The candidate was Carrie Symonds. Unknown to his advisers, Johnson had become close to her, and around this time, one friendly MP walked in on the pair in “a compromising situation” in his House of Commons office. Undaunted and unembarrassed, Johnson persisted with the idea of making Carrie head of staff, calling in Zac Goldsmith to offer support. Only after a (named) aide threatened to resign did Johnson drop it.

If ever a book invited lazy thinking from journalists, then First Lady: Intrigue at the Court of Carrie and Boris Johnson is it. We know what 76-year-old Ashcroft thinks about a lot of things, so it is easy to assume that the billionaire won’t be a fan of Carrie, who is very much a modern, liberal, green Tory (though they share an interest in animal welfare). The book on David Cameron that appeared under his and Isabel Oakeshott’s name, though very readable, was a piece of score-settling by a man who felt his beneficence to the Party had gone under-appreciated.

He remains something of an outsider so, one might think, this new title is presumably another piece of axe-grinding. Plus, given that many of the juicy bits have already appeared in the newspaper serialisation, why bother with the book itself? And evidently some will object to the imbalance of an idiosyncratic rich man examining the life of a woman half his age. One reviewer became “absolutely furious” at Ashcroft referring to Carrie, then 31, as a “young lady” in the introduction; for her, the narrative never recovered.

There are parts that made me squeamish, and certainly some of the anecdotes from her early years feel slightly invasive, inevitably in a biography of this type. But to disqualify Ashcroft because of an imputed attitude to women is short-sighted. And to say his book is a misogynistic hit job just isn’t good enough.

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The fake feminism of Carrie Johnson

By Tanya Gold

The days when he would use his wealth to elevate him above libel laws and ventilate nonsense about David Cameron putting his penis in a dead pig’s mouth, or his wife having an affair with one of her security people, seem to be behind him. (Francis Elliott and I checked the latter rumour when co-writing the first biography of Cameron and established it was untrue, but it was still doing the rounds seven years later and Ashcroft and Oakeshott reported it as gossip.)

And the result of Ashcroft’s, shall we say, maturing as a political biographer should not be ignored.[1.  I helped in an indirect and minor way with research for his book on Jacob Rees-Mogg.] Can anyone seriously claim that the story of a Foreign Secretary trying to sign up his new girlfriend for a job for which she is not qualified is not in the public interest? Or that the story is made up? There are too many sources for the book to be dismissed as a hatchet job. True, many remain unnamed, but that should deter no one. It would be naïve to expect otherwise with so fevered a government still in power. So unless Ashcroft has invented them, which is pretty much inconceivable, there is plenty in this volume that deserves to be taken seriously.

The picture that emerges is of someone with more strong opinions than her husband, but no less unhappiness in early life or, later, determination to achieve her goals. Her commitment to green issues, admirable to my mind, is a constant thread. Ashcroft applauds her bravery in waiving anonymity in the case of sex criminal John Worboys, who drugged her in the back of a taxi, her campaign against his release from prison and her willingness to discuss her 2021 miscarriage. He cites her charm, what fun she can be and ability to get on with influential journalists, which is indispensable in PR.

Her early life, financially comfortable rather than lavish, makes for sad reading. She is distant from her father, a journalist called Matthew Symonds, who had another family. The product of an extra-marital affair, she attended two top private schools in London and was brought up as an only child by her mother, Josephine McAfee. She studied drama at Warwick University, spent time in PR and then, after meeting Zac Goldsmith’s cousin at a party, began working for Zac and subsequently for the Conservative Party. She became a special adviser to John Whittingdale and then Sajid Javid before, at 29, becoming the Tories’ communications director.

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By Graeme Archer

But in Westminster she is not universally liked. We know something of this from Dominic Cummings, never one for deft understatement, but the evidence compiled here goes well beyond any campaign he could have organised. Her shortcomings as a colleague are rehearsed at some length (one colleague on the campaign trail called her “utterly, utterly useless”), as is her lack of interest in policy and her enthusiasm for holidays and smart restaurants. She once described the job of being Tatler’s political editor as her dream job.

There are numerous stories of Carrie being hard to work with and of her desire to get on (no more a crime in a woman than a man, of course). She even has her very own expenses scandal, in which she used the names of junior colleagues when claiming taxis. One source said: “She’s lucky she didn’t end up in more serious trouble… It was misuse of CCHQ funds. She used the names of those just starting out on their careers. That was unforgivable”. Whether the cabs were for her private use, or to meet one of the two married Tory MPs (one was Johnson, the other for some reason remains unnamed) with whom she had a relationship, we may never know.

