2021.06.07 鲍里斯-约翰逊很清楚自己在做什么

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POLITICS
THE MINISTER OF CHAOS
Boris Johnson knows exactly what he’s doing.

By Tom McTague
JULY/AUGUST 2021 ISSUE
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This article was published online on June 7, 2021.


“Nothing can go wrong!” Boris Johnson said, jumping into the driver’s seat of a tram he was about to take for a test ride. “Nothing. Can. Go. Wrong.”

The prime minister was visiting a factory outside Birmingham, campaigning on behalf of the local mayor ahead of “Super Thursday”—a spate of elections across England, Scotland, and Wales in early May. These elections would give voters a chance to have their say on Johnson’s two years in office, during which quite a lot did go wrong.


Johnson was, as usual, unkempt and amused, a tornado of bonhomie in a country where politicians tend to be phlegmatic and self-serious, if not dour and awkward. Walking in, he had launched into a limerick about a man named Dan who likes to ride trams. The mayor, Andy Street, looked horrified, tomorrow’s disastrous headlines seeming to flash before his eyes. (The limerick, I’m sorry to say, was not at all filthy.)

Johnson’s aide told me the prime minister had been excited about his tram ride all morning. He loves infrastructure, mobile infrastructure especially—planes, trains, bicycles, trams, even bridges to Ireland and airports floating in the sea. And he loves photo ops. There would be no point in displaying action and intent and momentum if no one were present to document it.

“All aboard!” he yelled, though there were no passengers. News photographers crowded around and men in hard hats stood by. The tram (British for “streetcar”) inched forward, only to jerk and shudder to a halt. That’s £2.5 million worth of vehicle, the chief executive of the tram company told me with a nervous laugh. When Johnson finally made it around the bend and neared the end of the circuit, he slammed on the brakes and blasted the horn. “Nothing went wrong!” he said gleefully.

Nothing, really, could have gone wrong. The tram was limited to three miles an hour and had an automatic-override system to protect it from reckless prime ministers, among others. No matter. It provided Johnson with the chance to do what he loves: to put on a show, to create a little tumult where there is none. He became famous in the late 1990s and early 2000s for his appearances on a popular satirical news program, Have I Got News for You. Each time, he was the butt of the jokes and also the center of attention. After he was first elected to Parliament, in 2001, his colleagues told him that he would have to become serious to succeed in politics. To spend time with Johnson, as I have done over the past several months, is to watch a politician completely indifferent to such advice.


Johnson is nothing like the other prime ministers I’ve covered. Tony Blair and David Cameron were polished and formidable. Gordon Brown and Theresa May were rigid, fearful, cautious. Johnson might as well be another species. He is lively and engaged, superficially disheveled but in fact focused and watchful. He is scruffy, impulsive, exuberant. He is the first British leader I’ve seen who genuinely appears to be having a good time. His conversations with members of the public are peppered with “That’s amazing!” and “You’re joking!” and “Wonderful!” and “Fantastic, fantastic!”

Read: Boris Johnson and the optimism delusion

His mission, he says, is to restore Britain’s faith in itself, to battle the “effete and desiccated and hopeless” defeatism that defined the Britain of his childhood. He believes that if you repeat that it is morning in Britain over and over again, the country will believe it, and then it will come to pass. His critics, however, say he is just leading the country “sinking giggling into the sea.”

By now, every British subject is an expert on the matter of Boris Johnson. We know that he has an extraordinary gift for extramarital affairs, that he has (at least) six children by three women, and that his personal finances are a regular subject of press gossip. We know that he has been fired twice for lying (once as a journalist, once as a politician); that he was the Conservative mayor of Britain’s left-wing capital city; that he helped engineer the defenestration of two prime ministers from his own party; and that he very nearly died during the pandemic. For three decades, we’ve followed his writing, his ambition, his outrages, his scandals. Yet the truth, for a professional Boris-watcher such as myself, is maddeningly elusive.


To many, Johnson is a clown—the embodiment of the demise of public standards and the face of international populism, post-truth politics, even British decline itself. He is the man who got stuck on a zip line during the London Olympics, dangling above the crowds in a harness and helmet, helplessly waving British flags while people cheered below. The French newspaper Libération used this image on its front page after Britain voted to leave the European Union, with the headline “Good Luck.”

Photo: Boris Johnson holding two flags while hanging in harness from zipline, with London Eye ferris wheel in background
During the 2012 London Olympics, Johnson—who was then the city’s mayor—got stuck on a zip line, dangling over the crowds until he could be rescued.
( Barcroft Media / Getty )
Johnson’s sense of humor regularly gets him into trouble. In 2017, as foreign secretary, he joked about the Libyan city of Sirte having a bright future, as soon as its residents “clear the dead bodies away.” Announcing further COVID-19 restrictions in October 2020, he reportedly told lawmakers that at least they wouldn’t have to spend Christmas with their in-laws. He has likened Hillary Clinton to “a sadistic nurse in a mental hospital” and the Conservative Party’s infighting to “Papua New Guinea–style orgies of cannibalism and chief-killing.”

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To his most vehement critics, he is worse than a clown: a charlatan who lied his way to the top, who endangers democracy and traffics in racism, and who believes in nothing but his own advancement. He has been accused of triggering a wave of populist anger that he then rode to 10 Downing Street, leaving Britain weakened and in very real danger of dissolution. (Scotland once again is considering making its own exit.) He is leading his country through the most radical reshaping of its economy, electoral map, and international role since World War II. To Johnson’s cry of faith that nothing can go wrong, critics say: No, a lot can go wrong—and very well might.

When I began meeting with Johnson early this year, I didn’t know precisely how he would take to interrogation. His exuberance worked in my favor; the fact that he is a former journalist, familiar with our wicked ways, did not.

In Northern Ireland once, he looked over at me as I scribbled in my notebook. “Ah, Tom,” he said, “you’re picking up color or something, aren’t you?” The answer, of course, was yes—color being the journalist’s term for anything that goes beyond straight facts or quotes, the details used to paint a scene for the reader. But I was after more than that.

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I wanted to understand whether Johnson was truly a populist, or just popular. His argument for patriotic optimism has obvious appeal, but I wondered whether it masked more cynical impulses. Was he working in the country’s interest, or his own? And I wanted to see up close if he truly was—as his enemies charge—the British equivalent of Donald Trump. On this question, Johnson would have an emphatic answer for me.

Johnson is leading his country through the most radical reshaping of its economy, electoral map, and international role since World War II.
Later, in his office, I asked Johnson to imagine that he was a journalist again. How would he open this profile? What is the key, I asked, to understanding Boris Johnson? After a few ums and ahs, Johnson replied: “Sheer physical fitness. And hard work.”


I laughed, as he’d surely hoped I would. “Look, Tom, that is your challenge,” he said (pronouncing challenge as if it were French), shutting down this line of inquiry. Here was the uncrackable Johnson: the amiability, the self-deprecation, the evasion.

a pink rule
On the day of Johnson’s visit to the tram factory, the big national story was the formation of an elite European soccer league, modeled on its steroidal American cousin, the NFL. The plan would draw at least six English clubs and six from the continent into a “European Super League.” It was announced the night before, and Johnson had come out against it, arguing that it would yank England’s grandest clubs from their traditional environment against the wishes of their fans. It was unfair, he said, and the government would fight it. His opposition led the news that morning.

I wondered why he cared so much. He doesn’t know anything about soccer, and in fact delights in his ignorance.

But Johnson intuited something important about English anxiety, and he turned the issue into a parable for a sense of powerlessness and dislocation felt by many in Britain, precisely the sort of feelings that had energized the Brexit movement and carried him to 10 Downing Street. In one of our conversations, Johnson had said that people need to feel part of something bigger than themselves. He told me that he doesn’t think of himself as a nationalist, but he argued that individuals need to feel that they belong, and they shouldn’t be patronized for worrying that their traditions and connections are being eroded. Was this why he opposed the European Super League?


“Absolutely,” he said. “This is about the deracination of the community fan base.” Soccer clubs, he continued, had turned into global brands and were leaving their supporters behind, “taking off like a great mother ship and orbiting the planet.”

I was struck by his use of the word deracinated to describe the peculiar dynamics of English soccer partisanship. To be deracinated is to be uprooted from your customs, your culture, your home—in this instance, from England. Here, Johnson was offering himself as the people’s tribune, defender of the national game from the threat of alien imposition. He was channeling a cry of anger and turning it against globalization.

Read: Boris Johnson can remake Britain like few before him

Johnson is a strange figurehead for such a movement. The prime minister is, at least nominally, a free-marketeer and the chief proselytizer of “Global Britain.” He plays to the rootedness of Middle England—to its anxieties, traditions, and national pride—but he is also a very obvious transient.

He was born Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, in a hospital that served poor New Yorkers. Johnson’s father, Stanley, then 23, had moved to the U.S. on a creative-writing scholarship but quit and enrolled in an economics program at Columbia University instead. The first few months of Boris’s life were spent in a single-room apartment opposite the Chelsea Hotel. He was officially a dual U.S.–U.K. citizen until 2016, once telling David Letterman that he could, “technically speaking,” be elected president. Some wondered whether he meant it—he had, after all, said as a child that his ambition was to be “world king.” (Johnson renounced his U.S. citizenship after being chased by the IRS for a tax bill on the sale of a London home.)

