Churchill was the leader that Britain needed at the time – could Boris be the same?
The new Prime Minister had never been short of confidence about his own abilities.
On the day of his ascension to the highest office in the land, he wrote “I felt as though I were walking with destiny and that all my past life had been a preparation for this hour and for this trial”.
But despite this self-belief, he was oddly mercurial. Having just been sworn into office at Buckingham Palace, he turned to his bodyguard somewhat tearfully, and said “I hope that it is not too late. I am very much afraid that it is. We can only do our best.”
Meanwhile, his enemies – and they were not few in number – were scathing in their condemnation of his elevation.
His predecessor’s assistant private secretary, Jock Colville, who later turned into a staunch supporter, recorded that the Prime Minister was “the greatest adventurer of modern political history… a half-breed American whose main support was that of inefficient but talkative people of a similar type”.
Meanwhile, Conservative party grandee Lord Woolton sniffed “few people have succeeded in obtaining such a public demand for their promotion as the result of the failure of an enterprise”.
If there was a grudging recognition that exceptional times required an exceptional figure to lead the country, that was more than tempered by the belief that an extraordinary gamble was underway, one upon which the fate of the nation rested. And there were many willing to bet against the man chosen to throw the dice.
The Prime Minister in question was, of course, Winston Churchill. But despite the circumstances facing Boris Johnson being radically different – with Churchill’s challenge literally being do or die in nature – there are sufficient uncanny parallels to raise a wry smile from the student of Churchill who has now taken the national reins at a time of crisis.
Timing in politics, as in life, is everything.
Churchill’s genius was to have been wrong on all the great issues of the 1930s that mattered, like Indian self-government and the abdication, but to have been right on the one that the nation needed someone to be right on: appeasement.
This made him the inevitable, if not universally popular, choice to take over the helm once the Chamberlain government was sunk by a Norway campaign which Churchill had ironically been largely responsible for as first lord of the Admiralty.
Churchill’s multiple sins – even recent ones – were washed away by the requirements of the hour. And cometh the hour, cometh the man.
Similarly, although he was a popular mayor of London who reached across the party divide, it is fair to say that the Boris of more recent vintage has not necessarily endeared himself universally.
In particular, his leadership of the Vote Leave campaign burned bridges with many of his London supporters and those who had been attracted by his social liberalism. And the diplomatic faux pas over Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, and some of his more colourful comments in general, have raised more than the occasional eyebrow, leading some to doubt his fitness to serve.
But is there any real doubt that at this moment of great national stasis – with the country paralysed in its attempt to secure a clear resolution of the Brexit issue – it might be prudent to turn to the man who helped set that process in motion to see if he can finish it?
Ardent Remainers will not agree, of course. But they may yet have their time once more should Boris fail to deliver what he has promised.
In the meantime, and for the first time in a thus far miserable Brexit process, Leavers can say that one of their own is in charge, and someone with a swashbuckling style who will not just rearrange the pieces on the Brexit negotiating table, but upend it completely if necessary.
As we gaze upon the prospect of the Boris Johnson chapter of British history, it is worth recalling the words of the political commentator who wrote Churchill off in 1920 as lacking “the unifying spirit of character which alone can master the discrepant or even antagonistic elements in a single mind, giving them not merely force, which is something, but direction, which is much more”.
It took Churchill 20 years to prove his critics wrong, and that all which he had once been damned for – the adventurism, bloody-mindedness, and exotic turn of phrase – could yet be turned to critical effect.
Boris has far less time in which to show that his whole is greater than the sum of his parts, with the latest Brexit deadline due in 98 days. But if there was ever a juncture when his sunny optimism about the “Awesome Foursome” and his enthusiasm to prove “the doubters, the doomsters, the gloomsters” wrong was required, it is now.
If the people who bet against Britain end up losing their shirts once more, just as they did in 1940, it will be because Boris banishes the ghosts of his failures, and summons up his inner Churchill.
Buckle up. It’s going to be quite the ride.
Main image credit: Getty