TV review: Boris Johnson - The Irresistible Rise
Here's a little game I've devised. I thought you could play it during tea tonight with your family. It's very simple. All you do is go around the table in a clockwise direction while each player comes up with one outrageous thing Boris Johnson would have to do in order NOT to become prime minister.
That's right. One thing. One gaffe, one cock-up, one mistake that would send his career into a tailspin from which it would never recover.
Now, I know that sounds easy, but, trust me, it's damned difficult.
Extra-marital affair? Pah! Bojo's gotten out of that before – a number of times – without breaking sweat.
Agreeing many moons ago to help get a journalist beaten up because he'd displeased an old school chum and convicted fraudster?
Crikey! Boris can bluster his way out of that particular trap with no trouble. (And, anyway, as he said: "Nothing eventuated from that conversation.") No, you must try harder, old bean.
Blundering his way through his first term as London mayor? Falling over in a river while on a photoshoot?
Refusing to come home from his Canadian holiday during the first days of the London riots?
Getting stuck on a zip wire at the Olympics?
Generally appearing to be a complete shambles?
Nah, all of those things only increase his appeal.
I guarantee however hard you try, no matter what you come up with, however outlandish your idea, it's an absolute, cast-iron, nailed-on, dead-cert that Boris will be parking his bike in the hallway at Number 10 within the decade.
Boris could turn out to have been Jack the Ripper and he'd still get in by a landslide. He could probably run over the entire royal family – and some kittens – on a combine harvester and we'd still smile and tut and shrug our shoulders and say, 'Boris, eh! '
In short, he's bullet-proof. As Michael Cockerell's absorbing profile showed, he's a very canny, somewhat ruthless, operator who knows exactly what he's doing. And he's got charisma by the shed load.
As Boris said: "It is often useful to give the slight impression that you are deliberately pretending not to know what is going on, because the reality may be that you don't know what is going on, but people won't be able to tell the difference."
"He is the only feel-good politician we have in Britain," said Private Eye editor Ian Hislop. "Everyone else is far too busy being responsible . . . What Boris does is make people feel good."
You simply cannot help but like the guy. And he needs you to like him, too.
In the view of Ken Livingstone, twice defeated by Johnson in the London mayoral elections, that's his 'breathtaking weakness' as a politician. "He wants to be loved even by the people he's destroying," he said.
Others were slightly more cutting. As former press baron Conrad Black put it, he's a "sly fox disguised as a teddy bear".
But Max Hastings, Boris's former editor, has worries about where his former golden boy's irresistible rise will take him.
"Just supposing Boris became prime minister," he said.
"The idea of Boris's finger on the nuclear button. One day he'd get it mixed up with the button to call the maid."
Yes, but even then we'd watch through melting eyes the mushroom clouds appearing in the skies above us, and still we'd smile and tut and shrug our burning, vaporising shoulders and say, 'Boris, eh!'
Andrew Owen