Normally personality traits in a Prime Minister’s spouse would matter only to the PM, but according to Ashcroft this one seeks to involve herself in areas where she is under-qualified and insert her allies into positions of influence. She appears to have been largely responsible for Allegra Stratton’s ill-fated hiring, for instance. Carrie is also portrayed as remarkably thin-skinned where media criticism is concerned, especially for someone so familiar with the transience of the news trade; the PM apparently spends inordinate amounts of time smoothing her ruffled feathers.

Carrie’s defenders will point to the sacking of John Whittingdale and Henry Newman, two of her supporters, as evidence of her lack of influence. But that seems to have been the result of one of the PM’s knee-jerk responses to criticism, following Lord Frost’s public suggestion that he refresh things by removing the woke crowd. Clearly, there is a body of opinion that disdains the greenery-by-stealth approach that she embodies (and which a braver PM would embrace). Either way, Carrie is scarcely the “private individual who plays no role in Government” that her spokesperson claims.

And there is plenty of evidence that Johnson, who hates confrontation, went to extraordinary lengths to avoid rousing his wife’s temper. He would beg aides to help him keep her happy, at one point asking if someone could be given a job title without actually doing the job, just so it looked as if that person performed that role. Was this another Boris joke? Conceivably, but that can’t excuse everything.

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Test article

By Aris Roussinos

Those who know Johnson well know him to be an organisational disaster. (I’m told his diplomatic protection team often have to remind him to do up his flies.) The expert in mitigating his chaos used to be his former wife Marina. Carrie, perhaps because she is of a more recent generation than Marina, apparently sees no reason why she should mother her husband. As one of Ashcroft’s sources says: “When the marriage [with Marina] ended, he lost his domestic support, the steadying influence, and he traded that in for a demanding girlfriend and strong disapproval from his children”. Even Prime Ministers are entitled to private lives, but are we really to believe these details have no effect on how the country is run?

Without the research that went into First Lady, we would be guessing — trying to join the dots between Cummings blogs, drip-drip news of Covid parties, flat refurbishments and Johnson’s pinball machine decision-making. What the book lacks, though, is the case for the defence. There are few voices supporting her, beyond that of her former boss John Whittingdale. Carrie refused to cooperate with the book, sticking to the “not a public person” line, when even her much-admired Tatler calls her “the most powerful woman in Britain”. Perhaps if she had engaged, or encouraged friends to engage, she could have neutralised the accusations and conveyed a more favourable impression of herself.

Nevertheless, this book offers an account of where Carrie came from, what she wants, what makes her tick and, most important, the influence she has on our PM.

The Tories were here, last week, for Conference, at the height of their uncannily revived powers.

Priti and Michael, Rishi and Nadine, were spreading their wide wings in Manchester Central, the singed remnant of some 19th century NASDAQ, now a corporate events space. The place was choking with Conservative slogans and branding, and boosterisms; but were they anything more than fresh enamel licked on the same old Westminster banger?

I was here because I wanted to watch the political body get pressed by conspiring lobbyists and cringing public affairs officers. I wanted to understand the people who will rule over us for the next decade. Had they really become the “people’s party”? Were they really more Northern, more working class, more in touch with basic realities? Did “levelling up” Britain mean anything at all? And did they really know what to do with that sweet majority, with all that delicious power?

If they were the people’s party, then it was ostensibly for people like Greg. I found him palely loitering around the exhibits one morning in a three-piece tweed suit. Both he and the suit appeared new. “Personally,” Greg said, “I’m nineteen.” He was from Harlow, Essex. (The 20th most deprived area in England.) His mother was a teaching assistant. His father was a drug dealer. He had never been to one of these before.

Conservatism gave him an identity. A way of defining himself contrarily. He said he’d hated school. Hated his Left-wing teachers. Hated, he admitted, his Left-wing home. He was utterly sincere. The new Conservatism had offered him enough to make the journey to Manchester. There were probably more Gregs in the party than there had been for a generation.

Did the Gregs have a champion? It was supposed to be Michael Gove. But the Minister for Levelling Up had pitched his tent so large that he was lost in it. Gove’s levelling up agenda was too wide, too vague. What did it mean to say that he wanted to “ensure people live their best life”? Promising everything would be another way of doing nothing.

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All hail Good King Boris

By Maurice Glasman

But at least Gove sounded cheerful. All of them did. “Now”, Rishi Sunak posted on Instagram, “is the time to show them that our plan will deliver.” In their speeches and their digital branding the ministers rolled together many different optimisms. To be a ranking member of this government was to be present with vigour and joyfulness.

Let the other side talk about fuel shortages. Let Dom talk about trolleys. Let the Telegraph spit about taxes. After Covid, after Brexit, it was time for peace. It was the moment to say, as Nadine Dorries did — against all sense, all reason, and all justice — that No Time to Die was the “best Bond ever”. None of it needed to be true.

