Boris Johnson was one of the first people I met after moving to Brussels in June 1989 to ‘report Europe’ for the Irish Independent.
If someone had told me then that he was a future British Prime Minister, I would have summoned the men in the white coats. Still, after a dysfunctional three years at the top of British politics, it turns out that my instincts weren’t that far off after all.
Boris Johnson has shown that he is a great man to get a big job. The shame was and is that, even on a good day, he was very bad at it.
With his blond hair and the studied “young misty” image of worn brogues, and permanently wrinkled pants and jacket, he certainly stood out from the crowd.
French was the language of the European Commission’s press room and his staged attempts to do so – despite a long stint at the European School in Brussels – sounded rather as if Peter Sellers deliberately failed to impersonate a Frenchman on screen.
The name helped—as it did throughout his career—and he was known at home as Al. Once in those early months, on a slow train journey to Luxembourg, we sat together and he gave me a brief history of his career to date.
It was his second job in journalism – he got the door in no time from his first post on the Time of London for being caught making up quotes. His second job in the Telegraph sent him straight to Brussels, where he started again in March 1989.
It was in stark contrast to my seven years of journalism by then, covering court, council, competitions and garden parties and slowly learning the trade.
It was also a miniature sketch of the English class system in action: Boris Johnson, an old boy of Eton and Oxford, rightly believed that the earth was his – and lo, it was.
Johnson started slowly in Brussels journalism and he was well received by senior people on the EU policy making committee who had worked with his father, Stanley Johnson, who had been a senior environmental expert there. Soon, however, he ‘spun’ anti-EU stories for the Europhobic Daily Telegramwhose editor, Max Hastings, was an avid mentor to him.
By the time he left Brussels in 1993 to work in London journalism and begin his slow foray into politics with the Conservative Party, he was a notorious figure, often for the wrong reasons, often trying to push the truth further than was reasonable. The then Tory leader and Prime Minister, John Major, hated him.
Johnson himself told a close mutual friend of ours that Major had written “not one of our people” next to his name on a list of potential candidates.
But Major was credited to history, and Johnson’s rise is now a matter of well-documented history. He had some political successes amid some spectacular lows. But the broad trajectory went up and down – including two rather successful stints as directly elected mayor of London, a job befitting his eclectic personality.
He relentlessly used Brexit to boost his career and get through as UK Prime Minister in place of the hapless Theresa May just under three years ago on July 24, 2019. His tenure began at a peak – aided by the then Taoiseach, Leo Varadkarhe forged a Brexit deal giving the north special trading status and won a large majority of some 80 seats in the UK general election in December 2019.
In the aftermath of all that, there was talk of “10 years of Boris Johnson”. But from then on things started to spiral out of control and eventually got completely out of hand.
In contrast to his term as mayor of London – where he was credited with hiring competent people and giving them their heads – he made some disastrous deals.
To elect Dominic Cummings as his chief of staff was particularly badly judged and caused a hat full of ongoing trouble as Cummings, after a bitter divorce, followed with a mission to settle the scores publicly, which continued until this week.
Johnson’s behavior towards the Brexit deal, which he negotiated, signed and publicly praised, was a total disgrace.
He went from completely dismissing fears about Northern Ireland’s special trade status to suddenly embracing it and using it to justify ignoring an international treaty.
The result is a looming trade war, alienation from its closest neighbors in the EU and very tense relations with the US. The sad thing here is the potentially serious consequences for Ireland, the north and the south.
Boris Johnson’s end to the top in British politics came suddenly as a result of a cabinet uprising following a series of scandals that publicly showed that he had a very faltering understanding of the difference between right and wrong.
More than thirty years ago, as a journalist in Brussels, this quality was already apparent.