Got the opposition on toast
Jeremy Paxman
CAMPAIGN 2001 by Nicholas Jones Politico's, £9.99, pp. 340, ISBN 1902301781 FRIENDS, VOTERS, COUNTRYMEN by Boris Johnson HatperCollins, £14.99, pp. 288, ISBN 0007119135 he election of 2001 will not be recalled as one of the high points of the British democratic process. It was notable mainly for producing the lowest voter turnout in modern history. These two books, therefore, do it a big favour.
The first is by Nicholas Jones, the BBC political correspondent, who, I gather, is periodically thumped by Alastair Campbell, the Prime Minister's personal bagpiper. Campbell is going to like him even less after he reads this book, from which he emerges less as the Svengali of this government than its Diaghilev, able 'to enunciate government policy with greater clarity than Tony Blair'.
Jones's diary starts before the treacly Labour campaign launch in front of south London schoolchildren and ends well after the bitterness of Peter Mandelson's victory speech in Hartlepool. This was because the election was delayed, due to the government's inability to control the foot-andmouth outbreak. (This was in the dark days before it decided it could deliver world peace.) From his ringside seat, Jones reintroduces us to such stars as Phoenix, the Mysteriously Preserved Calf; Shaun Woodward and his Magically Vanishing Butler; Sharron Storer, the Astonishing Talking Woman Who Silenced the Prime Minister: and Craig Evans, the Man With the Mullet, whose punch-up with John Prescott was the visual highlight of the campaign. It is an intelligent and entertaining read with an awfully bad title.
Friends, Voters, Countrymen has the subtitle 'Jottings on the Stump', which gives the impression that it is the confessions of an amputee. But no — Cripes! Gadzooks! as the author would say — it turns out to be the diary of a cove called Boris standing for election as MP for Henley-on-Thames.
This is the very same Boris the man who writes the smallest cheques in weekly journalism who edits this magazine. In this book he discloses all sorts of top-level insights into the mysteries of our democracy.
We learn of his firm belief in sandwiches in the pub at lunchtime. We read his musings on why people slow down to 70 on the M40 when there's a police car about. We discover the importance of being nice about babies. We even find out who his tailor is (Boris appears ignorant of the fact that the man is clearly either an impostor or playing some practical joke.) We hear plenty of what various Tory voters have to say about everything from the European Union to teenage vandalism. But we hear strangely little from the man who is supposed to be running for parliament to sort all these things out. It is, indeed, the chronicle of an amputation. In his heroic battle to win the rock-solid Conservative seat of Henley, Boris excised anything which sounded much like a policy.
He does, however, have a very strong line on toast. An anecdote at his selection meeting about how he was unable to buy toast for his wife at the local maternity hospital was, I have it on good authority, what clinched him the Tory nomination. He even confessed that this conversion to private/public partnership was made necessary by the fact that he had eaten his wife's NHS toast allowance while she was fast asleep.
Boris is keen on this story, so keen that he tells it repeatedly. I am not even a party member and have heard him tell it. As they used to say of Julian Critchley's performances, it is always welcomed back as an old friend. And in it is contained the Boris Johnson enigma.
All politicians need a range of characteristics, running from idealism to charlatanism. Sometimes they have too much of one thing or the other, and they turn out like Tam Dalyell or Jeffrey Archer. Most of them start out wanting to play Henry V and risk ending up as King Lear. Boris has started as the Fool and looks happy to aim no higher.
This cannot be because he is a fool. He was a prize scholar at Eton and Balliol. As a journalist, he had the genius to turn reporting of the European Union into something both vital and funny. It is all very odd. His book shines a light into the dusty church halls where the last surviving members of the Conservative party appear to live. It is very funny in places, managing the unusual combination of being self-consciously over-the-top while at the same being self-deprecating. It has, in short, all the idiosyncrasies of its author.
At one point he tries to explain why he wants to give up a perfectly unrespectable career as a journalist in order to trade even further down. The explanation consists of a couple of jokes, a confession of egotism and some faintly whiffy remarks about wanting to share his genius with the British people. It reads a bit like one of those Christmas stocking puzzles where all the letters necessary to form a word are present, but not in the right order.
He should immediately be put in charge of the House of Commons catering arrangements.
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