The only statesman-in-embryo for miles around Manchester was the Tees Valley Mayor Ben Houchen. A plausibly blue-collar, municipal Tory, reminiscent of Joe Chamberlain in the specificity of his vision, and in the way he embodied a sense of place.

He talked poetically and pointedly in a flat, steady Geordie voice at a fringe event one evening. Now was the time, he said; the Conservatives could rebuild and restore the North. He described a radiant future, where green tech brought the industrial revolution full circle, back to Teesside, back to Newcastle, Darlington, Stockton. Houchen’s revolution went backwards to reclaim the future. The superabundance, the rewarded greed, the hard materialism, and the worldly ambition of mid-19th century England would be born again. History could be forced. You had to push against it. Ben Houchen was doing this in Tees Valley. He had cajoled and eked away until industrial jobs were returned to Hartlepool and Redcar. But this time the revolution would not be iron squealing on iron, it would not turn country boys into broken factory hands, or pollute the rivers, or poison the sky black. These industries would be green, pure.

I was taken along by him, briefly. But he was only a mayor.

I met other Gregs. Four late teenage, working-class Tories from — rub your eyes — Liverpool. Owen Jones buzzed around them with a microphone, his mouth slack, bewildered, bitter. (The four did not make it into Jones’ “behind the scenes” conference video report.) Oh we hate him, we hate him, we hate him, the four boys said as they approached Jones. “But still,” one whispered, “we must get a selfie with him.” I asked them who their favourite Prime Minister was.

“Thatcher,” one said, “Thatcher forever.”

It stunned: Thatcher still burned above Conservative politics, charging her imitators with warmth and light. What else could explain Liz Truss? The new Foreign Secretary dressed like Thatcher, snubbed and blunted enemies like Thatcher, and started, whenever I watched her speak, to look like Thatcher too. Truss’s events were the most queued for. The members were pilgrims shuffling towards a splinter of the true Eighties cross. Truss offered them sacraments of fiscal rigour, delivered with leathery personal firmness. For in the pits of their hearts, the members didn’t want a big, caring, doing state — where levelling up was purportedly taking them. They didn’t want to go there. They certainly didn’t want to pay for it either. What they wanted was a dominatrix to lovingly roast the Government’s flab off with a blowtorch.

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The Tories created their own worst enemy

By Mary Harrington

These were the Tories who went, like Truss, longest into the night, after the daytime, orderly, brisk conference had been washed aside by the 6pm tide of expensed alcohol and gossip.

This conference happened in padded back rooms, invite-only suite parties, and long carpeted ballrooms in the bowels of the hotel. It was stranger, and darker, than the day was. Every night there was a sense of homecoming: after the election, which was never properly celebrated by the party; after the lockdowns, which made so many of them unhappy and uneasy.

The bar fizzed. Boys younger than tadpoles dragged their seats near to enthroned junior ministers; howlingly drunk princes screamed for the right kind of bread; dazed spads slid off chairs; rumours were exchanged: sexual escapades, job promotions, if Carrie was even allowed in her husband’s suite, more sexual escapades, and whether the Prime Minister will use his big speech to raise the minimum wage. (He will not.) And at every table, a suit lapel stuck with ironic lake blue badges that said “Tory Scum”.

A few knew how weird it was to be the “people’s party.” “I’d rather be the party of the working man than the party of the rich,” one of the princes had roared. “But I still want to be very well off.”

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Centrism always fails

By Will Lloyd

Would all those pristine first-time Conservative voters like what they saw at this conference, if they’d been here? They would have liked Houchen, maybe even voted for him. They would have put some chicken nuggets in the oven for Greg. Perhaps they would have spotted Liz Truss’s talons. Would they have noticed where real power in the party lay? Trollope writes somewhere that people who take an interest in politics should “not be desirous of peeping behind the scenes”. They wouldn’t like what they discovered.

At the top of the party was what a bad columnist would call the liberal metropolitan elite. The enduring sentimental stereotype of Toryism in England is utterly misleading. It’s still the rah-rah, port-sinking, organ music playing, red melton fabric, Oxbridge, Brideshead, “young fogey”. They are extinct. Kaputt. That Boris plays this character sometimes leads to confusion. The Left think they are fighting Simon Heffer, when they’re actually fighting Henry Newman.

The leading factions in the party are as distant from people in Redcar as the Blairites became. For now they are simply better at patting voters on the head than the Left is. Conservative power is wielded by spads who look like they were laying over in Manchester before a flight to LAX. An explosion in a Hugo Boss factory clothed them all in the same tieless blue suit. And the women strode by in dresses high in the neck and long to the floor. Headbands were mandatory. They are photocopies of Carrie.

