Asked during the 2019 election to comment on Boris Johnson's use of the word ‘piccaninny’, Nigel Farage replied: ‘It's not very pretty, but that's Boris.’11 Interview on BBC Radio Five Live, transcribed by Josh Milton, Pink News, 3.12.19. Oddly, though not unusually, the utterance was nudged out of the reach of discussion by according it a sort of natural inevitability, as if Johnson's vocabulary were the direct emanation of an essence: Boris. Oh, come on, you know what Boris is like. But in a sense, of course, we don't know what Boris is like – not only because in general, out here in the public domain, we are not really acquainted with the celebrities we read about, but also because this particular celebrity is famously mendacious. What we know is not the truth about him but an image constructed from what he has said or written. The actual position is thus the almost exact opposite of the one implied by Farage: it is not that the language is the expression of a personality, but that the impression of a personality is a product of the language. At this point, students of literature find themselves on familiar ground. After all, the linguistically generated illusion of a knowable person is the very stock in trade of realist narrative. That is to say, Boris is that elementary subject of critical essay writing, a character. For this reason, talking about Boris creates confusion. Agreeing to use the name naturalises the illusion, blurring the awareness that this is not a personal acquaintance but a rhetorical effect. To try and keep it clear in this article, I shall identify the character not as Boris, but as ‘Boris’. When I have occasion to refer to the historical individual, I shall call him Johnson. spent 20 years flat on his back on top of the scaffolding, so rigid that his arm became permanently wonky, and he's left us this gorgeous and slightly bonkers symbolic scene that captures the spirit of the United Kingdom in the early 18th century.33 Text at https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-speech-in-greenwich-3-february-2020. The praise of the painting, and of ‘the spirit of the United Kingdom’, is conventional enough. The characterising element, the equivalent of the children up chimneys, is the carefully inserted note of schoolboy colloquialism – ‘wonky’, ‘bonkers’. Through their wrongness in the formal context, these adjectives signify idiosyncrasy as such: all but explicitly, ‘Boris’ is peeking over the Prime Minister's shoulder and winking at his chums in the audience. This effect derives its political meaning from the general perception of politicians as inauthentic – not as liars necessarily, but as people who say blandly conventional things because they fear the consequences of saying what they really think. ‘Boris’ flaunts a lexical waywardness which suggests that he is untroubled by such fears and so that he is somehow not really a politician at all, or only an amateur one, whose prose, like his trademark hair, refuses the usual professional smoothness and signifies his independence of mind. In both these examples, typically, this fearless nonconformity is itself part of the illusion: it is not really that anything unorthodox is being said, only that a vague atmosphere of unorthodoxy is created by the linguistic register. The second dimension is no less obvious: it is that the line about chimneys is a joke. There is obviously no question of sending children up chimneys; when ‘Boris’ conjures it up as a conceivable feature of post-Brexit Britain, he is kidding. This is integral to the character. Keir Starmer has complained of Johnson's habit of ‘flippancy’ at the despatch box,55 Press conference, 20.12.20 (https://labour.org.uk/press/keir-starmer-speech-on-latest-coronavirus-restictions/) and it appears in all his public genres: exchanges in Parliament, but also books, articles, speeches, interviews. For an indicative example, take his book about Churchill. It starts with a sequence set just after the fall of France in May 1940, whose point is Churchill's magnificent refusal to acknowledge the probability of defeat: it therefore calls for a tragic narrative tone, with high stakes and heroic characters, and on the whole that is how it is written. But it is punctuated by silly jokes about the French. Their generals wear ‘Clouseau-like kepis’, and their ‘abject’ Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud, ‘knew in his heart what his British interlocutors could scarcely believe – that the French were possessed of an origami army: they just kept folding’.66 Boris Johnson, The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2014), chapter 1. This illustrates two peculiar features of the Borisian joke. One is that it is indifferent to context: it can crop up when the situation, or even Johnson's own intention, makes it evidently inappropriate. And the other is that on the whole it is not very funny. ‘Boris’ is not a professional comedian any more than he is a professional politician. He is more like an after-dinner speaker: his pleasantries look for nothing more than a polite chuckle. So what is the point of them? At one point in his essay on jokes, Freud suggests that ‘comic degradation’ can be a tactic against the solemn constraint imposed by whatever affects us as elevated. The reverence exacted by high seriousness represents a psychic expenditure, and this is compensated by a joke which, even momentarily, makes the revered object appear low.77 Sigmund Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, tr James Strachey, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), pp 260-3. A mechanism of this kind is surely at work in ‘Boris's’ otherwise puzzlingly weak jokes. The negotation of employment rights is a serious business of state-entailing considerations of fairness, national sovereignty, the balancing of rival interests. Important and rather boring, it forms a sort of mental burden, which is then lightened by the daft vision of British people as steampunk eccentrics eager for the chance to send children up chimneys. In the delicatessens of Elgin Crescent, the sawdust is sodden with tears. For months, years, Carla Powell will go into mourning, her plumage as black as night. For Mandy is dead, dead ere