does abuse beget abuse?
A couple of months ago I posted a missive concerning The Donald being able to neither choose his friends nor family as both had royally rounded upon him in deeply disturbing and revealing exposes. Therefore, just to show there’s no transatlantic bias I feel duty-bound to comment on Tom Bower’s recently published ‘Boris Johnson: The Gambler’, which sets out to throw some light on why the PM is like he is. And to get to the nub, it’s all because of his father, Stanley.
A lifelong pal of Boris, political biographer Bower unflinchingly casts Johnson Snr as the villain of the piece. He is shown to be an absent father, uninterested in any of his children other than to impart the classical family motto of “Nil refert non multum effect” (Nothing matters very much and most things matter not at all); a serially unfaithful and violent husband who punched his wife, Charlotte, so hard he broke her nose before having her hospitalised for eight months through mental trauma; a professional parasite who, unable to hold a job down for any length of time, shamelessly sponged off any and all; a craven narcissist constantly seeking out the spotlight, happy to sit on the coat-tails of his offspring if it brings him the attention he believes he warrants. Ouch.
Boris Johnson as victim, no less. As Charlotte herself comments in later life “I have often thought that his being ‘world king’ was a wish to make himself unhurtable, invincible, somehow safe from the pains of your mother disappearing.” His long-suffering second wife, Marina Wheeler, allegedly never held back in chastising Stanley for her husband’s many failings and sins.
In a nod to objectivism, Bower does concede that in his first (and only? – ed) career of journalism he exaggerated to the point of lies and make-believe but contests they were accurate in spirit if not detail; that his ‘grinning picaninnies with watermelon smiles’ prose was nothing more than the satirisation of our neo-colonialism past. More recent pandemic gaffs are placed firmly at the door of unqualified and incompetent Whitehall civil servants and provide further proof for the radical upheaval his soothsayer, The Dom, demands. His Brexit position, resting for months on a knife-edge, was eventually jettisoned when it no longer suited his ambitions. With regards to his personal misdemeanours, the author is marginally less complicit and highlights the many affairs, downright lies, broken vows and unpaid debts that have proved a constant companion to his modus operandi.
Throughout all of these the PM’s Tigger-like ability to irrepressibly bounce-back in an even stronger, more publically visible role seemingly defies logic but it is here that a most-telling remark is made. When Boris was promoted to the editorship of The Spectator “applications for employment bereft of nepotism or patronage were automatically binned”. Has social privilege and class nepotism got him to where he is today: you scratch my blue-blooded back and I’ll scratch yours? The actions of a callous and feckless father perhaps go some way to highlighting what makes the PM tick, as it does Trump over the pond, but fail to ask the bigger question of why we tolerate, and even reward it? If abuse does indeed beget abuse the eldest child appears to want to take it out on the rest of us! The man is laid bare of moral fibre, belief and ideal.
The other question that remains teasingly unanswered is, in the infamous ‘handbags’ elevator encounter between the then Chancellor, Gideon Osborne, and our very own London Lord Mayor, who came off worse? Gorgeous George as Beyoncé’s little sis and B-Jay Z is a fisticuffs I would pay to see!