Together the blue suits and the headbands formed a court, which squatted in government. They were the fluffers and pot-holders, the heralds and jugglers, the princes and flunkeys. Observing them did not make me feel confident about the power they had bedded so luxuriantly down in. The court only knew messaging and campaigning. Nobody knew how to govern. Not in the Labour Party either. “We’re not run by anybody,” Rory Stewart said in 2014. “The secret of modern Britain is there is no power anywhere.”

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Boris Johnson's speech was a joke

By Will Lloyd

But the Prime Minister still had power, of a sort. The other ministers gave their speeches in a squashed auditorium. He had a pharaonic hall to give the culminating barnstormer in. A big venue for the big boy.

It didn’t matter what he said. Nothing could move this government until the Labour Party woke up. Their power was a given. He could stand there and announce bread rationing next week and go up in the polls. They’d build a statue of him in Parliament Square. Everyone knew he had ten years by default. All that was required of him was a presence, to keep plates spinning in the air, to offer up punchlines.

Maybe though, after effete Boris, after this era of frothy giggling and wily manoeuvring, the party and the country would grow weary of clowns and sharpers. However ingenious they were at game-playing. Then Houchen — or a figure like him — might have a chance.

This is what the country needed. It is not what the party craves.

Ultimately the theme of conference was not whether the the Tories were changing. It was the glitter of this easy, empty power. The good ideas the Conservatives had, and all the good they could do, were at risk of being washed away by it.

Once again he gives the impression of leading a charmed existence, free from the constraints endured by ordinary mortals. Once again he’s been accused of acting as if the rules — even those of Holy Mother Church — are for the little people.

In this particular case, the little people are Johnson’s fellow Catholics, many of whom have made great personal sacrifices to abide by the teachings of the Church — especially those on marriage and divorce. So the news of Boris and Carrie’s wedding ceremony at Westminster Cathedral on Saturday must have come as a shock. It certainly came as a surprise to me.

But perhaps it shouldn’t have. There are some people in this life who are blessed — or, rather, cursed — with the ability to get away with almost anything. Boris Johnson is one of them. And as if to prove it beyond doubt: there he was, at the altar, getting away with it again.

Except that he wasn’t.

It’s not as if the happy couple snuck into the Cathedral, with a tame priest in tow, and got married in defiance of ecclesiastical authority. No, this will have gone through the proper channels and will have received the appropriate approvals. Indeed, given the circumstances, I’d be surprised if Cardinal Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster, was not informed.

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By Peter Franklin

Unless a colossal error has been made or false information has been supplied — and there’s no evidence of either — then this marriage took place within the rules.

And so on to the second charge in the case against Boris’s nuptials — which is that he exploited a loophole in canon law: that his two previous marriages are not recognised by the Catholic Church. If it did indeed come down to a technicality, then Boris could be accused of violating the spirit of the law, if not its letter.

There’s plenty who’d just love to do that. For the zealots of the Unreformed Church of Remain, Boris is already guilty of the gravest possible sin (getting Brexit done); and thus, if he can be accused of others, that would be a bonus.

Among the experts trying to explain canon law to a confused public, the consensus is this: that the ceremony that took place in the cathedral on Saturday, was not — from the point of view of the Church — Boris Johnson’s third marriage, but his first.

The Church does not deny that the first two marriages took place as a civil arrangement under the secular law of the land. However, the Church’s primary concern is with marriage as a sacrament.  And here we need to understand what the Church means — and absolutely believes — a sacrament to be.

It’s more than just another word for a ritual or a ceremony. The Catholic Church recognises seven sacraments, including Matrimony, and each of these have a particular set of rituals associated with them. However, the ceremony is a visible sign of something more important: the dispensation of divine life to God’s people through His Church.

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Boris owes it all to Theresa May

By Peter Franklin

So, when the Church marries a man and a woman it isn’t some theatrical performance to make the happy couple’s special day extra special (at least that’s not all it is). Nor is it solely the Church’s blessing upon the tribal rites of a particular time and place — the hatches, matches and dispatches universal to every human society. It’s also more than a means by which Christians proclaim and celebrate what they believe.

Rather, what a sacrament is first and foremost is a channel for God’s grace and power. It is a gift that changes reality at the most fundamental level. Thus it is through Baptism that a person becomes a member of the Church. It is through Confession that sins are absolved. And it is through Matrimony that a man and a woman enter into a lifelong union that is authored by God Himself.

I cannot stress enough that this is what faithful Catholics actually believe. Just as God is not a metaphor, His divinely instituted sacraments are not metaphors.

You may think that this is all very weird — which is fine, because it’s meant to be weird. In fact, the main problem with getting outsiders (or even Catholics themselves) to understand Catholicism is not that they find it strange, but that they don’t appreciate the full extent of its strangeness.

