Oh dear God. This four-part documentary, tracing the career arc of our blustering erstwhile prime minister (2019-22), has surely come too soon. Hasn’t it? Apart from anything else, can we be sure he will stay fallen? If ever a Lazarus were going to bounce ...
Anyway. Let us brace ourselves and start at the beginning of this sorry tale. His childhood – privileged but unhappy – is given its due without being asked to explain or excuse the man. The children grew up under the toxic influence of their womanising father, Stanley, whose abuse of Boris’s gentle, artistic mother is a matter of public record, and it sent her to the Maudsley hospital for several months after a breakdown. (Friends of Stanley said he was very sorry and it had happened only once.) The pair divorced and Boris was sent away to school.
From there, the talking heads are drawn increasingly from the worlds of journalism and politics, giving their accounts of Johnson young, old and in-between. There is his Oxford contemporary Toby Young – a hanger-on to the triumvirate of Johnson, David Cameron and Michael Gove that would soon bestride Britain like a colossus bent on spitting on the country from a great height for as long as it could – testifying to Johnson’s early and obvious ambition. There is Petronella Wyatt, with whom he would have an affair while they worked at the Spectator, avowing that, beneath “the bumbling act”, the real Johnson is shy, vulnerable (“there’s almost an innocence to him”) and friendless. (She counts here as one of his champions, by the way.) His biographer Andrew Gimson remembers Johnson trying to buy him out of writing the book – a comic take would be fine, said the subject, “but nothing could be more damaging than a book that told the truth about me”.
What must it be like to live a life in which you are just that bit too intelligent, that bit too self-aware, to let the mask eat the face entirely and find some peace? These are questions to ponder (and to care less and less about) as the detritus of people and country destroyed by Johnson piles up around him. The documentary makes its way meticulously through his lies and machinations as a journalist, a politician and a man. I know we lived through them, but it’s quite something to see them strung together sequentially (and consequentially).
Remember the time he became the MP for Henley and told his constituents he would step down from his role as a Telegraph columnist, having told the Telegraph that he wouldn’t stand for parliament? A bagatelle, my dears. On we go towards Brexit and him coming out for leave despite being a longtime pro-EU figure. The Brussels-is-mad stuff he wrote? That was just jokes. Clickbait. Gimson calls him a dramatist rather than a journalist: fact-checking, or telling the truth, as some would call it, is for pious bores. His then-deputy, Sonia Purnell, remembers him geeing himself up as his deadlines approached by shouting at the yucca plant on his desk, so he could get himself in the right mood for another diatribe. Together with Gove, he rode the red leave bus all the way to victory.
The series nicely embeds these discrete horrors – the other two episodes available for review take us through to the unbelievable foreign secretary years and up to his installation as prime minister – against the wider background of how he got away with it and how he became a brand so beloved by the public (we are cast back by cringeworthy footage of the Have I Got News for You?/mayoralty/Olympics/zipwire days) . He was the first recognisable character we had had after years of Blairite automata, who stayed on message and just got on with the boring business of running the country to the detriment of as few people as they could manage. Crazily calm days, children. You wouldn’t believe. Johnson’s “gaffes” made him seem like a truth-teller. His splutter-bumbling made him look so guileless that it couldn’t possibly be an act – who would want to look that stupid? At least two affairs hitting the press only made him seem more fun, all of a piece with his charming unpredictability. And so the stage was set.
Did we deserve it? Was he the political equivalent of the Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters, summoned by unthinking dreamers and wrecking everything? Has the fall been as painful for him as the rise has made life for so many? And, above all, will he bounce back? And who will help us if he does?
• The Rise and Fall of Boris Johnson is on Channel 4