his prime!88 The original Daily Telegraph piece is elusive, but it was reproduced in an article by Reiss Smith, Pink News, 12.12.19. Mandelson's resignation was on 23 December 1998. this is the moment for us to … recapture the spirit of those seafaring ancestors immortalised above us whose exploits brought not just riches but something even more important than that – and that was a global perspective. That is our ambition. There lies the port, the vessel puffs her sail …99 https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-speech-in-greenwich-3-february-2020. To pour into a glass an inch or so of the raw spirit and shoosh some soda water on top of it was with me the work of a moment. This done, I retired to an armchair and put my feet up, sipping the mixture with carefree enjoyment, rather like Caesar having one in his tent the day he overcame the Nervii.1010 P.G. Wodehouse, Right Ho, Jeeves (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), p. 96. You heard me right. Your kettle, your washing machine, your cooker, your heating, your plug-in electric vehicle – the whole lot of them will get their juice cleanly and without guilt from the breezes that blow around these islands …. I remember how some people used to sneer at wind power, twenty years ago, and say that it wouldn't pull the skin off a rice pudding. They forgot the history of this country. It was offshore wind that puffed the sails of Drake and Raleigh and Nelson, and propelled this country to commercial greatness. 1111 Conference speech, 6.10.20, text at https://www.conservatives.com/news/boris-johnson-read-the-prime-ministers-keynote-speech-in-full Admirers of the Jeeves stories may object that the two characters are fundamentally unlike: Bertie is honourable and a bit dim, whereas ‘Boris’ is neither. That may well be true, but the decisive difference is not so much moral as structural. In the stories, the incongruities of the narrative voice have an entertaining doubleness: they are at once accidents caused by Bertie's rhetorical cluelessness and comic effects deliberately devised by Wodehouse. Bertie is at sea amid the fragments of his education, but the craft is under firm artistic control. In the case of ‘Boris’, this separation is impossible, because there is no formal distinction between character and author: we are to suppose that Boris Johnson is both. Consequently, the character's innocent confusion and the author's conscious manipulation run into one another; the effect of the opposition between them is not an articulated comic structure but an evasive facetiousness; the double voicing appears not as art but as duplicity. Finally, besides the paraded idiosyncrasy, the weak jokes and the quoting, ‘Boris’ is definingly old-fashioned. The contentious bits of his vocabulary are often antique (up-to-date racists don't talk about ‘piccaninnies’ or ‘big white chiefs’); the snippets of poetry suggest Palgrave's Golden Treasury; the English history, populated by sea dogs and imperial visions, seems closer to 1,066 And All That (1930) than to any syllabus that Johnson himself is likely to have encountered. The character projected by this repertoire is a humorous old buffer, always ready to defend the retention of the Elgin Marbles or ‘Rule, Britannia!’ at the Proms.1414 ‘“Someone needs to restore your marbles”: Boris Johnson reacts to George Clooney's Elgin Marbles comment’, Daily Telegraph, 12.2.14; ‘Proms row: Johnson calls for end to “cringing embarrassment” over UK history’, Guardian, 25.8.20. When he thinks about the exploitation of labour, it is typical that he cites a practice which ended in 1875. This time we know in our hearts that we are winning, and that we will inevitably win, because the armies of science are coming to our aid with all the morale-boosting, bugle-blasting excitement of Wellington's Prussian allies coming through the woods on the afternoon of Waterloo.1515 Daily Mail, 28.11.20 For another thing, the conceit takes an inherently global issue – the pandemic in this case, or carbon-free energy in the previous example – and nationalises it. The reference to ‘Prussian allies’ is intended, I think, as a felicitous acknowledgment that the first vaccine to be approved was partly German; but it is nonetheless striking that a clinical achievement should be figured in terms of a battle against a neighbouring country. History is insistently and combatively national history: Drake, Nelson, Wellington. It is over-motivated because it is serving as decor for nationalist ideology. But then the nationalist appeal suffers from an interesting uncertainty of address, precisely because of its archaism. In theory, the icons of national endeavour work to unite the country around its shared memories. As Brits, we all thrill to the well-remembered bugle. But in reality the unity is imaginary: many British people are indifferent to the island story, and many know nothing about it. Moreover, the writing knows about this lack of connection, even insists on it: this is after all the Mail, which complains periodically of cultural loss, as modish and ignorant teachers deprive the nation's youth of its heritage.1616 E.g., ‘Trendy teaching is “producing a generation of history numbskulls”’, Daily Mail, 2.7.09. At https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1196911/Trendy-teaching-producing-generation-history-numbskulls.html When ‘Boris’ dwells with relish on ‘the afternoon of Waterloo’, it is also a snub to those of us who don't know what he is talking about. So the bugle-blasting rhetoric is inclusive and partisan in the same breath, like Brexit itself: it gestures towards national community, but at the same time flaunts the speaker's membership of an exclusive club. This suggests that ‘Boris’ is not merely a personal style but also a minor pathology of Britain's decline. Nationalist themes are endlessly repeated and adorned with a verbal anthology of markers of Britishness. But the ideology constantly acknowledges its own historical belatedness by its withdrawals from populist assertion into a self-parodying coterie. Unlike the conservative heroes he samples, Johnson knows very well that the imperial game is long over – that is why ‘Boris’ never says anything straight.