Being a brilliant columnist won’t make you a brilliant politician.
As a columnist you’re paid to proffer opinion. You’re expected to have a point of view.
The best are those who have opinions that chime with their audience. Better still, if they can combine that with providing entertainment, making their readers chortle as well as fume. Boris Johnson was an outstandingly good columnist, a terrific writer who had a smart, often amusing turn of phrase. He was able to turn that to effect also when hosting Have I Got News For Youand making rumbustious speeches as Mayor of London.
Being a good columnist does not necessarily make for a good Prime Minister. As a commentator you write the words, send them and switch to the next column. What you can’t do is to repeat the same theme constantly. Editors don’t like it and will tell you to think of something else. If occasionally you want to contradict what you wrote previously, that’s fine, so long as the reversal is explained. You’re human and humans make mistakes; people, your followers, understand that.
Being a Prime Minister is not like that. It’s not about supplying a laugh, encouraging someone to think, giving them something they can quote to family and friends. It concerns seeking their endorsement, ensuring they believe in you sufficiently to put a cross against your name and to do so again. You must win their trust, which is several levels beyond dashing off 1,000 words and heading off to the bar for a glass of vino. You can ‘t say one thing and do something else; you can’t make U-turns; you must be clear and consistent and decisive, always. Often, too, you have to convey the unpopular and you must not back away.
When he was Mayor, I interviewed Johnson. It was for Management Today and was about, yes, his management style. “I read all my stuff. That over there,” he said, pointing to a scruffy cycle rucksack, “is my mayoral ‘red box’. I carry it on my bike and read it when I get home. And I get up very early. I go for a run slowly, along the canal, then I have a quick skid through the newspapers. By now, it’s 5.30am. I write a few thousand words and I study some Aristotle. It’s 6.30 and I turn to the files.”
He was joking about the times, they weren’t quite so early in reality, but he said, “I look at all my speeches for the day. They’re all blocked out. Everything in my diary is colour coded – green says it’s an ordinary meeting, red means I’m performing. I usually make two or three speeches a day – my diary is full of big red blocks.” As to the content, “I like to have an idea of what I’m going to say. I do my thinking on the bike on my way in.”
He was able as Mayor to still be Boris. In one year, I heard him deliver the same speech four times. It was the one about how, because of the number of French citizens living in London, he could claim to be mayor of the fourth biggest city in France. On each occasion, he would tag on a different ending relevant to the event. He ruffled his hair, galloped through, raised smiles, then made an unlikely bridge to whatever organisation was hosting. The most bizarre was a charity supporting literacy among school pupils in disadvantaged areas. He suddenly went, from being “bigger than the mayor of Bordeaux” to pausing, and saying “reading, terribly important, that’s why we’re here, children should learn to read.” The crowd looked bemused, some shook their heads, a few said they’d heard the first part elsewhere. Most shrugged and after he’d finished, said, “that’s Boris”, and carried on chatting.
Opinion writer and important as it is, Mayor of London, are not the Prime Minister. The final paragraph of the Management Today article was that Johnson is “a slightly strange leader to have for the nation’s capital during an era of grey austerity. But in times when people need their spirits lifted, he’s far better at raising downcast heads than, say, George Osborne or Vince Cable. Boris brings colour and warmth. People like him. How much further could he go? Could he speak for the post-industrial North and Midlands?”
Now here he is, having won an election on the back of telling the same North and Midlands his government would set about “levelling up”. It went down a storm on the doorstep, in constituencies that usually voted Labour. Folk would moan about the quality of their lives and make the inevitable comparison with more prosperous areas, and Johnson would promise, directly, that he would sort it out.
He first introduced “levelling up” in his Tory leadership campaign, using the metaphor of an internal combustion engine: “We are somehow achieving Grand Prix speeds, but without firing on all cylinders.” Classic columnist; sharp, easily grasped.
Except, as with “Get Brexit Done”, moving from keyboard to putting policy into practice is difficult – just look at the consequences for Northern Ireland of leaving the EU.
Johnson described to me how he had one week working as a trainee management consultant for LEK Partnership – “try as I might, I could not look at an overhead projection of a growth profit matrix and stay conscious” before turning to journalism. I am not saying we want management consultants to lead us, God forbid, but I do wish Johnson would look a bit more closely at the overhead projection and try and stay conscious.
I can relate to Johnson’s career path; I too had a short stint as a lawyer before becoming a journalist. What I did not do thereafter was go into politics and become Prime Minister. I can file this column and move on. Johnson, as he and the country are finding out, no longer has that option.