Johnson’s intricate name suggests the cosmopolitanism of his background. Boris honors a Russian émigré whom Stanley and Johnson’s mother, Charlotte, met in Mexico shortly before his birth. The man bought them plane tickets back to the U.S. so the heavily pregnant Charlotte wouldn’t have to endure the Greyhound bus. De Pfeffel comes from Johnson’s half-French grandmother, Irène, who was born in the grand Pavillon du Barry, in Versailles, which belonged to her grandfather, Baron Hubert de Pfeffel.

Even the Johnson is less English than it might seem. Boris’s great-grandfather was a Turkish journalist and politician who was murdered in the chaos of the Ottoman empire’s collapse. He was denounced as a traitor for his opposition to Kemal Atatürk and was attacked and hanged by a nationalist mob wielding stones, sticks, and knives. According to Sonia Purnell’s biography, Just Boris, his body parts were said to have been stuffed in a tree. His half-English, half-Swiss wife, Winifred, gave birth to their son Osman in England, but died soon after. Osman was brought up by his English grandmother—maiden name Johnson—and went by the name Wilfred Johnson. (In 2020, at the age of 55, Boris Johnson named his new baby boy Wilfred.)

Over the first 14 years of Johnson’s life, his family moved 32 times, including to Washington, D.C., where Stanley worked at the World Bank. Some of Johnson’s fondest early memories are of his tree house in their yard on Morrison Street, just off Connecticut Avenue. In 1974, Charlotte had a nervous breakdown while the family was living in Brussels. The next year, Johnson and his younger sister, who were then 11 and 10, were sent to a boarding school in England, traveling there each term unaccompanied by their parents.

Before leaving for school, the young Alexander was a quiet, introspective boy. He had been partially deaf until age 8 or 9, because of a condition known as “glue ear,” in which fluid builds up behind the eardrum. At school, he transformed himself into the confident, insouciant extrovert we see today. It was at Eton that Alexander became Boris, a “fully-fledged school celebrity,” according to Purnell—head boy, editor of the school magazine, president of the debating society. Sir Eric Anderson, who was a housemaster to Tony Blair in Scotland and to Johnson at Eton, was once asked to name the most interesting pupil he’d ever had, and replied: “Without a doubt, Boris Johnson.”

3 photos: Johnson at age 8; Johnson at 21 in formalwear; Johnson with Allegra Mostyn-Owen, whom he married
Johnson was a quiet, introspective child who was partially deaf until he was 8 or 9, but he transformed himself after his parents sent him off to boarding school. Above, Johnson at age 8 (top left), at 21 at Oxford (top right), and with Allegra Mostyn-Owen, whom he would soon marry.
( Sophie Baker / Arenapal; Brian Smith / Reuters; Dafydd Jones )
After graduating from Eton and then Oxford—the finishing schools of England’s elite, where he was close friends with Princess Diana’s brother, Charles Spencer—Johnson married young, returned to Brussels, divorced, married again, moved back to London, conducted numerous affairs, divorced again, got engaged again, and all the while steadily made his professional ascent.

Throughout, Johnson has stood apart from any clique, whether the modernizers who have sought to remake the Conservative Party or the Thatcherite resistance against them. Johnson has, in fact, tended to avoid the formal ties of obligation that come with being part of any group. In many ways he himself is the definition of deracinated. (A friend of his once told me he suspected that Johnson subscribed to a pre-Christian morality system, with a multitude of gods and no clear set of rules. I put this to the prime minister, but he dismissed the notion. “Christianity is a superb ethical system and I would count myself as a kind of very, very bad Christian,” he told me. “No disrespect to any other religions, but Christianity makes a lot of sense to me.”)

The one group he is associated with are the Brexiteers. Johnson largely avoids the nativist rhetoric of the group’s more extreme elements, but he does believe that Britain’s discomfort with its power and its history has gone too far. (George Orwell once observed that Britain is “the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.”) On England’s national day last summer, Johnson released a video message urging the country to raise a glass “without embarrassment, without shame.” Imagine a U.S. president needing to make the same qualification on Independence Day.

But while Johnson’s patriotic message is powerful in England—by far the largest of the U.K.’s four nations—it does not readily translate elsewhere, particularly in Scotland, which voted to remain in the EU. The great irony is that although Johnson led the campaign to “take back control” from Europe, his success has intensified calls in Scotland for control to be wrested from London. This is where Johnson’s legacy is most at risk. If he were to preside over the breakup of the country, whatever else he did would forever be overshadowed. He would be the Lord North of the 21st century: not the prime minister who lost America, but the one who lost Britain itself.

a pink rule
Afew days after Johnson’s tram ride, I saw him again in Hartlepool, a coastal town in England’s struggling, industrial northeast. Johnson had threatened to drop a “legislative bomb” on the English soccer clubs planning to join the new Super League. Within hours all six had pulled out, and the league had collapsed. Newspapers across Europe hailed Johnson’s influence. Italy’s La Gazzetta Dello Sport, apparently a newspaper given to hyperbole, likened Johnson’s intervention to Churchill’s stand against the Nazis.

Keen to squeeze more political capital from the episode, Johnson stopped by a soccer stadium in town. I grew up only a short drive from Hartlepool. The region was once rock-solid Labour Party territory, but Conservatives have been making inroads there. It was heavily in favor of Brexit, and it has a long tradition of contempt for the political establishment. In 2002, the town elected its soccer club’s mascot, H’Angus the Monkey, as mayor. The man who wore the costume served the term and was twice reelected.

When Johnson arrived to be interviewed by the regional press, I showed him the Gazzetta article. Grabbing my phone, he read the headline aloud in exaggerated Italian as an aide urged him to get to the business at hand, which was to ensure that the town moved into the Conservative column.

Talking to a TV reporter, Johnson kept referring to a previous Labour MP for Hartlepool, Blair’s close ally Peter Mandelson, as “Lord Mandelson of Guacamole.” Mandelson is reputed to have once confused mushy peas—a side dish served with fish and chips—for guacamole. The story isn’t true, but the populist in Johnson enjoyed it so much that he deployed the nickname three more times before leaving the stadium. The joke would be hypocritical but for the fact that the prime minister doesn’t try to hide his own class status: When David Cameron was mocked for admitting that he didn’t know the price of a loaf of bread, a reporter confronted Johnson with the same question. He got it right, but then added: “I can tell you the price of a bottle of champagne—how about that?”

His electoral genius lies in his ability to stop his opponents from thinking straight: In their hatred for him, they cannot see why he is popular.
After the interview, Johnson joined a group of players passing a ball around. “Another chapter in my epic of football humiliation,” he said, alluding to a much-watched YouTube video of a charity soccer match in which Johnson charged at an opposing player before stumbling and crashing headfirst into the player’s groin, leaving him collapsed in pain on the ground. In Hartlepool, Johnson told the players that he was better with an oval ball than a round one, referring to rugby, the sport of Britain’s elite schools. He added that he knew how to play the wall game, an obscure sport played only at Eton. The Hartlepool players didn’t seem to know what he was talking about.

Johnson and his team then set off to knock on doors on a quiet suburban street. Prime-ministerial campaigning is more homespun and spontaneous than the American presidential sort, and Johnson knew next to nothing about the people whose doors he’d be knocking on. At one home, a retired couple told him they were furious about his handling of the pandemic, especially his failure to close the border as emerging strains of the coronavirus ravaged India.

2 photos: Johnson campaigning for Parliament; Johnson waving as prime minister
Johnson’s political ascent began with a run for Parliament in 2001 (top) and culminated with his becoming prime minister in 2019.
( The Independent / Alamy ; Adrian Dennis / AFP / Getty )
Before the virus was brought under control in the spring, Johnson had overseen one of the worst responses in Europe; more than 125,000 Britons have died. His own former chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, has publicly accused Johnson and his team of botching the government’s response to the pandemic and then lying about it.

Read: How the pandemic revealed Britain’s national illness

Johnson stood silently and took the couple’s haranguing. A few days later, he would take another; it was reported that in the depths of the pandemic, faced with announcing a second lockdown, he had declared: “No more fucking lockdowns—let the bodies pile high in their thousands.” He has denied saying this.

At the other houses, however, the prime minister was treated like a lovable celebrity, and it was almost taken for granted when he asked people if he could count on their support. He was twice stopped and thanked for “everything you’ve done.” (Although Britain’s death count is appalling, Johnson has also overseen a rapid vaccine rollout; by March, Britain had administered first doses to half its adult population—more than the U.S., Germany, and France.) Two women came out clutching toddlers. Johnson elbow-bumped the little ones and asked how old they were, then struggled to remember precisely when his own son would turn 1. The mothers laughed as he fumbled for the right date—guessing three times before he got it right.

Johnson’s uncle, the journalist Edmund Fawcett, told me the prime minister’s shambolic manner helps him connect with people. One of Johnson’s closest allies in government, his Brexit negotiator, David Frost, said the technique was “deliberate but unconscious.” Johnson, however, seems to know exactly what he’s doing. He said as much in an interview with CNBC in 2013, when he was asked whether his performative incompetence was typical in a politician. “No, I think it’s a very cunning device,” he said. “Self-deprecation is all about understanding that basically people regard politicians as a bunch of shysters.”

