In his one phrase that everyone knows, Karl Marx wrote that Hegel was right that “all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice”, but he forgot to add: “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” Marx was comparing the fatuous mid-19th-century French politicians posing for the original revolutionists, and “the nephew for the uncle”: the opera buffa seizure of power by Napoleon III in 1851 besides the first Napoleon’s coup d’etat in 1799. What words would Marx have found to scorn “Boris for Winston”?
Six years ago Boris Johnson published The Churchill Factor, which one learned reviewer called “a self-aggrandising pot-boiler”. But his more besotted admirers have since taken up his own implied comparison. The Daily Telegraph, once an austerely honest newspaper, has morphed into a teenybopper Boris fanzine, with columnist Tim Stanley shouting: “It’s time critics saw Boris for the Churchillian figure he is.”
While conceding that our present troubles were “out of scale with those of 1940”, Charles Moore, another adoring cheerleader, says that “there is something in the comparison”. In either case, a man “widely regarded by political colleagues as a charlatan sees trouble coming from the European continent”, and “is proved right”. The “controversial untrusted man who got it right leads, unites country, wins”. That was after Johnson had campaigned on the slogan “Get Brexit done”, exploiting an artificial and self-inflicted crisis to force an election and win a parliamentary majority, although anyone who thinks he has united the country must truly live in social and political self-isolation.
No doubt Johnson can be a very amusing light journalist. He’s sometimes made me laugh, but then so did Ken Dodd, and no one ever saw him as a likely prime minister. Johnson’s corresponding problem is his inability to be serious about anything. A question always lurked as to how he would respond to a real crisis, an emergency which threatened us all. Now we know. The government claims to have done the right thing, even if that’s disputed. Time will tell whether it’s enough, but the prime minister himself cuts a desperately unconvincing figure, and it’s hard to think of anyone less designed to inspire confidence.
Not that comparisons with Churchill are wholly without point. To my knowledge – and I’ve spent some time studying his career and reputation – no one ever called Churchill a charlatan. Even his political opponents could admire him. “Mr Churchill writes better than any politician since Disraeli,” Keynes wrote in 1927, words not even the most fawning sycophant would use of Johnson.
But the charges made against Churchill over pretty much all his career until 1940 were that he was a reckless adventurer and an unprincipled opportunist, which ring loud bells today. He was “the transatlantic type of demagogue (‘Them’s my sentiments and if they don’t give satisfaction they can be changed’),” said the high Tory National Review in 1906, after Churchill had deserted the Tories for the Liberals, and salaried office. That seems remarkably apt for the man who wrote two columns ahead of the referendum, one arguing for remain and one for leave, before deciding which suited his interests better.
Even Churchill’s allies distrusted him. In the early 1930s he joined the reactionary but sincere Tory imperialists, who were fighting the India bill and any measure of self-government for India, but his adherence gave them no pleasure. “He discredits us,” said Lord Selborne, one of their number. “We are acting from conviction but everybody knows Winston has no convictions; he has only joined us for what he can get out of it.”
Asked once whether he had any real convictions, Johnson answered: “Yes, one for speeding years ago.” What a wag! But it’s not quite as funny as he thinks. Dominic Lawson is, like Johnson, a former editor of the Spectator – and unlike him, a committed leaver. He says that personal freedom is “one principle Johnson holds dear (and he does not have many)”, and he adds, quite rightly, that “Johnson was never in favour of Brexit, until he found it necessary to further his ambition to become Conservative leader”: just what Selborne once thought about Churchill.
In a famous passage, Churchill said that in May 1940: “I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.” They were rousing words but made no sense. If becoming prime minister was his inexorable destiny, as he and his disciples claimed, why had so few thought so? A year earlier he had almost no supporters and, as that fine historian Paul Addison, who has sadly just died, has said, had Churchill died at the beginning of 1939, he would “perhaps be remembered today as the most illustrious and interesting failure in twentieth-century British politics”. Instead he was transmuted by events into a national saviour.
It was our good fortune that Churchill found his greatness at his country’s moment of supreme peril. It is our misfortune that the country is now in the hands of the incoherent, haunted, haggard figure, so obviously and utterly out of his depth, that we see daily: at a tragic time, history repeated as unfunny farce.
• Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s books include Yo, Blair!, The Strange Death of Tory England and a forthcoming study of Churchill’s reputation and influence.