Ever since the Reformation, and arguably long before, people have tried to translate the things of God into purely human language. And, up to a point, that’s fine — as long as one remembers that, like trying to fit a quart into a pint pot, the translation is incomplete.

Here’s just one example, a tweet addressed to Boris Johnson from the comedian Katy Brand: “A nice touch to have your previous marriages struck out by the Catholic Church. Gives it all a lovely Tudor flourish.”

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By Ed West

Eighteen thousand likes, but zero understanding. The Catholic Church didn’t “strike out” anything. Boris Johnson’s first two marriages were not entered into as Catholic sacraments — and are thus not the Church’s business. The question of striking out does not even arise.

The Church’s business is marriage as a Catholic sacrament — and it is in this context that it will not allow divorce, because it cannot put asunder what God has joined together. In some circumstances, the Church will annul a marriage, but that is only a recognition that the marriage, as a sacrament, never existed in the first place because it was not freely or properly entered into.

And thus we come to the real issue regarding Saturday’s big event — and that is the question of Boris Johnson’s sincerity. Though he was baptised a Catholic, evidence of his commitment as an adult to any form of Christianity is somewhat patchy. As for what he’s said himself about his religious beliefs, he’s best known for likening them to a faltering radio signal:

“I suppose my own faith, you know, it’s a bit like trying to get Virgin Radio when you’re driving through the Chilterns. It sort of comes and goes. I mean sometimes the signal is strong, and then sometimes I’m afraid it just vanishes. And then it comes back again.”

One might also ask about the spiritual radio station he’s been tuning into. Indeed, some might suspect that the signals he’s sent and received are closer to the Bacchanalian worldliness of classical paganism than to the heavenly fixations of Christianity.

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By Giles Fraser

If that was, and still is, his outlook on life, then the commitment he entered into on Saturday cannot have been made in good faith. To go through the motions in that state of mind would be an act of such cynicism as ought to revolt his closest friends and shock even his worst enemies. It would also shame the Church authorities for failing to detect the imposture.

But who are we to judge? Last year, Boris Johnson almost died; his son, Wilfrid, was born (and baptised); and he led his country through its most testing time since the Second World War. Experiences like that change people.

Perhaps it was just the wording, but the Prime Minister’s Easter message this year sounded awfully close to a profession of Christian faith:

“But if there’s one thing British Christians have shown us this year it’s that Jesus Christ is “the way, and the truth, and the life” not just today but every day. His teachings, and the message of his death and resurrection, permeate through every aspect of daily life.”

What we can definitely say is a profession of Christian faith are the words that Mr and Mrs Johnson would have said in Saturday’s ceremony. In the Catholic Church, Matrimony is unique among the sacraments in that the minister of the sacrament — that is to say the conduit of God’s grace — is not a priest or a bishop, but the two people being married.

So let’s hope they meant every last word.

1. Mobutu Sese Seko, African dictator, who embezzled at least $4 billion while leading one of the poorest countries on the planet?
2. Héshēn, the most corrupt official in Chinese imperial history, who amassed a vast fortune including 20 solid gold bedsteads and 600 concubines?
3. Benedict IX, who stands out among dodgy medieval popes as the only one who sold his position to his successor?
4. Boris Johnson, who tried to get some private donors to pay for improvements to a public building, before giving up on that idea and paying for the work himself?

Not for the first time in his life, Mr Johnson appears to be the exception. Clearly, sleaze ain’t what it used to be. Even by boring British standards, the current “scandal” — if that’s what you can call it — is underwhelming. There’s no comparison to, say, David Lloyd George who flogged-off peerages to the highest bidder or John Stonehouse who faked his own death.

And yet over the last week, we’ve had day-after-day of screaming front-page headlines — depicting Downing Street as a latter-day court of Caligula.

It’s absurd. Everyone knows it’s absurd. And yet “we” — by which I mean those in the media — pretend that this nonsense matters.

Take the allegation that the PM remarked that he’d rather see “bodies pile high” than take the country into another lockdown. I don’t care whether he said it or not. I do care if our leaders can’t use intemperate language or gallows humour to let off steam in private.

What next? Perhaps we could force our politicians to wear body-cams and microphones at all times in case they do or say something offensive. What was that, Prime Minister? An inappropriate smile? A muttered expletive? Will you apologise to the British people and resign immediately?

What is genuinely offensive is that while the media are engaged in fevered speculation as to what Boris Johnson did or didn’t say, actual bodies are piling up — in India. If you haven’t done so already, I’d urge you to read Tom Chivers’s sobering article on the issue. It’s not just the scale of tragedy that stands out, but the fact that the West could be helping with its supply of desperately needed vaccines.

