Boris is like a great novel without a plot

How can something that seems so very right, feel so very wrong?

That, I think, is one way of viewing the looming coronation of Boris Johnson. Sunday night’s leadership debate on Channel 4 fell flat without the leading elephant in the room. It felt like they were preparing the Tory party for life after Boris rather than mounting a serious challenge to him in the here and now.

Yet Johnson and inevitability have always gone together. “Character is destiny” he was quick to remind readers at the beginning of his hagiography of Churchill. It certainly feels likely that Stanley Johnson once looked at his infant son and declared: “There is a future leader of our country”. It has been said about Boris Johnson since he first appeared on Tory radars, probably the moment he transitioned to long trousers. establishment credentials he has in abundance or, as he might phrase it, great dolloping spades of the stuff that bear no resemblance to the cheap Poundshop plant food sprinkled around the Marxist-Leninist tubers of Mr Corbyn’s allotment.

Johnson also has that kind of intellectualism that’s still cherished for reasons that are as deep as our cultural identity. He is of that breed apart: chaps who carry lumps of nuclear material with their pipe tobacco, wear a boater whilst wrestling a camel, and who go to sleep at night with a loaded herringbone suit beneath their pillow. While the rest of the world are learning to code deep-learning networks that will steal our souls, the British are about to elevate a classical swot who can recite Homer to an insufferable number of lines in Ancient Greek. Not that anybody can explain why that impresses as it does. Is it a good education or a party trick? Excellent memory or an abundance of brain cells just crying out for a gnarly geopolitical problem to solve?

There has always been this riddle at the heart of British intellectual life, around a nation proud of its empiricist roots, where pragmatic solutions take precedent over abstractions. Cold and logical we might be, but we still labour under the superstitious belief that good breeding erupts periodically in once-in-a-generation instances of greatness. It’s the stuff of great people from great families that seem overrepresented in our collective history; a reminder of the days of the Huxleys, Mitfords, and the Bonham-Carters. They’re the families that the Rees-Moggs and Johnsons would like to emulate. They are our history, as old as the Bible itself.

The reality is that very little remains of that properly intellectual life that did flourish for a period around the two wars when necessity unlocked the latent potential of the English aristocracy. Johnson is a parody of Bloomsbury, Bletchley Park, and Biggin Hill. He is less about a bloodline than a comedic line. He is a reduction of golden age virtues; a beautifully crafted, semi-sentient, self-constructed codex of all the great resonant tropes of Englishness. He would make a fine detective had he emerged from the pen of Agatha Christie to bumble around Great Gnashington-Upon-Teeth, occasionally falling into the village pond but emerging with the murder weapon lodged in his upper haystack. He is the sterling chap to whom Bertie lends his swankiest cufflinks before realising he needs them for his Aunt Agatha’s roller disco. He is that sweating Pollyanna from the ministry, found propping up the bar and a military junta at the back end of some Graham Greene novel.

It’s why the commentariat are left scratching their collective bald spot as they ask the question: people know that Johnson is useless, don’t they? But of course, they know. We all know. It’s just that reality is less fun than fiction and Johnson understood, early enough to make it his life’s work, that we all seek fun rather than the cold difficulties that arise from Reason.

He might not be alone, of course. Imagining a world into being could well be a peculiar British condition. There’s certainly enough compelling evidence in the field of Tory leadership nominees to make that argument. If politics were guided by anything other than some “grand narrative” rooted in class, social as well as professional, we perhaps wouldn’t have a list that reads like the plot to a John le Carré novel, filled with representatives of those positions that have always provided the gravity to British affairs: lawyers like Raab, journalists like Gove, bankers like Javid, or mysterious men of good standing like Rory Stewart who can lecture eloquently about T.S. Eliot as they hip-throw you through the nearest jihadist.

There is very little of modern British life in there. Esther McVey, perhaps, is a modern stereotype of the self-hating working class; a Liverpudlian who has made her career beyond the city, only to use her hometown when she needs it but she appears to loathe it as much as many there loathe her. She has now been eliminated of course. But it’s Matt Hancock and Jeremy Hunt who more properly are the faces of the modern party; one a walking talking phone app and the other from the world of business with his fingers in technological solutions. Beyond them, nothing about the Tory roster represents the digital age. Few, you imagine, can speak in SQL or know how to order a latte in C++.

Certainly not Johnson. His eloquence is older, grander, more Churchillian but only because he learned his craft from the master. Yet it was more than craft that made Churchill great. Like many great Edwardians, he was shaped by wars. Johnson, shaped more by turf battles on Fleet Street, has no battle scars. He has tricks and trifles. We are only impressed because we want to be impressed and, moreover, expect to be impressed, from the way he makes clearing his throat sound like Winchester Cathedral warming up to bowl some gentle off-spin, to the way he wins his arguments by skirting around the facts with spontaneous acts of gratuitous wordplay.

Let’s have no serious debates about Europe, people! Let me tell you the one about those tulip-munching EU commissars with their mean keratinous elbows deep in bowls of Austrian goulash and Scandinavian GUACAMOLE…

Very little of it makes sense, even when words are launched like cannonballs across Trafalgar. He reaches for effects rather than for meanings. We should also know better than to fall for it. Yet fall for it we do. His bombast about “trots” and “jelly” has dominated Tory politics for decades, when serious conservative thinkers have languished on the backbenches or even worse, on late night BBC political chat shows. We should be wiser and think of Johnson as something other than “Boris”, but the word virus has already infected the system. He is the late period Bill Murray, trying his hand at serious roles but leaving audiences cracking up at all the wrong moments.

That, ultimately, is the problem with nearly all fictions. They raise our hopes right up to the point they disappoint us. There’s no better example than Churchill. Great in summary, vulnerable through biography. Johnson is even more blessed when examined in precis, flawed in the longer form. He has been lucky to be on the periphery where those flaws have been diminished. The problem now is that we are about to elevate a great character written around a hollow centre. He is Wodehouse’s style without Wodehouse’s plot; the well-polished novel without a theme. His challenge, ever greater than our own, is ridding himself of “Boris” and finding something substantial to fill the place where soon there will stand a prime minister.