Travel Blog

I’ve been a regular reader of The Spectator since 1980 – when I would go through it back-to-front in the British Council in downtown Warsaw – so I’ve known about Boris Johnson longer than most Americans, and probably a few Brits. He wrote a column for the magazine in the ’90s and in 1999 became its editor. I was struck more by the seeming incongruities of his name than by his prose, primarily because it usually focused on politics, and I spent most of my time in the back of the book. The Spectator distinguished itself then, and still does today, by pairing its High Life column with a Low Life column, which back then was written by the inimitable Jeffrey Bernard, who once wrote: “I wish the police would block off memory lane.”

When the conservative Johnson became prime minister there came, in this country, the inevitable comparisons to Trump, which I hated. Trump had never edited a sophisticated magazine. He had never written a biography of one of his predecessors in office. He had never engaged in a public debate on the merits of the Greeks over the Romans. (Johnson’s opponent in that learned and entertaining scuffle was the Oxford classics professor Mary Beard.) Trump had never, in a television interview, recited from memory, and in Greek, long passages from The Iliad.

What the two men do share, as Johnson’s stint as prime minister has clearly shown, is a stunning unsuitability for public office. But while Trump has few talents, Johnson has many, governing just not being one of them. I am happy to see him leave 10 Downing Street, but I look forward to his next chapter. Should Trump disappear, the world would be a better place. Should Johnson disappear, it would be considerably less interesting.