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By Peter Franklin

Britain — with its close ties to India and its influence on vaccine policy — could be playing a leading role in mobilising a global effort. But with Covid spiralling out of control in the world’s second most populous country, we’ve been arguing about interior decor instead. This twisted sense of priorities is the real scandal, but as it involves the journalistic establishment as well as the political one, don’t expect the mainstream media to complain.

Indeed, far from heralding the fall of the House of Boris, the story behind the non-stories of last week is in fact a reassertion of control. When the Covid pandemic washed over our shores last year, it disrupted the established order of Westminster politics. As the full gravity of situation became unignorable, things that had been seen as important — including things that actually were important, like Brexit — were suddenly overshadowed. That meant that the people who dealt in the normal currency of Westminster politics were overshadowed too. They could only look on helplessly from the wings as the likes of Chris Whitty, Patrick Vallance and Jonathan Van-Tam took centre stage.

In newsrooms, science and medical reporters had their stories promoted to the front page. Indeed, just about anyone with a basic grasp of statistics found themselves in demand — and a lot more relevant than the previously dominant Westminster gossipmongers.

Of course, the latter took every opportunity to claw their way back into the limelight. A prime example was last summer’s press conference with Dominic Cummings in the Downing Street garden. One after another, the big names of British political journalism puffed themselves up to express their moral indignation. But in doing so they only exposed their own powerlessness — Cummings lived to fight another day.

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More serious was what followed, which was a free pass for actual government policy. Decisions on which ministers should have found themselves under serious pressure — such as the reckless encouragement of international travel — were more celebrated than scrutinised. The trouble we were brewing for ourselves later in the year went largely unanticipated.

Luckily, the vaccine cavalry was on its way to rescue us. But don’t forget that last autumn, the media were more interested in attacking Kate Bingham for who she’s married to and who she went to school with, than understanding her vital work with the Vaccine Taskforce. Had politics-as-usual been in full force, the media witch-hunt may well have forced her out. Fortunately, the grown-ups were in charge and she was able to finish her job.

The irony is that it’s the success of the Vaccine Taskforce that’s allowing politics-as-usual to reassert itself. Half the population has been vaccinated, Covid deaths are heading down to zero and lockdown is lifting.

In celebrating with a festival of gossip our political journalists are signalling that nature has healed and they are back in charge of the news agenda. Indeed, no titbit from the last 12 months is too trivial not rake-up and present again to the public; for example, the alleged animosity between Dominic Cummings and, er, Dilyn — the Prime Minister’s canine companion.

The mystery is why our leaders are so keen to feed the beast, by which I don’t mean the dog. Even if they didn’t have events of world-historical importance to concentrate on, like India, ministers have enough to worry about at home. For instance, it’s just over a week to the Scottish Parliament elections, on which the fate of the Union hangs. There’s also the Welsh Senedd elections and a double set of local elections. And let’s not forget the crucial Hartlepool by-election — which could cement Tory control of the North or provide the first sign of a Labour comeback.

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By Douglas Murray

It therefore seems an extraordinary time for Downing Street to start a briefing war with Dominic Cummings.

But then one has remember that No 10 isn’t just the victim of the Westminster gossip machine, but an active participant. From the Prime Minister downwards, they’re all devotees of a political culture which is all about mastery of the unimportant.

In his novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera explores whether it is better to live one’s life “heavily” — that is to deeply care about the situations one finds oneself living in and the people we share them with; or to live life “lightly” — without being weighed-down by any great burden of responsibility for anyone or anything.

Through the characters, he ultimately comes down on the side of heaviness — and, as such, he is writing against the philosophy of Friederich Nietzsche. It may seem strange to associate Nietzsche with lightness or levity, but that is the ultimate meaning of his ideal of the Übermensch. It isn’t actually any concept of racial superiority that makes the Nietzsche’s “super-man” über, but the fact that he rises above the things that weigh down ordinary people — especially Christian notions of morality and the distinction between right and wrong.

In its own shallow kind of way, there’s something distinctly Nietzchean about the British culture of politics. It too refuses to be weighed down. It is ruled by super-persons who consider themselves above the details of governance and are much more interested in fleeting moods and shifting narratives then anything concrete.

Covid, however, made politics heavy again. Suddenly it became impossible to prevail through rhetorical means alone. The politicians who tried, such as Donald Trump or Ursula von der Leyen, came badly unstuck. For the first time in years, politics fell into the hands of people who really know and care about things that actually matter.

In this country we now have a choice. It is whether to stay grounded in the real or to return full control to the PR spivs. I’ve got a horrible feeling that it going to be the latter – and that really is unbearable.

The first piece of unalloyedly positive coverage he received came when he emerged from hospital on Easter Sunday. It was an exceptionally good news story — for the country as well as his family.

