Why is Boris Johnson publishing a breezy book about Churchill? The answer depends on your view of his political calculation
What must it be like to be trapped in irony – to be so infused by it that nothing you say or write is without comic inflection or some distancing device? Certain kinds of feelings become impossible to express properly. Suffering, desire, solemnity, sympathy, compassion: the dedicated ironist mocks all of them without intending to – we’ve got so used to his register that even if he is shouting “Take to the lifeboats!” or “Your house is on fire!” we can’t imagine that these alarms can be in earnest. They reach us with their quote marks doubled.
Eventually, even in heavily ironic England, this may be where Boris Johnson’s ambition to lead the post-Cameron Tory party comes unstuck; what is he serious about, other than the business of making us like him by making us laugh? But in a book that deals with the great tragedies of the 20th century, irony can be a handicap for Johnson the writer, too. Perhaps irony isn’t the right word; it’s more as if the author had had a retrofit in the slang department. “There are aspects of Churchill that make him sound like a chap who has had a few too many at a golf club bar,” he writes of a statesman who, as late as 1945, could tell his private secretary that the Hindus were a foul race “protected by their mere pullulation [rapid breeding] from the doom that is their due”. Johnson’s word choice – chap, a few too many – softens vileness into merely regrettable behaviour: we imagine a boring drunk in plus fours rather than the famine that killed three million people in Bengal (a disaster that goes unmentioned by Johnson, in which Churchill played an instrumental role). “Some of his ideas sound frankly a bit whacko,” the author writes of Churchill’s military wheezes in the first world war (and they certainly were, as the dead might attest).
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Eventually, even in heavily ironic England, this may be where Boris Johnson’s ambition to lead the post-Cameron Tory party comes unstuck; what is he serious about, other than the business of making us like him by making us laugh? But in a book that deals with the great tragedies of the 20th century, irony can be a handicap for Johnson the writer, too. Perhaps irony isn’t the right word; it’s more as if the author had had a retrofit in the slang department. “There are aspects of Churchill that make him sound like a chap who has had a few too many at a golf club bar,” he writes of a statesman who, as late as 1945, could tell his private secretary that the Hindus were a foul race “protected by their mere pullulation [rapid breeding] from the doom that is their due”. Johnson’s word choice – chap, a few too many – softens vileness into merely regrettable behaviour: we imagine a boring drunk in plus fours rather than the famine that killed three million people in Bengal (a disaster that goes unmentioned by Johnson, in which Churchill played an instrumental role). “Some of his ideas sound frankly a bit whacko,” the author writes of Churchill’s military wheezes in the first world war (and they certainly were, as the dead might attest).
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