According to his allies, Johnson goes out of his way to suggest that he’s more flawed than he really is. He claims, for instance, not only that he has smoked pot “quite a few” times but also that he once tried cocaine and accidentally sneezed it out. Andrew Gimson, who wrote Boris: The Rise of Boris Johnson, doesn’t believe it. Noting that the prime minister once described sex as “the supreme recreation,” Gimson argued that “where others might reach for the bottle, or the needle, he is more likely to embrace some warm and attractive woman.”

Johnson’s ability to invite underestimation seems to shield him from the usual rules of politics. “There’s a magic to Boris which allows him to escape some of the political challenges that he’s had since he became prime minister,” Frank Luntz, an American pollster who was friends with Johnson at Oxford, told me. “People are more patient with him, they are more forgiving of him, because he’s not a typical politician.”

And there’s been a lot to forgive.

Johnson has written about Africans with “watermelon smiles” and described gay men as “tank-topped bumboys.” As foreign secretary, he put a fellow citizen at risk when he mistakenly claimed that she was in Iran to teach journalism, giving Tehran an excuse to charge her with spreading propaganda. As prime minister he has erected a trade barrier within his own country as the price of Brexit—subjecting Northern Ireland to EU regulations while the rest of the country is free to do its own thing.

That nothing ever seems to stick drives his opponents mad. He won the Conservative leadership just weeks after it was reported that an argument with his fiancée, Carrie Symonds, became so heated, neighbors called the police. He won the biggest parliamentary majority in a generation despite breaking promises over when and how he would secure a Brexit deal. Time and again, when controversy has engulfed him, he has emerged unscathed.

Read: Boris Johnson keeps defying gravity

Part of his electoral genius lies in his ability to stop his opponents from thinking straight: In their hatred for him, they cannot see why he is popular, nor what to do about it.

a pink rule
“What am i doing this for?” Johnson asked his aides, looking at his schedule for the day and seeing a slot carved out to talk to me.

“It’s for the profile I advised you not to do,” James Slack, Johnson’s then–director of communications, said.

In the year since I’d first asked Johnson’s team for time with the prime minister, his director of communications had changed twice, and much of the rest of Johnson’s early team had been replaced, partly over interoffice rivalries that had spun out of control. In the end, Johnson himself gave the green light. When I finally got to see him, it was March 2021 and the country was just starting to come out of its most stringent lockdown.

Visiting Downing Street is a strange business: You have to be precleared to enter and you pass through airport-style metal detectors, but then you simply walk up the street as if it were any other and knock on a door to be let in. It is not a single building, but a warren of Georgian townhouses that have been connected, extended, fixed up, and perpetually tinkered with. At the heart of the complex is No. 10, the prime minister’s official residence and place of work.

Behind the smart black bricks and polished front door, an air of shabbiness hangs over the place. Stepping inside, you find yourself in a high-ceilinged entrance hall where the house cat, Larry, is often asleep. Discarded modems sit on windowsills; thick red carpets lie worn and uneven with bits of tape stuck to them. (This spring, Johnson was caught up in an ethics investigation over allegations that he’d sought political donations to help pay for redecorating the Downing Street apartment he shares with Symonds, who was blamed in the British tabloids and nicknamed “Carrie Antoinette.” Johnson has denied any wrongdoing.)

Downing Street is extraordinarily ill-suited to its function as the nerve center of a modern bureaucracy. Its rooms are either small and disconnected or big and impractical—the dining rooms, libraries, and servants’ quarters of a different England. It manages to be both modest and cavernous, iconic and underwhelming. It is outdated and dysfunctional—and yet somehow it works. It is a physical incarnation of 21st-century Britain.

Johnson believes the British state showed unforgivable weakness in its Brexit negotiations, and some of his advisers told me it also exhibited fatal incompetence during the pandemic. Britain’s bureaucracy, they argue, is in need of an overhaul. Johnson’s critics would point out that it was he who negotiated Britain’s exit from the EU, and the state was not to blame for his pandemic decision making. It is also true, however, that Britain was notably ill-equipped to cope with the coronavirus, and that by the time Johnson took over in 2019, he faced a devil’s bargain in how to leave the EU, the terms on offer largely having been set beforehand.

Britain’s only real success fighting COVID-19 came when Johnson turned down the opportunity to join the EU’s vaccine-procurement program and handed the country’s own effort to a venture capitalist with a virtually unlimited budget outside the usual rules of government. As a result, Britons were being vaccinated in the millions long before the rest of Europe. But this way of working has created layers of complexity and confusion that have left no clear lines of accountability. Even some of those at the top feel a sense of powerlessness, telling me that the only way to get anything done is to declare, “I’ve spoken to the prime minister about this, and he wants it to happen.”

Read: John le Carré Knew England’s Secrets

In his office, Johnson steered the conversation to a subject he raised nearly every time I saw him. He’d read an article I’d written, a kind of eulogy for the late British novelist John le Carré. I’d praised le Carré’s observations about England and its failing ruling class—privately educated charlatans whom the author mocked as the greatest dissemblers on Earth. And I’d listed Johnson as an example.

He told me he’d taken a completely different lesson from the novelist. To Johnson, le Carré had exposed not the fakery of the British ruling class, but its endemic passivity, and acceptance of decline. “I read Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy at school,” he said. “It presented to me this miserable picture of these Foreign Office bureaucrats … For me, they were the problem.” Johnson told me this was exactly what he was determined to fight.

“You lump me together with various other people—and you say we are all products of these decadent institutions and this culture, an inadequate and despairing establishment. That’s not me!” He said he was trying “to recapture some of the energy and optimism that this country used to have.”

Johnson believes there remains a “world-weariness” in the government that has to be “squeezed out,” one of his ministers told me. Johnsonism, an aide said, was partly about “puffing our chest out and saying, ‘We’re Britain.’ ” (Several of Johnson’s advisers agreed to be candid in exchange for anonymity.) In an early phone call with Joe Biden, an aide told me, Johnson said he disliked the phrase special relationship after the president used it. To Johnson it seemed needy and weak.

Johnson made a name for himself with outlandish stories about European regulations governing the flavors of potato chips, the bendiness of bananas, the size of condoms.
The one member of le Carré’s establishment whom Johnson does not hold in contempt is the hero, George Smiley, who is jaded like his colleagues but plods on nonetheless, catching traitors and serving Britain. “He was a patriot,” Johnson said.

To Johnson, Smiley might be a cynic, but he is also a romantic—a believer. Isn’t that you? I asked. Johnson is a romantic who urges the country to believe in itself, but who plays the political game, stretches the truth, stands against his friends, and deposes his colleagues. After an initial show of mock evasion, the prime minister replied: “All romantics need the mortar of cynicism to hold themselves up.”

Here was Johnson offering a rare moment of self-reflection. During the time I spent with him, whenever we got close to anything approaching self-analysis, he would parry, swerve, or crack a joke. At one point, when I brought the conversation back to le Carré, Johnson fell into a series of impersonations of the novelist’s characters. One of Johnson’s aides told me the prime minister loathed anything that smacked of overintellectualizing politics.

At Downing Street, I heard Johnson repeat a saying his maternal grandmother was fond of quoting. “Darling,” he said, mimicking her, “remember, it’s not how you’re doing; it’s what you’re doing.” Johnson said this was “the key advice.” I asked Johnson’s sister, Rachel, about it. She told me their mother was also fond of the saying. “It’s about being in the moment,” she said, rather than worrying about how things will turn out.

Get on with it is the Johnson mantra.

a pink rule
Johnson often carries a notepad around, a habit from his days as a journalist. A former aide told me that you know he has taken your point seriously if he writes it down. He runs meetings like an editor, surveying his staff for ideas, always looking for “the line”—cutting through dry and occasionally contradictory facts to identify what he sees as the heart of the matter, the story.

The prime minister’s journalism career, however, got off to an ignominious start. In 1988, one year out of Oxford, he was fired from The Times, the newspaper of the establishment, for making up a quote in a front-page story and attributing it to his godfather. He has since apologized, sort of, while also complaining about the “sniveling, fact-grubbing historians” who called him out.

Despite getting sacked from The Times, he quickly landed at its rival, The Daily Telegraph, and rose through the ranks of British media, eventually becoming the editor in chief of The Spectator, Britain’s premier conservative magazine. In 1992, Johnson was the Brussels correspondent for the Telegraph when the Maastricht Treaty was signed, laying the foundation for the modern incarnation of the European Union and sending British politics into one of its perennial tailspins over London’s relationship with Europe. It was the perfect time and place for a man of Johnson’s talents.

Photo: Boris Johnson standing behind messy desk by fireplace in office
Johnson in his office at The Spectator magazine, where he served as editor in chief from 1999 to 2005 ( Edd Westmacott / Alamy )
He made a name for himself with outlandish, not-always-accurate stories about European regulations ostensibly being imposed on Britons—rules governing the flavors of potato chips, the bendiness of bananas, the size of condoms. Margaret Thatcher, whose battles over European integration had cost her the premiership in 1990, reputedly enjoyed Johnson’s columns. He later described his life in Brussels as “chucking these rocks over the garden wall and [listening] to this amazing crash from the greenhouse next door over in England.”

