Opinion

Fionnuala O Connor: When it comes to the next PM, nosiness could be described as a civic duty

Jeremy Hunt and Boris Johnson are battling it out to become the next Conservative leader. Picture by Yui Mok, Press Association
Jeremy Hunt and Boris Johnson are battling it out to become the next Conservative leader. Picture by Yui Mok, Press Association Jeremy Hunt and Boris Johnson are battling it out to become the next Conservative leader. Picture by Yui Mok, Press Association

Shirt hanging out of his trousers, fake-distracted hands through hair when a question is awkward, Boris Johnson is as good as a play.

The London political/media whirl that has finally squeezed out Theresa May and is now plotting against her likeliest successor is fascinatingly different from that immediately around us. People are still hoping for more on that row between the probable next British prime minister, and his current partner.

Do not pretend, dear readers, that this is beneath your interest. Sheer curiosity is human, as well as being an essential in journalism. We’ll come back to the journalism. Since the man shouting, swearing and spilling red wine is on the verge of heading the government of the state we all belong to, much though many wish it otherwise, we could even describe nosiness as civic duty.

That DUP MP David Simpson sent thousands of texts to his assistant/lover is less intriguing than the Johnsonian stew of sexual and verbal incontinence. This is not only because the most distinctive offering from the member for Upper Bann, before his text marathon, was his quip in Westminster that it was Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, not ‘Adam and Steve’. The DUP pose as moral arbiters encourages bad thoughts in those less inclined to impose their beliefs on others.

Hypocrisy is always dislikeable. It is bound to be satisfying to discover that elected representatives of a moralistic organisation are failing to live up to their own literally-interpreted biblical precepts. But at least no political figure here is ever going to be in charge of ordering drone attacks on Pakistan hill villages, unlike the charlatan apparently headed for the top of today’s British government.

Although ‘they’, and they are a mixed bunch, are out to get him. One lot are Tory rivals, plus a few bedraggled Tory ‘moderates’. Might he be prime minister for no more than days? Then there are the journalists. Laid bare by the Brexit-induced meltdown of the Conservative party, the other fascinating element in this tale is the inbred nature of London’s politics and journalism. At the centre is a flimsy person, borne up by ego and ambition untethered by reality, and pursued by bears. One weekend essay reported protectively from what sounded like inside the camp of Carrie Symonds, Johnson’s much younger and still comparatively new partner. Sky’s Adam Boulton was indignant that the scene of the row had been ‘man-splained’ by Boris aides as Johnson’s flat.

People should know, Boulton wrote, that Symonds pays the mortgage, with Johnson homeless as his ex-wife gears up their divorce. Boulton, having married Tony Blair’s ex major-domo Anji Hunter, well knows the political-media web. The Guardian’s witty Marina Hyde lamented the over-supply of journalists in the story, and that of the two contending for Conservative favour the worse journalist (Johnson) had won.

With understandable delight in the circumstances most in the media are doing a professional job, charting Johnson’s Brexit lies as well as his affairs, his links to reactionary horrors like Steve Bannon. Those who have worked alongside Johnson cite atrocious temper and disdain for truth as greater political risk than his maltreatment of women. In this reading, chronic infidelity and fathering of unacknowledged children is painful evidence of fundamental unseriousness, and arguably also of instability.

Almost with wonderment, a Times columnist recalled interviewing him some years back for a general profile and innocently asking how many children he had. Was it four, or five? She described it like a video game, Johnson shouting in panic: ‘Swerve, swerve! Avoid, avoid!’.

Reporting, here as in London, used to shy away from scandal. No longer, though the libel laws the DUP cling to are still an inhibition. This is not London, and interwoven families can make truth-telling very sore. It has to be done. Even when none of it is fun.