Boris Johnson, the postmodern classicist

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published 26 July 2019

Ulysses is back in Ithaca, vengeful from the Trojan shore. Chief after chief lies expired at every wound: Rory Stewart, Andrea Leadsom, Jeremy Hunt, and of course Theresa May herself. Time for a beano or jamboree.

This is more or less how we are supposed to think about Boris Johnson's election as leader of the new Conservative government in Britain. Here's the loquacious, haphazardly dressed Old Etonian who says he's going to lead the United Kingdom out of the European Union and into a golden age on the strength of a few classical allusions and some vintage Mitford slang. Sure, he's said and written some truly appalling things, including dozens, if not hundreds, of quips about race that cannot be printed in a family publication. But he doesn't really mean it. And he's so funny!

It is possible to be of two minds about Boris. (Like Liberace or Cher, he is mononymous but not monogamous.) He is easily one of the most arresting and entertaining political speakers of my lifetime, a master of sprezzatura who goes out of his way to look disheveled and sound unprepared whenever he gives a speech. He is certainly the only significant politician of our time who could have taken part at an event like this one with the Cambridge classicist Mary Beard or gotten away with telling the host of a radio program that if he were marooned on a desert island he would spend the rest of his life translating Homer.

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This is not to suggest that Boris is in any straightforward sense a throwback to an earlier era in Tory politics, when members of Harold Macmillan's cabinet would amuse themselves by composing extemporaneous Latin epigrams. When Super Mac recited Aeschylus to himself in the trenches of World War I while up to his ankles in the blood of his friends, he was witnessing the death of a classical civilization. Johnson's engagement with the classics, like that of his cabinet colleague Jacob Rees-Mogg with medieval history, is fundamentally postmodern: jokey, teasing, knowingly over-the-top, effortlessly casual — just a wheeze, really.

This is also not to say that he never means it. One of the most touching and genuinely human things I have ever heard from a politician was Boris's awed response upon visiting the bells in the Shwedagon Pagoda in Burma. Seemingly oblivious to everyone around him, including the film crew, he began muttering lines from Kipling's "Road to Mandelay," much to the horror of the British ambassador who was escorting him.

This was not the first time Boris's words got him into trouble. Just last year he was voted off the board of Classics For All, a charity that seeks to promote the teaching of Greek and Latin literature in state schools, after writing in his newspaper column that women who wear burqas "go around looking like letter boxes." For a few weeks, conventional wisdom suggested that his political career was finished.

Missing amid all the outcry was the fact that Boris was actually arguing against the bans on the wearing of burqas in France, Belgium, and Denmark. This ability to appease reactionaries without actually endorsing their views has always been central to his appeal. Despite his reputation as a man of the far right, Boris has insisted throughout his career that mass immigration was a good thing for Britain. Many years ago he described the London of his youth as "monochrome," a place with "Terrible stale gusts of beer and desiccated bleached white dog turds everywhere and old copies of Mayfair [a pornographic magazine] in bushes in the park." In 2008, he surprised many of his American admirers by endorsing Barack Obama: "Unlike the current occupant of the White House, he has no difficulty in orally extemporising a series of grammatical English sentences, each containing a main verb." How many other supporters of our 44th president could also have written the following only six years earlier?

It is said that the Queen has come to love the Commonwealth, partly because it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag-waving picaninnies; and one can imagine that Blair, twice victor abroad but enmired at home, is similarly seduced by foreign politeness. They say he is shortly off to the Congo. No doubt the AK47s will fall silent, and the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh, and the tribal warriors will all break out in Watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down in his big white British taxpayer-funded bird.

On other issues he has been less consistent. These days Johnson describes himself as a "social liberal" and someone who is not a "serious practicing Christian." When it comes to same-sex marriage, for example, he says that he fails to see "what the fuss is about." This was not always the case. Less than two decades ago in the pages of The Spectator he was denouncing "Labour's appalling agenda, encouraging the teaching of homosexuality in schools." (Boris has a genuine nasty streak, too. He once advised a newspaper editor who had commissioned an article he found less than flattering to "F— off and die.")

I think these are in some sense naïve questions. Boris's rhetoric is not some kind of foreign tissue grafted on top of his mythical "real" personality. But his ability to put his words in service of any cause or position — from the Iraq War, which he keenly supported, to environmentalism to the relative merits of Hellenic civilization — should give all of us pause, earnest proponents of Brexit most of all. It is not obvious that he believes in anything in particular except self-aggrandizement and having a laugh.

Matthew Walther is a national correspondent at The Week. His work has also appeared in First Things, The Spectator of London, The Catholic Herald, National Review, and other publications. He is currently writing a biography of the Rev. Montague Summers. He is also a Robert Novak Journalism Fellow.