Boris Johnson’s classic fall

Farewell then, Boris Johnson, and to paraphrase another leader who had rather lost the support of his front bench, what an artist dies with him. Johnson was the most amusing prime minister in living memory, but also the most historically aware. The first British political leader since Harold MacMillan to read classics, he was hugely influenced by the ideas of the ancient world, in particular Fortuna. And as Tom Holland reflected in last Friday’s The Rest is History podcast, this obsession with the classics guided his career.

Classics, Holland said, had once been a ‘how to do politics’ course, from the time of Machiavelli to the aristocrats of the 18th and 19th centuries, seen as a guide to ‘how to behave morally and politically’. This became especially important as elites in Europe and America came to consciously imitate the ancients — five Victorian and Edwardian prime ministers read classics — but ‘that has not been the case for many, many years.’

Johnson in that way is a throwback. He is someone for whom classics is central to his education, but I think the thing that is intriguing about it is that he studied it as an example of how to get ahead. He had a properly Greek/Roman understanding of Fortuna, Tyche, chance, this great goddess who has her favourites. He genuinely, in an inchoate sense but in a sense that does seem to be authentic, saw himself as fortune’s favourite, but of course it’s the essence of tragedy, the cruelty and humour of Fortuna, that she raises her favourites up only to hurl them down. The joke that fate has played on Johnson is a particularly cruel one.’

It’s hardly surprising that Boris believed in Fortuna, considering just how much she smiled on him. A little over a year ago, I wrote about how incredibly fortunate Boris was to become leader in the middle of a seismic demographic shift that would make life very difficult for the Tories in just a few years.

It was all the more incredible because, just 12 months earlier, it appeared that Boris’s luck had finally run out. Having done everything to climb the greasy pole, Johnson had achieved his goal only for his dreams of power to turn sour. Apollo had fired his arrow at Britain and Boris was left with a country overrun by disease and necessitating authoritarian measures that repulsed him; soon he was sick himself, and it looked like he might follow his idol Pericles a bit too much by dying of the plague.

Yet Fortuna favoured him again. Boris recovered, and Britain’s vaccine roll-out turned out to be an enormous success, in doing so temporarily squashing the Brexit debate for, whatever the myriad disadvantages of leaving, no one could then say it was just about blue passports anymore. Then came the more bizarre Super League proposal, after which the Juventus chairman publicly blamed Boris for ending a hugely unpopular stitch-up by the continent’s richest clubs. This all seemed like further proof of outrageous good fortune, active divine favouritism. In contrast his opponent Keir Starmer seemed, like Ajax, to be disliked by the gods for no particular reason. Maybe they just found him boring.

Yet ‘no one should feel too confident of the favours of Fortune, especially in the hour of success,’ as Polybius wrote, and Johnson’s hubristic behaviour suggested he did.

Fortuna as an idea runs through the works of ancient historians. For Polybius, in his Rise of the Roman Empire, Fortuna explained the triumph of Rome, while Tacitus thought of Fortuna in terms of Rome’s future destruction. Fortuna was never the sole cause of men’s fates — character and courage and talent still mattered — but it could never be escaped.

The growing classical influence on Europe in the later Middle Ages saw a renewed interest in the idea of Fortuna. Georges Duby wrote in France in the Middle Ages that ‘The image of Fortune’s wheel took root in the collective consciousness, turning faster and faster as it raised some and secured the downfall of others. The key themes were destabilisation and emulation, and 'winning' (gagner) became a watchword for the period.’

In the mid-14th century, after Venice had crushed Genoa in one of their countless conflicts, the Duke of Milan sent the poet Petrarch to persuade the Genovese to make peace, who warned them that ‘the dice of fortune are ambiguous. It cannot but be that if one of the Eyes is put out, the other will be darkened.’