But rereading Johnson’s work today, what jumps out is that he appears far less hostile to Europe than one might imagine: In a January 1992 article, for example, he writes that while the principal charges against the EU—that it was wasteful and bureaucratic—were true, these problems were “dwarfed by the benefits” of membership. He goes on to say that the EU was “run by an undemocratic Brussels machine, full of faceless busybodies,” but that it also gave Britain a new purpose: to run Europe.

I asked Johnson about his change of mind. He famously wrote two drafts of a column—one in favor of “Leave,” the other for “Remain”—before announcing which side he supported in the 2016 referendum. Critics allege that he only backed Brexit because it provided him with a path to power. Johnson rejects that characterization—his aides say he often plays devil’s advocate to pressure-test his arguments and ideas. And Johnson told me Britain had never been able to lead the EU in any case, because it was too hamstrung by division and doubt over the project to be anything but a brake. This seemed anathema to him: better momentum, whatever the direction, than playing the role of spoiler.

“Anyway,” he said, “do we have to talk about Brexit? We’ve sucked that lemon dry.”

So we turned instead to Horace.

In 2005, Johnson gave a lecture about the Roman poet, in which he reflected on the lasting influence that poets and historians and journalists have over how people are remembered. “Horace writes all these bum-sucking poems about his [patrons] saying how great they are,” Johnson told me, “but the point he always makes to them is ‘You’re going to die and the poem is going to live, and who wrote the poem?’ ”

I told him that sounded like a cynical view of the world.

“It’s a defense of journalism!” he said.

“So you’re saying I’m more powerful than you?” I asked.

“Exactly, exactly,” he replied, laughing.

I said I didn’t buy it. But Johnson very clearly appreciates the importance of shaping perceptions. To him, the point of politics—and life—is not to squabble over facts; it’s to offer people a story they can believe in.

In the prime minister’s view, those who wanted to remain in the EU during the Brexit referendum didn’t have the courage to tell the real story at the heart of their vision: a story of the beauty of European unity and collective identity. Instead, they offered claims of impending disaster were Britain to leave, most of which haven’t come to pass, at least not yet. The story voters believed in was fundamentally different—in Johnson’s words, “that this is a great and remarkable and interesting country in its own right.”

“People live by narrative,” he told me. “Human beings are creatures of the imagination.”

a pink rule
“So you’re not trump?” I asked Johnson. I had just been treated to a long monologue about his liberal internationalism and support for free trade, climate action, and even globalism.

“Well, self-evidently,” he replied.

It might be self-evident to him, but not to others—the former president himself embraced Johnson as “Britain Trump,” and Biden once called him a “physical and emotional clone” of Trump.

This is the central argument against Johnson: For all his positivity and good cheer, the verses of Latin and ancient Greek he drops into conversation, he is much closer to Trump than he lets on. Johnson spearheaded the “Leave” campaign the same year the U.S. voted for Trump, and the two campaigns looked similar on the surface—populist, nationalist, anti-establishment. What, after all, is Brexit but a rebellion against an ostensibly unfair system, fueled by the twin angers of trade and immigration, that aims to restore to Britain a sense of something lost: control.

Read: Why Britain’s Brexit mayhem was worth it

The prime minister certainly understands that this perception has taken hold. “A lot of people in America, a lot of respectable liberal opinion in America—The Washington Post and The New York Times, etc.—thinks that Brexit is the most appalling, terrible aberration and a retreat into nationalism,” he told me. “It’s not at all.”

As for Johnson himself, his past language about members of minority groups is, to some, evidence of a kinship with Trump. Johnson has compared Muslim women in burkas to mailboxes, written of “flag-waving piccaninnies,” and recited a nostalgic colonial-era poem while in Myanmar. His partisans note, defensively, that his first finance minister was the son of a Pakistani bus driver; his second is a British Indian. The business secretary is a fellow Eton alum whose parents came to Britain from Ghana, and Britain’s president of the United Nations Climate Change Conference, which is being held in Glasgow, Scotland, this year, was born in India. The man Johnson charged with overseeing Britain’s vaccine rollout is an Iraqi-born British Kurd, and the home secretary, responsible for policing, is the daughter of Ugandan Indians.

There is also the issue of immigration. During the Brexit campaign, Johnson did call for—and has since delivered—stronger controls on migration from Europe. But in contrast to Trump, he has supported amnesty for undocumented immigrants; offered a path to British citizenship to millions of Hong Kongers; and refashioned Britain’s immigration system to treat European and non-European migrants equally. As mayor of London, he said that Trump’s claim that the British capital had “no-go areas” because of Islamic extremists betrayed “stupefying ignorance” and that Trump was “out of his mind” for seeking to ban Muslim immigration.

Even so, the Trump question is the first thing many Americans will want to know, I told him.

“Well, how ignorant can they be?” he said. I ventured that the curse of international politics is that each country looks at others through its own national prism.

“They do, they do,” he admitted, before continuing: “I’m laboriously trying to convey to an American audience that this is a category error that has been repeatedly made.”

“The point I’m trying to get over to you and your readers is that you mustn’t mistake this government for being some sort of bunch of xenophobes,” he added, “or autarkic economic nationalists.” (Here even Johnson’s critics would have to concede one difference: Donald Trump is unlikely to have ever used the word autarkic in conversation.)

The first attempt at pulling together a coherent intellectual framework for Johnsonism was the government’s “integrated review” of foreign, economic, and defense policy, published in March. It emphasized the importance of deepening alliances outside Europe and the need to more robustly defend democratic values. Its driving force was John Bew, Johnson’s chief foreign-policy adviser and the author of Realpolitik, a book published four years before Johnson came to power that now reads like a primer for Johnsonism. According to Bew, realpolitik is based on four interlocking principles: politics is the law of the strong; states are strong when they are domestically harmonious; ideas matter because people believe them, not because they are true; and finally, the zeitgeist is “the single most important factor in determining the trajectory of a nation’s politics.”

Johnson’s blueprint for governing can be found in these principles. His pitch to voters is that he will “unite and level up” the country, which starts from the premise that Britain cannot be a decisive, confident international actor as long as it is divided, economically imbalanced, and as vulnerable to global financial and health crises as it has shown itself to be.

He also believes that the global zeitgeist has radically changed since the 2008 financial crisis, and therefore so too must Britain’s foreign policy. This is not an ephemeral, insubstantial thing: Voters will not accept a laissez-faire attitude toward free trade, deindustrialization, or the rise of China any longer. Whether voters’ demands on these issues are reasonable or constructive is beside the point—they are reality.

Johnson and his allies emphasize that Brexit did not happen in a vacuum. In The Globalization Paradox, the Harvard economist Dani Rodrik notes that the more tightly the world’s economies intertwine, the less influence national governments can have over the lives of their citizens. For a long time, governments—including Britain’s—believed that the economic benefits of globalization outweighed that cost. But when this bargain began to reveal its emptiness, particularly after 2008, voters demanded more control. In Britain this was particularly acute, because the country was more exposed than most, with its oversize financial sector and open economy. It was ripe for a revolt to “take back control”—the “Leave” campaign’s central promise.

Johnson has vowed to use the power of government to reinvigorate industry and boost growth outside London, using levers that he says wouldn’t be available if the country were still in the EU. One aide told me Johnson had ordered civil servants to reject conservative orthodoxies about government intervention being bad and to be “more creative and more confident around who we choose to back.” It’s an unusual approach for someone caricatured as a right-wing ideologue; on the American political spectrum, Johnson’s policies would fall well to the left of center.

Whenever you talk to Johnson, you bump up against an all-encompassing belief that things will be fine.
The prime minister told me he doesn’t want the EU to fragment—he just doesn’t want Britain to be a part of it. For too long, Johnson and his team believe, Britain has been “living out a foreign policy of a world that has gone,” one of his closest advisers said. Beijing and Moscow have shown us the limits of the rules-based order. Britain can no longer afford to be a “status quo power” naively trying to resurrect a defunct system. “The world is moving faster,” the adviser said, “and therefore we have got to get our shit together and move faster with it.”

To do so, Johnson insists, Britain must be independent, united, and nimble. (His foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, told me that instead of “some big cumbersome whale,” the country needed to be “a more agile dolphin.”) The prime minister has already indicated what this might look like, imposing human-rights sanctions on Russia, using the presidency of the G7 to turn the group into a wider alliance of democracies, and trying to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

The world is messy, and Johnson likes mess. He believes the key is to adapt. He has spent a lifetime turning ambition, opportunism, and ruthless self-promotion into extraordinary personal success. Why can’t a country do the same?

TK
Johnson in 2019 campaigning on the Isle of Wight (top) and at a session of the UN Security Council on climate and security in London in 2021
( Dominic Lipinski / WPA Pool / Getty; Stefan Rousseau / WPA Pool / Getty )
a pink rule
Whenever you talk to Johnson, you bump up against an all-encompassing belief that things will be fine. He believes, for example, that the threat of Scottish independence will melt away over time, with Brexit acting as a centripetal force pulling the U.K. back together.

Yet Johnson understands the art of politics better than his critics and rivals do. He is right that his is a battle to write the national story, and that this requires offering people hope and agency, a sense of optimism and pride in place. He has shown that he is a master at finding the story voters want to hear.

