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.

By the same author

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.

By the same author

How the Trumps silence their women

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.

Suggested reading

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.

I am angry. And I’m pretty sure I am not alone.

The proximate cause of my anger is the ludicrous non-quarantine quarantine to which my family is currently subjected, after a brief trip to France. It’s not that I object to making a sacrifice for public health. It’s that I’m pretty sure, from the way they’ve gone about things, that the Government has absolutely no interest in whether I break the rules or not. There was no information or signage at the Channel crossing, and at no point has anyone told me what the rules are. I got more information from a twitter quiz in the Telegraph than I did from our government.

In this latest phase of Covid-restrictions, we’ve gone for full-throttle half-arsed-ness. Wear a face mask, but don’t worry, we won’t check and no one will enforce it. Go to school, and if you don’t we’ll fine you, except we probably won’t because headteachers won’t bother reporting you. Do a quarantine, but you can still go to the supermarket, only once, and don’t worry no one will check. Submit your details for Test and Trace, but we probably won’t get around to calling you or telling you what to do.

This is much more than a recipe for confusion. It’s a clear path towards growing resentment and division between citizens, who find themselves surrounded by Other People behaving badly and not being punished. And from there a collapse in trust between people the institutions they look to for guidance.

Suggested reading

Will the Conservatives start conserving?

By Tom Holland

Before ministers take another step down this path, they should read The Hidden Wealth of Nations, by David Halpern, which argues that social trust is the essential foundation not just for wellbeing, but for economic growth.

Of course, Halpern is in many quarters persona non grata these days, because of the perceived failings of the Behavioural Insights Team, which he leads, during the early phases of the pandemic. He was on TV mid-March using the phrase “herd immunity” which gave him a passport to cancel-land.

But Halpern’s work on prosperity, published in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, is vital reading. He shows that “our ability to get on with our fellow citizens oils the working of markets, lowering the costs of transactions and speeding the flow of information on which economies rely”. Countries and regions with the highest levels of social trust tend to have not just the strongest growth, but the greatest levels of subjective wellbeing, too.

Halpern goes on to observe that: “The resilience of a community or nation to survive through economically difficult times rests heavily on its hidden wealth — not the money that its citizens have squirreled away under their mattresses, but the preparedness of citizens to help each other.”

Britain scored well on this metric in the early months of the pandemic. We volunteered in our hundreds of thousands. We suffered the hardships of isolation or overcrowding in lockdown for the sake of others. We cheered on our care workers. We had a single, simple set of rules that applied to everyone. Even those who disagreed could see that those rules were broadly and justly applied. But since rules got complicated, and attempts at enforcement were replaced by a vague plea to be sensible, that unity and solidarity is ebbing away. In Mid May, the ONS recorded that more than 60% of people believed Britain would be “very” united after Covid-19. By the end of June that was down to 28%.

Halpern’s book is a vital reminder that this division is not just a sideline issue, to be worried about by soggy social scientists. If we can’t find a way to get along, we can’t rescue our economy.

Suggested reading

A portrait of power, warts and all

By James Kirkup

Our Treasury is now desperate for growth. To save town centre economies from collapse, the Government has unilaterally decided that workers are more productive in offices, and is trying to bully people back to them. The Prime Minister launched an all-out war on obesity, and then the Government spent a month subsidising fast food with Eat Out to Help Out. They will reach for anything, no matter how contradictory, to leverage up the economy, and with a wall of redundancies coming this autumn, I can’t blame them

They imagine that the best path to growth is complex public health rules, varied by postcode, age, ethnicity, risk factors, and a general sense of whether you can be bothered doing what the Government says. This is because their mathematical models show that complexity liberates the maximum number of people possible.

But their utilitarian calculation misses out the basic societal principle that all should be equal before the law. If you want a strong, trusting society, then fairness has to be a factor. Halpern’s book suggests to me that if public health strategy divides and discombobulates the population, stimulus will not thrive.

The Government should base its economic and health policies on the goal of rebuilding social capital. Covid-19 brought mass volunteering. It stopped millions from commuting, freeing up more time for family and neighbourhoods. It helped us see the networks and connections between people more clearly than ever. That social trust was not some fluffy distraction from the real business of the economy: it was a great foundation for recovery. We just need to hang on to it before it disappears.