So much so, that his disgruntled opponents could not help but see dastardly practices at work. Chris Lockwood of The Economist managed to make a great virtual fool of himself by tweeting out that the Prime Minister’ appearance after emerging from hospital was “not someone who was at death’s door a few days ago”.

There seemed, according to the magazine’s Europe Editor (who would of course have no reason to hold a grudge against Boris Johnson) to be “something incredibly fishy about the whole business”. Lockwood subsequently backtracked from this claim, under a certain amount of virtual pressure and presumably some amount of actual, real-life pressure, from the higher-ups at his publication.

In a similar vein, The Guardian has found it hard to see anything especially positive in the announcement of Carrie Symonds giving birth to a baby boy. Ordinarily, it should be an easy one: “Congratulations to the happy couple on the birth of their child.” Even political opponents used to be able to agree on that sort of line. Not this time at The Guardian, where Martin Kettle announced in a sub-heading so gritted that you worried for his teeth: “It would require a heart of stone not to be moved by such a story of illness and new life. But this is no apolitical birth.”

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Why did Boris Johnson survive?

By James Kirkup

As a metaphor for Boris Johnson’s view of Britain, it was, Kettle claimed in his confused argument, “audacious”. “The operation in Downing Street is still a lot smarter than many would like to see it” he warned. And amid the sound of his teeth finally giving in under the pressure, Kettle ground out the sentence, “Let’s acknowledge, if nothing else, that today’s announcement was a brilliantly executed piece of political tradecraft.”

It is understandable that Johnson’s opponents keep reacting like this; there is, of course, a reason. They see him as a political chancer who has got through life by being lucky and that if it were not for this, then he would have been exposed by now as a charlatan and a fraud whose copy would not be deemed printable in such august publications as The Guardian or Economist. Time and again his journalist critics ignore the fact that their estimation of the Prime Minister is out of kilter with the public’s.

And of course there is an inbuilt reason why that might be the case. Which is that Boris Johnson used to be one of them, soared exceptionally high in journalism, earned more than most journalists can ever dream of and then chose to leave the trade and move on to higher office. Some people would spend a life in therapy trying to forgive success and abandonment like that.

But it means that such journalists ignore the attributes of the Prime Minister which are particularly attractive and might be exceptionally well-suited to the times we are now in.

Good and bad things happen to all of us in our lives. We all have a chance daily to store up resentment or positivity. And while the storing up of positive sentiment may be exceptionally hard on occasion, in politics – especially during times of political and economic turbulence – it is crucial.  Despondency is not a great look in leadership.

The moment when I saw that there was an unusual type of political leadership in the Prime Minister was back when he was Mayor of London. In 2011, rioting had just broken out in London which spread out across the country. For several nights, Londoners saw the breakdown of law and order as the police failed to intervene and the capital looked very close to chaos. There were all sorts of ways for people in positions of political power to respond to that event, but the most memorable to me came the morning after the rioting began.

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Has Boris had a sickbed conversion?

By Tom Holland

As other dour-faced politicians made their pronouncements and commentators predicted the end of civilisation, Boris Johnson appeared in London with a group of citizen volunteers. Armed with a broom he encouraged Londoners to help him clear up the city. It was the sort of thing that would have occurred to almost no other politician — bunkered down as they would be at such a time. But it showed a number of things about Johnson, most important of which was that he continued to have the capacity to make people feel good about things and take part in improving their collective lot, even at the direst moments.

It was one of his most serious demonstrations of political nouse, but it is one which comes from his general character. When Boris managed to turn an ‘unlucky’ incident with a zip wire into something rather joyful and very human, the same unusual quality came across to the public and seemed to bypass many of his journalist critics. It wasn’t hard to see even then that he was different from other political beasts. After all, imagine if Gordon Brown or Theresa May had attempted to go on a zipwire and got stuck half way along it? How would the pictures of them dangling in mid-air have gone down?

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We don't need 'gotcha' journalism now

By Douglas Murray

Would Gordon Brown have showed a sunny disposition on this occasion? Would he have joked with the crowd about lending him a rope to get down? Would Theresa May have engaged in repartee and badinage? Or might both have hung there fuming at their personal humiliation, wondering who had put them up to this and visibly mulling over who to blame for the lack of zipwire forward-planning?

The misfortune for Boris Johnson’s opponents is not that everything he does is stage-managed, the result of conspiracy or part of some grand political masterplan. The thing they fail to recognise is the fact that whether personal or global problems come bouncing along at him, Johnson reacts to them, as he does to everything in his life, with a generally sunny and upbeat disposition. And whether bad or good things happen to him — hospitalisation or fatherhood — his response to them is not some elaborate ruse or spin.

You cannot fake Johnson’s sort of attitude to life. The Prime Minister’s disposition is such that it allows bad things to bounce off him, and the good things make most reasonable people happy along with him. It’s no wonder the Prime Minister’s opponents feel the stars lining up against them at times. But the fault is in their stars, not his.