Whether he succeeds or fails matters beyond Britain’s borders. As democratic states look for ways to answer the concerns of voters without descending into the authoritarian Orbánism of Eastern Europe or the Trumpian populism that has consumed the Republican Party, Johnson is beginning a test run for a conservative alternative that may prove attractive, or at least viable.

But with Britain finally outside the European Union, Johnson must now address problems that cannot be dealt with by belief alone. If his domestic economic project fails, some fear the country will turn toward xenophobic identity politics. If he cannot unify the country at home, his bid to make Britain more assertive on the world stage may prove impossible. If he cannot fend off demands for Scottish independence, the state will fracture. “Telling everyone everything is fine is not the same as everything is fine,” Tony Blair told me.

Now that Johnson has won his revolution, does he have the focus to see it through? Even one of his closest aides expressed worry that the prime minister doesn’t think systematically about Britain’s problems, that he is too reliant on unshakable faith.


The last time I saw Johnson was back in the northeast of England. “Super Thursday” had come and gone and he had scored thumping victories in England, though not in Scotland, where pro-independence parties won a small majority. We met in Sedgefield, long Blair’s constituency. When I was a child, the joke was that Labour votes there were not so much counted as weighed. Now it’s Conservative territory.

Johnson admitted a certain “grudging admiration” for Blair, who won three parliamentary majorities in the 1990s and 2000s. I said that the difference between the two men, as far as I could tell, was that Blair saw everything through a prism of progress: those on the right side of history, such as himself, and those like Johnson who were trying to hold back the inevitable.

“He felt the hand of history on his shoulder, didn’t he?” Johnson said, mocking a famous Blair quote shortly before the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland.

Johnson doesn’t see the world that way. “I think that history—societies and civilizations and nations—can rise and fall, and I think that things can go backwards,” he said.

This might sound like a warning. But to Johnson, Brexit is the fuel for Britain’s rise, not its fall. He believes the country today has far more “oomph, impetus, mojo” than before it left the EU.


As ever with Johnson, it’s hard to discern true belief from narrative skill. I kept coming back to something he’d told me earlier, in our discussion of le Carré: “All romantics need the mortar of cynicism to hold themselves up.” The duality of his character continued to fascinate me. There is the light and the color he wants the world to see—his jokes and unclouded optimism. But there is a shadow, too, the darker side that most people who know him acknowledge, the moments of introspection and calculation.

Hoping for another glimpse of the more reflective Johnson, I repeated the quote to him and began to ask him what he’d meant.

“I wondered—” was all I was able to get out before Johnson cut in.

“Did I say that?” he asked. “How pompous of me.”

This article appears in the July/August 2021 print edition with the headline “Boris Johnson Knows Exactly What He’s Doing.” ​​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Tom McTague is a staff writer at The Atlantic based in London.




政治
混乱的部长
鲍里斯-约翰逊很清楚自己在做什么。

作者：汤姆-麦克塔格
2021年7月/8月号
分享到
本文于2021年6月7日在线发表。


"没有什么可以出错！" 鲍里斯-约翰逊说，跳进他准备试乘的一辆电车的驾驶座。"没有什么。可以。走。错的。"

首相正在访问伯明翰郊外的一家工厂，代表当地市长在 "超级星期四"--5月初在英格兰、苏格兰和威尔士举行的一系列选举--之前进行竞选。这些选举将给选民一个机会，让他们对约翰逊的两年任期发表意见，在这期间确实出了不少问题。


约翰逊像往常一样，不苟言笑，在一个政治家们倾向于沉默寡言、自以为是，甚至是沉闷和尴尬的国家里，他就像一股龙卷风。他一进门就写了一首打油诗，内容是一个叫丹的人喜欢坐电车。市长安迪-斯泰特一脸惊恐，明天灾难性的头条新闻似乎在他眼前闪过。(我很抱歉地说，这首打油诗一点都不脏。）

约翰逊的助手告诉我，总理整个上午都在为乘坐电车而兴奋。他喜欢基础设施，尤其是移动基础设施--飞机、火车、自行车、有轨电车，甚至是通往爱尔兰的桥梁和漂浮在海上的机场。而且他喜欢拍照。如果没有人在场记录，展示行动、意图和势头就没有意义。

"都上车！"他喊道，尽管没有乘客。新闻摄影师挤在一起，戴着硬帽的人站在旁边。有轨电车（英国的 "街车"）向前驶去，只是抽搐和颤抖着停了下来。有轨电车公司的首席执行官紧张地笑着告诉我，那是价值250万英镑的车辆。当约翰逊终于绕过弯道，接近终点时，他踩下了刹车，吹响了喇叭。他高兴地说："没有出错！"。

没有什么，真的，不可能出错。有轨电车的时速限制在三英里，并有一个自动超车系统，以保护它不被鲁莽的总理等人发现。没有关系。它为约翰逊提供了做他喜欢的事情的机会：做一场秀，在没有人的地方制造一点骚动。在20世纪90年代末和21世纪初，他因在一个流行的讽刺性新闻节目《我有新闻给你看》中露面而成名。每一次，他都是笑话的主角，同时也是注意力的中心。2001年他第一次当选为议会议员后，他的同事告诉他，他必须变得严肃，才能在政治上取得成功。像我在过去几个月里所做的那样，与约翰逊相处，就是看一个对这种建议完全无动于衷的政治家。


约翰逊与我报道过的其他总理完全不同。托尼-布莱尔和大卫-卡梅伦精明强干，威风凛凛。戈登-布朗和特雷莎-梅是僵硬的、恐惧的、谨慎的。约翰逊可能是另一个物种。他活泼好动，表面上衣衫不整，但实际上注意力集中，小心翼翼。他很邋遢，很冲动，很旺盛。他是我见过的第一位真正看起来很开心的英国领导人。他与公众的谈话中夹杂着 "真了不起！"、"你在开玩笑！"、"太好了！"、"太棒了，太棒了！"

阅读：鲍里斯-约翰逊和乐观主义的错觉

他说，他的任务是恢复英国对自己的信心，与定义他童年时期的英国的 "堕落、枯萎和无望 "的失败主义作斗争。他相信，如果你一次又一次地重复英国的早晨，这个国家就会相信它，然后它就会变成现实。然而，他的批评者说，他只是在带领这个国家 "傻笑着沉入大海"。

到现在，每个英国主体都是鲍里斯-约翰逊问题的专家。我们知道，他在婚外情方面有非凡的天赋，他有（至少）三个女人的六个孩子，他的个人财务状况是媒体八卦的常规话题。我们知道他曾因撒谎而被解雇过两次（一次是作为记者，一次是作为政治家）；他曾是英国左翼首都的保守派市长；他帮助策划了他自己政党的两位总理被解职；而且他在大流行病期间差点死掉。三十年来，我们一直关注他的写作、他的野心、他的暴行和他的丑闻。然而，对于像我这样一个专业的鲍里斯观察者来说，真相却让人难以捉摸。


对许多人来说，约翰逊是一个小丑--公共标准消亡的化身，也是国际民粹主义、后真相政治、甚至英国衰落本身的代表。他是那个在伦敦奥运会期间被困在滑索上的人，戴着安全带和头盔悬在人群上方，无助地挥舞着英国国旗，而人们在下面欢呼。法国报纸《解放报》在英国投票离开欧盟后，在其头版上使用了这张图片，标题是 "好运"。

照片。鲍里斯-约翰逊手持两面旗帜，身着安全带悬挂在滑索上，背景是伦敦眼摩天轮。
在2012年伦敦奥运会期间，时任该市市长的约翰逊被卡在滑索上，在人群中悬空，直到他被救出。
( Barcroft Media / Getty )
约翰逊的幽默感经常让他陷入困境。2017年，作为外交部长，他开玩笑说利比亚城市苏尔特有一个光明的未来，只要其居民 "把尸体清理掉"。据报道，在宣布2020年10月进一步限制COVID-19时，他对立法者说，至少他们不用和他们的岳父岳母过圣诞节。他把希拉里-克林顿比作 "精神病院的虐待狂护士"，把保守党的内讧比作 "巴布亚新几内亚式的吃人和杀酋长的狂欢"。

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在他最激烈的批评者看来，他比小丑还糟糕：一个靠撒谎上位的骗子，一个危害民主和贩卖种族主义的人，一个只相信自己升迁的人。他被指责引发了民粹主义的愤怒浪潮，然后他骑着马来到唐宁街10号，使英国被削弱，并面临着解体的真正危险。(苏格兰再次考虑自己退出。)他正带领他的国家经历二战以来对其经济、选举地图和国际角色的最彻底的重塑。对于约翰逊认为不会出错的信心呐喊，批评者说。不，很多事情都会出错，而且很可能出错。

今年年初，当我开始与约翰逊会面时，我并不确切知道他将如何接受审讯。他的热情对我有利；而他是一名前记者，熟悉我们的邪恶方式，这一事实对我不利。

有一次在北爱尔兰，当我在笔记本上乱写乱画时，他看了我一眼。"啊，汤姆，"他说，"你在拾取颜色或什么，是吗？" 答案当然是肯定的。"色彩 "是记者的术语，指的是超出直接事实或引文的任何东西，即用于为读者描绘场景的细节。但我追求的不仅仅是这些。