Petrarch, of course, was the central figure when it came to the new influence of ancient Greece and Rome; his rediscovery of Cicero’s letter is seen as the start of the Renaissance, and he largely invented the idea of the ‘Dark Ages’, which has been much conflated with Middle Ages or medieval.

This new classicism was often seen as immoral, none more so than the work of Niccolò Machiavelli. As John Gray wrote of the great Florentine political philosopher: ‘In his youth he had been much impressed by the materialism of Lucretius, scribbling in the margin of a copy of the Roman philosopher-poet’s De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things) the observation: 'the gods don’t care about mortal things'. History contains no redemptive providence or meaning. The Rota Fortunae – the randomly spinning wheel of fortune – governs everything.’

Although this was hard for Machiavelli to accept, ‘A version of Lucretian philosophy surfaces in The Prince, where Machiavelli claimed that half of human life was owed to fortuna and the other half to virtù (by which he meant talent or ability). Intelligence and energy can seize the opportunities that fortune grants. Great projects can be realised. But then the wheel spins again, and what has been achieved is lost. The human world is ruled by the turns of chance.’

Yet the Christian world inevitably saw Fortuna in a different light to the ancients, giving her/it a darker tone. For the Romans, Gray wrote, ‘Though she was fickle and uncertain, she was also the bringer of good luck and abundance, and one of her symbols was an overflowing cornucopia. The Christian philosopher Boethius, however, focused on Fortuna's dark side in his Consolation of Philosophy, and although her Classical elements survived, subsequent images of her in medieval Europe focused on her ability to dash human hopes and ambitions. Her symbol was the turning wheel, which people rode to the top, only to be thrown to the bottom at the next turning.’

But for Machiavelli, the successful politician took Fortuna’s fickleness as an invitation to be bold. ‘It is better to be adventurous than cautious, because fortune is a woman,’ he wrote in a now-jarring passage, ‘and if you wish to keep her under it is necessary to beat and ill-use her; and it is seen that she allows herself to be mastered by the adventurous rather than by those who go to work more coldly.’

If that today offends our moral sensibilities, the overall direction of Renaissance men troubled their contemporaries, too, who feared that they eschewed Christian morality; human affairs really weren’t the concern of a loving God but outside forces who didn’t care, or who saw it all as a joke. It’s not a mystery why some saw the new focus on the ancient world as morally troubling, fears that were hardly helped by the growing cruelty and intolerance that characterised the early modern period.

Johnson is indeed a throwback, but perhaps he is also the first truly post-Christian prime minister, befitting an age of repaganisation. If political morality is in decline, if ‘norms’ are falling apart or we’re entering a post-truth era, perhaps it is indeed related to a new obsession with gagner. Just as the waning of the Middle Ages led to Christian rules of chivalry falling by the wayside, perhaps now nothing matters but winning, and Boris Johnson epitomised that.

Johnson’s love of the classics inspired his thirst for power, but we should at least be grateful that it was not Sulla nor Alexander he idolised, but Pericles, whose bust he kept in Downing Street. Pericles was an upper-class populist with an interest in the ladies, and he came to personify the democracy of Athens; his great Funeral Oration granted him the immortality that so many politicians desire but fail to achieve.

Yet, as Holland says, the comparisons hugely flatter Johnson, a far less substantial figure. In the end the great projects weren’t realised, and Johnson’s obvious intelligence and energy didn’t seize the opportunities his great fortune granted.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy of Johnson’s political career, and the turn of events ensuring he won’t be remembered except as a comedy turn, is that he survived. Had the Prime Minister died of Covid in April 2020, he would almost certainly be remembered as one of the greats, a man who might have reached Churchillian levels but fell steering the democracy through its greatest emergency since the war.

Of course, Johnson hadn’t wished for that, any more than any of us would; because what is historical greatness when you can enjoy the moment here on earth, and avoid dying a horrible death? What does it all matter, really, history? Deep down, I wonder if all Johnson’s classicism, the obsession with history and Fortuna and fate, was all just a live action role play.