Finn McRedmond: Boris Johnson should pay more heed to the classics

Boris Johnson is teetering on the precipice of political ruin. Whether it is haplessness, mendacity, glory-seeking or hubris that brought him to this point will be the question that troubles future historians.

But for now we might wonder why Johnson’s fascination with the distant past never alerted him to a simple fact: those personal failings have been the making of many a downfall.

The prime minister’s love of the classics is sincere, and his understanding of the ancient world almost intuitive in nature. His loose sexual morality, naked ambition, belief in the power of satire, and his populist tendencies would see him blend seamlessly into the Roman Forum.

He extols the virtues of Roman and Greek politics, he quotes the Iliad from memory, and talks loftily of the virtues of Athens.

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Despite the destruction he leaves in his wake, Johnson emerges as ebullient, funny and almost likable. Duplicitous charm is still charming at the end of the day

Since 2004 Johnson has had a bust of his hero Pericles, the 5th century BC Athenian statesman. It has accompanied him through his mayoralty, foreign office stint and tenure in Downing Street.

Perhaps this is where Boris derived his belief in the power of large-scale infrastructure projects: Pericles built the Parthenon. What he might think of Johnson’s proposed Scotland-Northern Ireland bridge will have to be left down to some historical guesswork.

And Pericles was an accomplished orator, a peerless communicator of democracy, freedom and equality before the law. There is much to admire in him and there are certainly worse heroes to claim as your own. And there is a symmetry between the two men so on the nose it can only have been contrived by divine intervention.

Pericles presided over a plague-ridden Athens (a plague which ultimately killed him). It is the pandemic, not Brexit, that has come to define Johnson’s premiership, its byproducts and offshoots and mishaps that may be his ultimate undoing.

Social occasions

But the men were not the same. Pericles had an aversion to social occasions, and his biographer Plutarch spoke of his absence from all parties and dinners while head of state. The irony of this will not be lost on the prime minister as he scrabbles to excuse himself of culpability amid the drip feed of Number 10’s mid-lockdown hedonism.

And Pericles was famously averse to sharing extraneous or inappropriate words. This does not compare well with the former columnist and magazine editor whose loose lips cause him all manner of difficulty.

But it is not Johnson’s proclivity for a louche social life, nor his impromptu musings and balladry that have seen him backed, cowering, into this corner. In fact, his imperviousness to this mode of scandal has long been an inexplicable feature of his career.

We might want to ask why Johnson would go to such lengths to claim Pericles as his ultimate hero

He does not curry much favour in Ireland, thanks to his swashbuckling, misplaced optimism that has often left Ireland at the mercy of his reckless exit from the European Union. But the picture from London is often more charitable.

Despite the destruction he leaves in his wake, his disinterest in the details, his ambition and fickleness, Johnson still emerges as ebullient, brimming with charisma, funny and almost likable. Duplicitous charm is still charming at the end of the day.

No, his failure emerges from somewhere different altogether. And it is in Johnson’s own assessment of the Greeks that we might glean some insight. The Greeks, said Johnson, were the first to expose their vulnerable egos. And like all egotists, he added (speaking from personal experience, we must assume), were extraordinarily competitive. This was the source of their brilliance.

Reckless ambition

Johnson’s overweening and reckless ambition is no secret to the world. It is what saw him secure the keys to Number 10 Downing Street – Brexit come what may, we can always iron out the details later.

It is too what saw him purge his party of detractors and fill his cabinet with loyalists to the Johnson cause. But this kind of raw ambition always gives way to even bigger falls; the Athenian empire collapsed, Rome’s did too. Macbeth was the architect of his own demise and Icarus flew too close to the sun.

Johnson might come to emulate his hero in the end. Pericles’s life did not end with fawning adulation, but in failure: overseeing the Peloponnesian war, a cautionary tale of misplaced self-confidence and underestimation of the devastating impact his choices might have on public morale.

The exhortation that those who fail to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it is perhaps one of the most tedious cliches in the modern canon. But we might want to ask why Johnson would go to such lengths to claim Pericles as his ultimate hero, and place so much stock in his affinity with the classics, if he has not bothered to heed its most foundational warnings. Some might call it hubris.

Perhaps the lesson that most tugs at the heartstrings of the beleaguered prime minister, and the governing thesis of his life, came from Pericles too. Famous men, he said, have the whole world as their memorial, not just inscriptions on graves but in people’s hearts and memory.

Legacy matters to Johnson. The ultimate tragedy is that perhaps he has not been careful enough to ensure he has a good one.