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我想了解约翰逊是否真的是一个民粹主义者，或者只是受欢迎。他的爱国主义乐观主义的论点有明显的吸引力，但我想知道它是否掩盖了更多愤世嫉俗的冲动。他是在为国家的利益工作，还是为自己的利益工作？我想近距离观察他是否真的像他的敌人指控的那样，是相当于唐纳德-特朗普的英国人。关于这个问题，约翰逊会给我一个强调的答案。

约翰逊正在带领他的国家经历自二战以来对其经济、选举地图和国际角色的最彻底的重塑。
后来，在他的办公室里，我让约翰逊想象一下，他又是一名记者。他将如何打开这份资料？我问，理解鲍里斯-约翰逊的关键是什么？在几声嗯和啊之后，约翰逊回答说。"纯粹的身体素质。还有努力工作。"


我笑了，因为他肯定希望我笑。"听着，汤姆，这就是你的挑战，"他说（把挑战读成了法语），打断了我的追问。这就是无法破解的约翰逊：和蔼可亲、自嘲、回避。

粉红色的规则
在约翰逊访问电车厂的当天，全国性的大新闻是组建一个欧洲精英足球联盟，以其类固醇的美国表亲NFL为模型。该计划将吸引至少六家英国俱乐部和六家欧洲大陆的俱乐部加入 "欧洲超级联赛"。该计划是在前一天晚上宣布的，约翰逊站出来反对，认为这将把英格兰最伟大的俱乐部从他们的传统环境中拉出来，违背他们的球迷的意愿。他说，这是不公平的，政府将与之斗争。当天上午，他的反对意见成为新闻的主角。

我想知道他为什么这么关心。他对足球一无所知，事实上，他为自己的无知感到高兴。

但约翰逊对英国人的焦虑有一些重要的直觉，他把这个问题变成了许多英国人感到的无力感和失落感的比喻，正是这种感觉激发了英国脱欧运动，并把他带到唐宁街10号。在我们的一次谈话中，约翰逊说，人们需要感受到比自己更大的东西的一部分。他告诉我，他不认为自己是一个民族主义者，但他认为，个人需要有归属感，他们不应该因为担心自己的传统和联系被侵蚀而受到冷落。这就是他反对欧洲超级联赛的原因吗？


"绝对的，"他说。"这是关于社区球迷基础的贬低。" 他继续说，足球俱乐部已经变成了全球品牌，并将他们的支持者抛在身后，"像一艘伟大的母船一样起飞，绕着地球飞行"。

我对他用 "出轨 "一词来描述英国足球党派的特殊动态感到震惊。脱离是指从你的习俗、你的文化、你的家园中被连根拔起--在这个例子中，就是脱离英格兰。在这里，约翰逊把自己作为人民的护民官，捍卫国家游戏免受外来强加的威胁。他正在引导一种愤怒的呼声，并将其转化为对全球化的反对。

阅读：鲍里斯-约翰逊可以像他之前的几个人一样重塑英国。

约翰逊是这种运动的一个奇怪的人物。至少在名义上，这位首相是一位自由市场主义者，也是 "全球英国 "的主要宣传者。他利用了中英格兰的根基--其焦虑、传统和民族自豪感--但他也是一个非常明显的过客。

他出生于曼哈顿上东区的亚历山大-鲍里斯-德-普菲尔-约翰逊，在一家为纽约穷人服务的医院。约翰逊的父亲斯坦利当时23岁，以创意写作奖学金来到美国，但他放弃了，转而进入哥伦比亚大学的经济学课程。鲍里斯生活的前几个月是在切尔西酒店对面的一个单间公寓里度过的。他在2016年之前一直是正式的美英双重国籍，有一次他对大卫-莱特曼说，"从技术上讲，"他可以当选为总统。一些人怀疑他是否是真心的，毕竟他小时候曾说过他的志向是成为 "世界之王"。(约翰逊在被国税局追问出售伦敦住宅的税单后，放弃了美国国籍。)

约翰逊的名字错综复杂，表明他的背景是世界性的。鲍里斯是为了纪念斯坦利和约翰逊的母亲夏洛特在他出生前不久在墨西哥遇到的一位俄罗斯移民。这个人给他们买了回美国的飞机票，这样大肚子的夏洛特就不必再忍受灰狗巴士的折磨了。De Pfeffel来自约翰逊有一半法国血统的祖母Irène，她出生在凡尔赛的宏伟的Pavillon du Barry，属于她的祖父Baron Hubert de Pfeffel。

即使是约翰逊家族也不像看上去那样是英国人。鲍里斯的曾祖父是一名土耳其记者和政治家，在奥斯曼帝国崩溃的混乱中被谋杀。他因反对凯末尔-阿塔图尔克而被谴责为叛徒，被挥舞着石头、棍棒和刀子的民族主义暴徒袭击并被绞死。根据索尼娅-普内尔（Sonia Purnell）的传记《公正的鲍里斯》（Just Boris），据说他的身体部分被塞在一棵树上。他的半英半瑞的妻子威妮弗蕾德在英国生下了他们的儿子奥斯曼，但不久后就去世了。奥斯曼由他的英国祖母--女主人名叫约翰逊--抚养长大，并改名为威尔弗雷德-约翰逊。(2020年，55岁的鲍里斯-约翰逊给他的新生男婴取名为威尔弗雷德）。

在约翰逊生命的前14年里，他的家人搬了32次家，包括搬到华盛顿特区，斯坦利在那里的世界银行工作。约翰逊早期最美好的记忆是他在莫里森街的院子里的树屋，就在康涅狄格大道附近。1974年，夏洛特在一家人住在布鲁塞尔的时候精神崩溃了。第二年，约翰逊和他的妹妹，当时分别是11岁和10岁，被送到英国的一所寄宿学校，每学期在没有父母的陪同下前往那里。

在去学校之前，年轻的亚历山大是一个安静、内向的男孩。他在8、9岁之前一直是部分失聪，因为有一种被称为 "胶耳 "的疾病，即耳膜后面有液体堆积。在学校里，他把自己变成了我们今天看到的那个自信的、不苟言笑的外向人。正是在伊顿，亚历山大成为了鲍里斯，一个 "完全成熟的学校名人"，根据普内尔的说法，他是男孩的头，学校杂志的编辑，辩论协会的主席。埃里克-安德森爵士是托尼-布莱尔在苏格兰的舍监，也是约翰逊在伊顿的舍监，他曾被要求说出他所带过的最有趣的学生，他回答说。"毫无疑问，鲍里斯-约翰逊"。

3张照片。8岁时的约翰逊；21岁时穿正装的约翰逊；约翰逊与阿莱格拉-莫斯廷-欧文（Allegra Mostyn-Owen），他与后者结婚。
约翰逊是一个安静、内向的孩子，在他8、9岁之前一直是部分失聪，但在他的父母把他送到寄宿学校后，他改变了自己。上图是约翰逊8岁时（左上），21岁时在牛津（右上），以及与他即将结婚的阿莱格拉-莫斯汀-欧文在一起。
( Sophie Baker / Arenapal; Brian Smith / Reuters; Dafydd Jones )
从伊顿公学和牛津公学毕业后，他与戴安娜王妃的弟弟查尔斯-斯宾塞(Charles Spencer)是很好的朋友，约翰逊年轻时结婚，回到布鲁塞尔，离婚，再婚，搬回伦敦，进行了无数次偷情，再次离婚，再次订婚，同时稳步实现他的职业上升期。

自始至终，约翰逊都与任何集团保持距离，无论是试图重塑保守党的现代派还是撒切尔派对他们的抵抗。事实上，约翰逊倾向于避免成为任何团体的一部分所带来的正式义务关系。在许多方面，他自己就是被疏远的定义。(他的一个朋友曾经告诉我，他怀疑约翰逊赞同一个前基督教的道德体系，有许多神，没有一套明确的规则。我向首相提出了这个问题，但他否定了这个观点。"他告诉我："基督教是一个极好的道德体系，我认为自己是一种非常、非常糟糕的基督徒。"没有对任何其他宗教的不敬，但基督教对我来说有很大的意义。")

与他有联系的一个群体是英国脱欧派。约翰逊在很大程度上避免了该团体更极端分子的本土主义言论，但他确实认为，英国对其权力和历史的不适应已经走得太远。(乔治-奥威尔曾指出，英国是 "唯一一个其知识分子以自己的国籍为耻的大国"。） 在去年夏天的英国国庆日，约翰逊发布了一个视频信息，敦促该国举杯 "没有尴尬，没有羞耻"。想象一下，一位美国总统在独立日需要做出同样的限定。

但是，尽管约翰逊的爱国主义信息在英国--迄今为止英国四个国家中最大的国家--是强有力的，但它并不容易转化到其他地方，特别是在苏格兰，因为苏格兰投票支持留在欧盟。最大的讽刺是，尽管约翰逊领导了从欧洲 "夺回控制权 "的运动，但他的成功却加剧了苏格兰要求从伦敦夺回控制权的呼声。这正是约翰逊的遗产面临最大风险的地方。如果他主持了国家的解体，无论他做了什么，都会永远被掩盖。他将成为21世纪的诺斯勋爵：不是失去美国的首相，而是失去英国本身的首相。

