Where does Alexander Johnson (Al to his intimates, Boris is only his public name) fit in with them? The answer is awkwardly. In Bower’s biography of Johnson, subtitled The Gambler, Bower prefers narrative to insight, but he has one great scoop: the violence of Johnson’s father Stanley. I have always suspected that Stanley — a pseudo-intellectual, a wanderer and a bore — is the key to his son, and Bower confirms it: Stanley repeatedly beat his wife Charlotte, an artist, and she spent time in a mental hospital, blaming herself. The children were cast to the four winds: to the English public school system, where hurts are buried and myths self-made.

The story appears early in The Gambler and it throws Bower off his stride: too much and too soon. He cannot help but see his subject in the light of it, and it serves to infantalise Johnson, who is 56 now, and quite capable of amending himself. Bower spends the rest of The Gambler acting as a sort of excitable therapist, and cheerleader, to Johnson, with lengthy, un-sifted narratives and occasionally purple prose, as if a sexually shy man is trying to understand his opposite, who he both disapproves of and admires. He calls him “a glamour boy” and “a loner and a lover”. Lover is a strange word for what Johnson is to women: he has a trail of disappointed wives, abandoned mistresses and sullen, speechless children. Is it love, really — or is it hunger?

You will know everything beyond Stanley’s violence already: when he became prime minister, Johnson was already a myth — and who would be a myth? He was at Eton College, where Al the child retreated and Boris the invention rose; he was president of the Union at Oxford University. He was a journalist at the Times, fired for a pitifully obvious lie, an invented quote from his godfather. I would call this behaviour self-hating, though to Bower it is only “insubordinate” and “insolent”, which is a schoolmaster’s analysis. Then came success at the Telegraph for mocking Brussels; the editorship of the Spectator; adultery; Parliament; the Mayoralty; Brexit; a landslide; the sickness of Covid-19; and now uncertainty.

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The moral vacuum at the heart of power

By Tanya Gold

You know this thanks to the British media, who have followed Johnson since the Spectator years, seeking drama while praying he will fail. It is a very malicious tribute from journalism, and self-important: it is essentially jealousy and the queasy knowledge that, at last, we went too far. I have participated in many Johnson media scrums or “rolling goat fucks”. They are more exciting than policy round tables, and I write that with shame. Bower doesn’t emphasise this crucial element to Johnson’s rise: Boris Johnson, like Donald Trump, is a media invention, willed ironically into life and funny, until it wasn’t.

He has to be, because he barely has politics. Policy does not interest him, as Bower says; and the politics he does have — he is a liberal Remainer — are not the engine of his life. He is not a politician but a personality; he wanted to be World King long before he heard of the Treasury. The engine is, rather, a thrilling personal narrative, which is anti-intellectual, despite Johnson’s book-learning. Bower makes much of Johnson’s love of the ancient poets, and it is true that the pre-Christian world is distant enough for Johnson to attempt to hide there. It is also irresistible to an unserious age. I would go further and call the engine sickness: the sickness is the engine of his life.

That Johnson has Don Juan syndrome is almost too obvious to write but, still, Bower does not emphasise it, presenting us merely with a list of women and their disappointments, or personal failings. These tales, I am again ashamed to admit, are by far the most interesting passages in the book probably because in these matters Johnson has a cracked kind of agency: he does things to women, but politics feels like something that is done to him; his behaviour is reactive, enough to keep going onwards to the undiscovered country of self-acceptance, but not important in itself.

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By Tanya Gold

Don Juan syndrome is, simply put, a desire to seek, and to punish, the mother; the mother the child believes abandoned him. It explains the compulsion to seduce and betray which is the story of Johnson’s intimate life. Those who call Johnson a lover misunderstand him. He is a seeker: for him the wanting is better than the having. Don Juanism is a personal tragedy, it is true, but it is not tragic enough to destabilise an entire country. The Left is not wrong in its anger towards Johnson and his acolytes who, despite his desire to promote only inadequates, sense a vessel to exploit.

When the real history of Johnson’s rule is written there will be three villains at least beyond Stanley Johnson: the English public school system which supplies the Tory Party with inept leaders; the media, who collude in this and the raising of Johnson, for sport and profit; and the voters, who, with indifference or salaciousness, tolerate it.

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Boris Johnson and the ravages of office

By Ian Birrell

Towards the end of Bower’s story, Johnson’s sickness and what counts for his politics thrillingly collide. For Johnson, the premiership is a woman, or at least it resembles a woman. It was something he only thought he wanted, though he would do anything to secure it. That is how a liberal Remainer on the left of the Tory party became the agent of Brexit: he is simply not strong enough to advance his imagined One Nation creed in the face of Brexit, Covid-19 and the objections of his own supporters.

Too much time has been spent willing Johnson to victory — to happiness — as if he, like the Fisher King, represents us: the politics of an earlier age, an awful thing to contemplate in what is supposed to be a liberal democracy. So perhaps it is not Johnson who gambles, but us. Reading this over-sympathetic, slightly credulous book I yearn only for a future Johnson — penitent, aged and wise — to write his own story, but that is another feminine Johnson-themed fantasy of redemption, and there have too many of them already.

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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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.