He was seriously committed to Net Zero, and was ready to argue the toss on climate with sceptics in his own party, though less good at doing the preparatory legwork for the Glasgow COP meeting. He came in early and strong on Ukraine’s side in the war, and helped consolidate the G7 and NATO in support. (Though there too, the UK is a smaller player compared to the US and the EU.)
Inside 24 hours of Westminster chaos as Boris Johnson tried to spin the Sue Gray report to MPs
It is a book to be appreciated for all of the diligent hard work that the authors have put into it though. An obvious lazy approach/clear avoidance of doing the tough boring work. Implementation, and strategy he avoided at all costs. The third is a moment in which Seldon and Newell analyse one of the elements in Johnson’s downfall. This is what they say: I am meant to be in control. I am the Führer. I’m the king who takes the decisions.” This eye-catching line from Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell’s Johnson at 10, their account of Boris Johnson’s three-year period as prime minister, is more telling than its speaker might have imagined. If Johnson, who expressed his desire to be “world king” when he was a schoolboy at Eton, was any sort of monarch, he was, in the words of Hamlet, “a king of shreds and patches”. Of the 57 people who have held the highest office, Seldon suggests, Johnson was probably unique in that he came to it with “no sense of any fixed position. No religious faith, no political ideology”. His only discernible ambition, Seldon says, was that “like Roman emperors he wanted monuments in his name”.
What proves that Johnson was never a Brexiteer with no clear or ambitious plan for a post-Brexit Britain? Anthony Seldon published his Cameron at 10 book when David Cameron was still in Number 10. It made for uncomfortable reading for the then prime minister, with its analysis of who the man in charge was and well-sourced revelations about how he made policy. People we spoke to were afraid of Cummings, personal fear,” he says. “And to an extent of the whole Johnson court. In the seven books I’ve written, we saw some fear of some of the people around Gordon Brown, but this was off the scale. And that’s a deeply unhealthy facet of modern government that you let in people who are using fear as a method of control. Quite a lot of that was misogynistic in what we saw.” Why did Britain get the Covid pandemic wrong in the early stages and did the government learn from its mistakes? Indeed, Johnson relies heavily on brilliant people around him who by and large lose patience with the operation they have to deal with, if not the man himself. What makes this book so worth reading is that so many of these brilliant people have chosen to talk to Seldon and Newell, some of them unusually on the record. For instance, Graham Brady, chair of the Conservative Party’s 1922 Committee, tells the story of a “grovelling apology” from the PM after Cummings banned Johnson from speaking to him.Seldon and Newell are therefore faced with the usual problem encountered by authors of history so recent that it’s practically current affairs: is it too soon to make judgements about Johnson’s premiership, not least because he has hinted, with typically deafening subtlety, that he would like another go? Rarely in 300 years and never since 1916 has a Prime Minister been so poor at appointments, so incompetent at running Cabinet government, or so incapable of finding a stable team to run No. 10. The Prime Minister is the chief executive, yet he belittled the executive and allowed his ministers to do the same, but without producing badly needed practical solutions for improvement. Nor did he act on ambitious plans to reform central government after Brexit. It is hard to find a Prime Minister who has done more to damage the fabric of government.“
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