粉红色规则
在约翰逊乘坐电车的几天后，我在哈特尔普尔再次见到了他，这是一个位于英格兰挣扎的工业化东北部的沿海城镇。约翰逊曾威胁要对计划加入新的超级联赛的英国足球俱乐部投下一枚 "立法炸弹"。几小时内，所有六家俱乐部都退出了，联赛也崩溃了。欧洲各地的报纸为约翰逊的影响力欢呼。意大利的《体育报》（La Gazzetta Dello Sport）显然是一家喜欢夸张的报纸，它把约翰逊的干预比作丘吉尔反对纳粹的立场。

为了从这一事件中榨取更多的政治资本，约翰逊在镇上的一个足球场停留。我是在离哈特尔浦不远的地方长大的。该地区曾经是工党坚如磐石的领地，但保守派一直在那里大展拳脚。它在很大程度上支持英国脱欧，而且它有着蔑视政治机构的悠久传统。2002年，该镇选举其足球俱乐部的吉祥物猴子H'Angus为市长。穿着这套服装的人担任了这个任期，并两次获得连任。

当约翰逊来到这里接受地区媒体的采访时，我给他看了Gazzetta的文章。他抓起我的手机，用夸张的意大利语大声念出了标题，一位助手催促他去做手头的事情，也就是确保该镇进入保守党的行列。

在与一名电视记者交谈时，约翰逊一直将哈特尔普尔的前任工党议员、布莱尔的亲密盟友彼得-曼德尔森称为 "瓜子酱的曼德尔森爵士"。据称，曼德尔森曾将豌豆酱--一种与炸鱼和薯条一起食用的配菜--与鳄梨酱混淆。这个故事并不真实，但约翰逊的民粹主义者非常喜欢这个故事，以至于他在离开体育场之前又三次使用了这个绰号。如果不是因为首相并不试图掩饰自己的阶级地位，这个笑话将是虚伪的。当大卫-卡梅伦承认他不知道一条面包的价格而被嘲笑时，一位记者用同样的问题问了约翰逊。他答对了，但又补充说："我可以告诉你一瓶香槟的价格，怎么样？"

他的选举天才在于他有能力阻止对手思考问题：在对他的憎恨中，他们看不到他为什么受欢迎。
采访结束后，约翰逊加入了一群传球的球员。他说："我的足球羞辱史诗的另一个章节，"他暗指YouTube上一段备受关注的慈善足球比赛视频，其中约翰逊冲向一名对方球员，然后跌跌撞撞地一头撞向该球员的腹股沟，让他痛苦地倒在地上。在哈特尔普尔，约翰逊告诉球员，他用椭圆球比用圆球更好，指的是英国精英学校的橄榄球运动。他还说，他知道如何玩壁球，这是一项晦涩难懂的运动，只在伊顿大学进行。哈特尔浦的球员似乎不知道他在说什么。

随后，约翰逊和他的团队开始在一条安静的郊区街道上敲门。与美国总统竞选活动相比，总理竞选活动更加家庭化和自发化，约翰逊对他要敲门的人几乎一无所知。在一户人家，一对退休夫妇告诉他，他们对他处理大流行病的方式感到愤怒，特别是他在冠状病毒的新菌株肆虐印度时没有关闭边境。

2张照片。约翰逊为议会竞选；约翰逊作为总理挥手致意
约翰逊的政治地位从2001年竞选议会开始（上图），到2019年成为总理，达到顶峰。
( The Independent / Alamy ; Adrian Dennis / AFP / Getty )
在病毒于春季得到控制之前，约翰逊监督了欧洲最糟糕的应对措施之一；超过12.5万名英国人已经死亡。他自己的前首席顾问多米尼克-卡明斯(Dominic Cummings)公开指责约翰逊和他的团队搞砸了政府对大流行病的应对措施，然后在这方面撒谎。

阅读：这场大流行如何揭示了英国的国家疾病

约翰逊默默地站着，接受这对夫妇的骚扰。几天后，他又接受了一次；据报道，在大流行病的深处，面对宣布第二次封锁，他曾宣布。"不要再他妈的封锁了--让尸体成千上万地堆积在一起。" 他否认了这句话。

然而，在其他房子里，总理被当作一个可爱的名人，当他问人们是否可以指望他们的支持时，几乎被认为是理所当然的。他两次被拦住，并为 "你所做的一切 "表示感谢。(虽然英国的死亡人数令人震惊，但约翰逊也监督了疫苗的快速推广；到3月，英国已经为其一半的成年人注射了第一剂疫苗，比美国、德国和法国都要多）。两名妇女抱着蹒跚学步的孩子走了出来。约翰逊用手肘碰了碰这些小家伙，问他们多大了，然后努力回忆他自己的儿子何时满1岁。当他摸索着说出正确的日期时，母亲们都笑了起来--猜了三次才猜对。

约翰逊的叔叔，记者埃德蒙-福塞特告诉我，首相的这种不经意的举止有助于他与人沟通。约翰逊在政府中最亲密的盟友之一、他的英国脱欧谈判代表大卫-弗罗斯特(David Frost)说，这种技巧是 "故意的，但却是无意识的。" 然而，约翰逊似乎很清楚自己在做什么。他在2013年接受CNBC采访时如是说，当时他被问及他的表演性无能在政治家中是否很典型。"不，我认为这是一个非常狡猾的手段，"他说。"自嘲都是为了理解，基本上人们把政治家视为一群害羞的人。"

据他的盟友说，约翰逊不遗余力地暗示他比实际情况更有缺陷。例如，他不仅声称自己抽过 "不少 "大麻，还声称自己曾经尝试过可卡因，并不小心把它喷了出来。写了《鲍里斯：鲍里斯-约翰逊的崛起》的安德鲁-吉姆森不相信。注意到这位首相曾将性描述为 "最高的娱乐"，Gimson认为，"在其他人可能伸手去拿酒瓶或针头的地方，他更有可能拥抱一些温暖而有吸引力的女人。"

约翰逊招致低估的能力似乎使他免受政治的通常规则的影响。"鲍里斯身上有一种魔力，使他能够逃避他成为首相后的一些政治挑战，"在牛津大学与约翰逊是朋友的美国民意测验专家弗兰克-伦茨告诉我。"人们对他更有耐心，他们对他更宽容，因为他不是一个典型的政治家。"

而且有很多事情需要原谅。

约翰逊曾写过关于非洲人的 "西瓜式微笑"，并将同性恋者描述为 "背心式流浪汉"。作为外交部长，他把一个同胞置于危险之中，他错误地声称她在伊朗教新闻，让德黑兰有借口指控她散布宣传。作为首相，他在自己的国家内建立了一个贸易壁垒，作为英国脱欧的代价--将北爱尔兰置于欧盟法规之下，而该国其他地区则可以自由地做自己的事情。

似乎没有什么能坚持下去，这让他的对手们感到疯狂。据报道，他与未婚妻卡莉-西蒙兹(Carrie Symonds)的争吵非常激烈，邻居们报了警，仅仅几周后他就赢得了保守党的领导权。他赢得了一代人中最大的议会多数，尽管他在何时以及如何确保达成脱欧协议上违背了承诺。一次又一次，当争议吞噬了他，他却毫发无损。

阅读：鲍里斯-约翰逊一直在藐视地心引力。

他的选举天才的一部分在于他有能力阻止他的对手直截了当地思考：在对他的憎恨中，他们看不到他为什么受欢迎，也不知道该怎么做。

粉红色规则
"我这样做是为了什么？" 约翰逊问他的助手，看了看他当天的日程安排，看到有一个空档可以和我谈话。

"这是为我建议你不要做的资料，"约翰逊当时的通讯主任詹姆斯-斯拉克说。

在我第一次向约翰逊的团队提出与总理谈话的要求后的一年里，他的通讯主任已经换了两次，约翰逊早期团队的大部分成员也被替换，部分原因是办公室之间的竞争已经失去控制。最后，约翰逊本人开了绿灯。当我最终见到他时，是2021年3月，国家刚刚开始从最严格的封锁中走出来。

访问唐宁街是一件奇怪的事情。你必须经过预先检查才能进入，并通过机场式的金属探测器，但随后你只需像其他街道一样走上去，敲门就能被放进来。这不是一栋建筑，而是由乔治亚时代的联排别墅组成的迷宫，它们被连接、扩展、修整，并不断被修补。该建筑群的中心是10号，是首相的官邸和工作场所。

在聪明的黑砖和光洁的前门后面，这里笼罩着一种寒酸的气氛。踏进这里，你会发现自己身处一个高高的入口大厅，家里的猫拉里经常在那里睡觉。废弃的调制解调器放在窗台上；厚厚的红色地毯破旧不平，上面粘着一些胶带。(今年春天，约翰逊陷入了道德调查，因为有人指控他寻求政治捐款以帮助支付重新装修他与西蒙兹共同居住的唐宁街公寓，西蒙兹被英国小报指责，并被昵称为 "卡莉-安托瓦内特"。约翰逊否认有任何不当行为）。

唐宁街与它作为现代官僚机构的神经中枢的功能格外不相称。它的房间要么小而不连贯，要么大而不实用--那是另一个英国的餐厅、图书馆和仆人的住所。它既谦虚又空旷，既是标志性的又是令人难以接受的。它是过时的，功能失调的，但不知何故，它是有效的。它是21世纪英国的一个实体化身。

