Fourteen years ago the mayor of London walked into a pub that did not exist, drank a pint with no alcohol in it, and charmed an actress disguised as a landlady.
Boris Johnson was making a charismatic guest appearance on EastEnders in 2009. Here was peak Johnson. He was secure in his mask: pink-faced, boyish, grinning. If you want to remember what made Johnson so appealing — and that can be difficult — find and watch this clip.
“I do so admire a man who dedicates his entire life to serving society,” whimpered Peggy Mitchell, played by Barbara Windsor. She practically melts at the sight of him. I’m not sure she was acting.
Johnson was made by television. His return to the medium with GB News, announced on Friday, is a fitting capstone to a personal narrative that no longer makes much sense. The details are bewildering. The scholarship boy, haunted by Winston Churchill, who vowed to be world king. The Oxford Union president trapped inside an impression of Bertie Wooster. The journalist with an inexact relationship to objective reality. Marriages; mistresses; mayoralty. Takes Britain out of the European Union by accident — whoops! A wretched plague-time prime minister, assassinated by his own colleagues, in an orgy of chief-killing so violent it may have permanently undermined the Tory party.
Johnson, like Mussolini, Churchill, and Theodore Roosevelt, was a print journalist who became a politician. But television, not dead-tree media, was where he whetted his image, flattered the nation, and won his fame. He never would have been prime minister without the box.
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The influence of television on our public life is so pervasive that it is barely visible any more. For decades the British have understood themselves, primarily, through TV — as Neil Postman, the media theorist, put it, “how television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly staged”.
The line between politics and entertainment was always permeable. Gore Vidal used to call Ronald Reagan an “indolent cue-card reader” for a reason. And the young Churchill understood that “given an audience there is no act too daring or too noble. Without the gallery things are different.” He knew that if he was to become a politician, he would need to be an entertainer.
Johnson knew this too. When he made his ascent, television was the only political gallery that mattered. A stylishly endearing personality was superior to any policy. His timing was fortunate. In the Noughties, as Britain became more divided and unequal, television grew ever more twee. A new upper-middle-class ethic of faux-amateurism dominated programming. Posh, aspirational fantasy figures were everywhere. Boarding-school types hijacked the culture: head girl Nigella Lawson; hockey captain Clare Balding; spirited prankster Jeremy Clarkson; green-fingered Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall chuckling in the vegetable patch; and the frivolous class clown — Johnson. People did not want to think too hard about politics. They wanted to mock it, and Johnson was perfectly positioned to orchestrate their laughter.
That atmosphere melted away about the time ITV stopped broadcasting Downton Abbey. Mainstream television strives to be egalitarian these days, and people no longer want to think about politics at all, or even joke about it.
So Johnson returns to a changed media landscape. GB News might be seen as the controversial agri-business chewing up its fields. The channel is two years old and ran at a loss of £30 million in its first year. Its programming is a weirdly compelling mixture of straight reporting, political pantomime and splenetic opinion. Alongside Nigel Farage, among its presenters are several Conservative politicians: Lee Anderson, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Philip Davies and Esther McVey. They are likely to be on lucrative salaries. You might be able to guess what attracted Johnson to the channel.
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That money may incur more costs than Johnson realises. His ideal programme would probably involve an hour of him staring into a mirror muttering Virgil. On GB News, where he has promised to air his “unvarnished views”, he may be given a harder ride.
Johnson’s fellow presenter Neil Oliver greeted his arrival with a minute-and-a-half rant, where he accused the former prime minister of enabling “death and economic destruction on an unmeasured scale” during the pandemic. John Cleese, who has a new Sunday show on the channel, said “he can hardly believe” they were giving a “serial liar” a platform. Barbara Windsor is no longer around to pull a pint for him.
Brexit briefly made Johnson a hero of the British right. But his “unvarnished views” are those of a thoughtless metro-liberal. He likes migration, LGBT rights and the occasional war in a far-off land. He affects a sunny optimism that is at odds with real life. This year his former political secretary, the MP Danny Kruger, said that much of Johnson’s politics came from “a real reluctance to alienate people he might be having dinner with”.
Alienating such people is exactly why GB News exists. Its audience is deeply sceptical of mainstream politicians, which is how an anti-politician like Farage became its biggest star. After betraying almost every cause and ally he ever had, it is fitting that Johnson is setting himself up for the same fate. In the old days television made him. On GB News it’s much more likely to break him.
Will Lloyd is a commissioning editor and writer at The New Statesman