And, yet, after that terrible week, I wonder, could Boris Johnson be the man to make his party sane again? I think he has that possibility, due to his flaws: to his desire to be loved; to his status of outsider; to his writer’s mind. He has done less strange things already in his life.

If he survives Brexit, I think he should look less to Winston Churchill for inspiration — always a ludicrous idea, since Tory wars are now imagined wars and he is obviously a physical coward — and more to the prime minister he most resembles: to Benjamin Disraeli, the Jewish-born novelist who remade the Tory Party as a One Nation reforming movement, and retired to live in faux-aristocrat splendour in Buckinghamshire with peacocks. He was also accused of unprincipled opportunism – it was almost his personal mantra — and yet he enabled famous social reform and now has a statue in Parliament Square.

A romantic without fixed principles — I can imagine Disraeli writing two contradictory columns, as Johnson did on Brexit — can potentially lead Conservatism to the centre. Sometimes only such a man has the imagination and the fearlessness to do it. I may sound like a hostage; four days of Conference is a long time to watch Jacob Rees-Mogg pose as an intellectual. But so, for now, is Johnson.

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Our politics of impossible promises

By Polly Mackenzie

The Tories chose Johnson for leader with their worst selves. That is obvious. They like his faux nobility, his satyrmania, his jokes, and his appearance of optimism, which is only an appearance. Boris Johnson — even the name is fake, his family call him Alexander; Boris is his power name — is a construct. He is not his shell; he is really grave, solitary and vulnerable. His risk-taking, which is obsessive, implies gloom and a sense of worthlessness.

Even so, the mention of his name brought cheers in Manchester, even when he was not there, and they were applauding an absence. They treat him as a toy, or mascot. But they do not understand that he is not like them. He is socially liberal — I saw him swat away a pro-Life activist at the hustings, in a reflex act — a descendant of immigrants, and he won over London, which is a city of immigrants, not fools, twice. He is not an ideologue, but an opportunist, which is less dangerous these days. He doesn’t seek power to remake a country but to remake himself. I know it is unfashionable to say it, but Britain, on the whole, is neither Socialist nor sadist. Whoever gets first to the centre will win a functional majority. That, too, is obvious.

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Boris has a dream

By Tanya Gold

Johnson at Conference looked like a man supping with the devil — or a toy who knows he is too clever to be a toy, and he doesn’t like it. He is getting fat again, which bespeaks anxiety. He now looks like Mr Incredible — and his father Stanley, the adulterer who made him — from the back. I sensed it in his obvious reluctance; his agonising repetitions; his slowness as the waddled about the halls; the outstretched arms as the disposable cup was torn away by a Tory serf for appearance of environmentalism. He knew the spin is stupid, and it is.

If the Tories chose Johnson with their worst selves, sometimes I think — and I thought this as he spoke to Conference at the end — he would give it his best self if he could. Would he like to be admired beyond the party, and put the country he helped fracture back together? What else is limitless ambition for?

It is curious that this, the party of the family — but only, I think, for the purpose of denying the state — has chosen a man who has fractured his family to lead it. Only his father Stanley and his girlfriend Carrie Symonds — rudely put, the cause and the symptom of his problems — were there. It is not impertinent to discuss the character rather than the policy — not with Johnson. With him, the character is the policy, and so that policy is ever changeable. The Tory Party thrills to his transgressions, which they would not accept from anyone else. Rather, they admire them; Symonds was even applauded in the hall, which felt bizarre, even to them, and it melted away. And so, I thought — where else could he lead them? What else could he persuade them to do, which they have not done before? Rather a lot, I would say.

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How it could all go wrong for Boris

By Matthew Goodwin

Johnson might lie to create the narratives he requires to survive — all narcissists do — and he will, for now play the strong man the Tories crave to deliver the Brexit their dreams require. He is a writer after all; and he will write himself a character of Prime Minister. Since his possibilities are endless, I will also write for him, and a potential happy ending too: Get Brexit Done and be the One Nation Tory he ought to be: for sanity.

I found this hope again when he said, off script in his speech, “I love Europe anyway”. He looked doughty, if a little nervous when he said it, and very young, which is why I think he meant it.

I never thought Johnson was in politics to take sweets from children. I know some who are. Psychopaths flock to it. Johnson is more complicated than that; he lacks that particular brand of malice. He only wants to be loved; and there are far worse things than voluptuaries in Westminster these days.

I wonder if he is better than the party he leads; if, at least, he could be. If the wind blows through your heart, you have that possibility. It might appeal to his vanity; it might soothe him to find lasting love with the British electorate. None of this is ideal, but these are desperate times. Whatever it comes from, I will take it.