约翰逊认为，英国国家在脱欧谈判中表现出不可原谅的弱点，他的一些顾问告诉我，英国在大流行病期间也表现出致命的无能。他们认为，英国的官僚机构需要进行全面改革。约翰逊的批评者会指出，是他谈判了英国退出欧盟的问题，国家对他的大流行病决策没有责任。然而，英国应对冠状病毒的能力明显不足也是事实，到2019年约翰逊接任时，他面临着如何离开欧盟的魔鬼交易，提供的条件基本上是事先设定好的。

英国对抗COVID-19的唯一真正成功是在约翰逊拒绝了加入欧盟疫苗采购项目的机会，并将该国自己的努力交给了一个风险资本家，其预算几乎不受政府的通常规则限制。结果，英国人早在欧洲其他国家之前就接种了数以百万计的疫苗。但这种工作方式造成了层层复杂和混乱，没有留下明确的责任界限。甚至一些高层人士也有一种无力感，他们告诉我，完成任何事情的唯一方法是宣布："我已经和首相谈过这个问题，他希望它发生。"

阅读。约翰-勒卡雷知晓英格兰的秘密

在他的办公室里，约翰逊把话题引向了他几乎每次见到他都会提出的一个话题。他读了我写的一篇文章，是对已故英国小说家约翰-勒卡雷的一种讴歌。我赞扬了勒卡雷对英国及其失败的统治阶级的观察--这些受过私人教育的骗子被作者嘲弄为地球上最大的骗子。我还把约翰逊列为一个例子。

他告诉我，他从这位小说家那里得到了完全不同的教训。对约翰逊来说，勒卡雷揭露的不是英国统治阶级的虚伪，而是其特有的被动性和对衰退的接受。"他说："我在学校读过《工匠、裁缝、士兵、间谍》。"它向我展示了这些外交部官僚的悲惨形象......对我来说，他们就是问题所在。" 约翰逊告诉我，这正是他决心要反对的东西。

"你把我和其他各种人混为一谈--你说我们都是这些腐朽机构和这种文化的产物，是一个不足和绝望的机构。那不是我！" 他说，他正在努力 "重新获得这个国家曾经拥有的一些能量和乐观精神"。

约翰逊认为，政府中仍然存在一种 "对世界的厌倦"，这种厌倦必须被 "挤出来"，他的一位部长告诉我。一位助手说，约翰逊主义部分是关于 "挺起胸膛，说'我们是英国'。 "（约翰逊的几位顾问同意坦诚以换取匿名）。一位助手告诉我，在早期与乔-拜登的电话中，约翰逊说他不喜欢总统使用特殊关系这个词。在约翰逊看来，这似乎是一种需要和软弱。

约翰逊以有关欧洲对薯片口味的规定、香蕉的弯曲度、避孕套的大小的离奇故事而声名鹊起。
在勒卡雷的作品中，约翰逊没有蔑视的一个成员是主人公乔治-斯迈利，他和他的同事们一样厌倦了，但还是坚持不懈地抓捕叛徒，为英国服务。"他是一个爱国者，"约翰逊说。

对约翰逊来说，斯迈利可能是一个愤世嫉俗的人，但他也是一个浪漫主义者--一个信徒。那不是你吗？我问道。约翰逊是一个浪漫主义者，他敦促国家相信自己，但他玩弄政治游戏，歪曲事实，站在他的朋友的对立面，并罢免他的同事。在最初表现出嘲讽的回避之后，总理回答说。"所有的浪漫主义者都需要愤世嫉俗的砂浆来支撑自己"。

约翰逊在这里提供了一个罕见的自我反省的时刻。在我和他相处的时间里，每当我们接近任何接近自我分析的话题时，他都会回避，转弯，或者开个玩笑。有一次，当我把话题拉回到勒卡雷身上时，约翰逊陷入了一系列对小说家角色的模仿中。约翰逊的一位助手告诉我，首相厌恶任何带有过度智力化政治色彩的东西。

在唐宁街，我听到约翰逊重复了他外婆喜欢引用的一句话。"亲爱的，"他模仿她说，"记住，这不是你怎么做，而是你在做什么。" 约翰逊说这是 "关键的建议"。我问过约翰逊的妹妹瑞秋。她告诉我他们的母亲也很喜欢这句话。她说："这是关于当下，"她说，而不是担心事情会如何发展。

继续前进是约翰逊的口头禅。

粉红色的规则
约翰逊经常随身携带一个记事本，这是他当记者时的习惯。一位前助手告诉我，如果他把你的观点写下来，你就知道他已经认真对待了。他像编辑一样主持会议，调查他的工作人员的想法，总是寻找 "线"--从枯燥的、偶尔相互矛盾的事实中切入，找出他认为的问题的核心，即故事。

然而，这位总理的新闻生涯有了一个不光彩的开始。1988年，在牛津大学毕业一年后，他被建制派报纸《泰晤士报》解雇，原因是他在头版报道中编造了一段话，并将其归于教父。此后，他进行了道歉，算是道歉，同时也抱怨那些骂他的 "卑鄙无耻的历史学家"。

尽管被《泰晤士报》解雇，但他很快就进入了其竞争对手《每日电讯报》，并在英国媒体中步步高升，最终成为英国首要的保守派杂志《旁观者》的主编。1992年，当《马斯特里赫特条约》签署时，约翰逊是《每日电讯报》的布鲁塞尔记者，该条约为现代欧盟的化身奠定了基础，并使英国政治在伦敦与欧洲的关系上陷入了多年的困境。对于约翰逊这样的人才来说，这是一个完美的时间和地点。

照片。鲍里斯-约翰逊站在办公室里壁炉旁凌乱的桌子后面
约翰逊在《旁观者》杂志的办公室里，他在1999年至2005年期间担任该杂志的主编（Edd Westmacott / Alamy )
他以离奇的、并不总是准确的关于欧洲法规表面上强加给英国人的故事而声名鹊起--这些法规规定了薯片的口味、香蕉的弯曲度、避孕套的大小。玛格丽特-撒切尔（Margaret Thatcher）在1990年为欧洲一体化所做的斗争使她失去了总理职位，据说她喜欢约翰逊的专栏。他后来形容他在布鲁塞尔的生活是 "把这些石头扔到花园的墙上，[听]隔壁英国的温室里传来的惊人的撞击声"。

但今天重读约翰逊的作品，发现他对欧洲的敌意远没有人们想象的那么强烈：例如，在1992年1月的一篇文章中，他写道，虽然对欧盟的主要指控--它是浪费和官僚主义--是真的，但这些问题与加入欧盟的 "好处相比相形见绌"。他接着说，欧盟是 "由一个不民主的布鲁塞尔机器管理，充满了不露面的忙人"，但它也给了英国一个新的目的：管理欧洲。

我问过约翰逊关于他的想法的变化。在宣布他在2016年公投中支持哪一方之前，他写了两份专栏草稿，一份支持 "脱欧"，另一份支持 "留欧"，这很有名。批评者指称，他支持英国脱欧只是因为这为他提供了一条上台的道路。约翰逊拒绝这种描述--他的助手说，他经常扮演魔鬼的代言人，以测试他的论点和想法。约翰逊告诉我，英国在任何情况下都无法领导欧盟，因为它被对这个项目的分裂和怀疑所束缚，只能成为一个制动器。这对他来说似乎是一种耻辱：无论方向如何，都比扮演破坏者的角色要好。

"无论如何，"他说，"我们必须谈论英国脱欧吗？我们已经把那个柠檬吸干了。"

因此，我们转而讨论霍勒斯。

2005年，约翰逊做了一个关于这位罗马诗人的讲座，其中他反思了诗人、历史学家和记者对人们的记忆方式所产生的持久影响。"贺拉斯写了所有这些关于他的[赞助人]的吸血诗，说他们有多么伟大，"约翰逊告诉我，"但他总是对他们说'你会死，而诗会活，谁写的诗？ "

我告诉他，这听起来像是一种愤世嫉俗的世界观。

"这是为新闻业辩护！"他说。

"所以你是说我比你更强大？" 我问。

"正是，正是。"他回答说，笑了起来。

我说我并不买账。但约翰逊非常清楚地认识到塑造观念的重要性。对他来说，政治和生活的重点不是争论事实；而是为人们提供一个他们可以相信的故事。

在首相看来，那些在英国脱欧公投中希望留在欧盟的人没有勇气讲述他们愿景核心的真正故事：一个关于欧洲团结和集体认同的美丽故事。相反，他们提出了英国离开后即将发生灾难的说法，其中大部分都没有成为现实，至少现在还没有。选民们相信的故事从根本上说是不同的--用约翰逊的话说，"这是个伟大的、非凡的、有趣的国家。"

他告诉我："人们靠叙事生存，"。"人类是想象力的创造者。"

粉红规则
"所以你不是特朗普？" 我问约翰逊。我刚刚听了一段关于他的自由国际主义和支持自由贸易、气候行动、甚至全球主义的长篇独白。

"嗯，不言而喻，"他回答。

对他来说，这可能是不言而喻的，但对其他人来说却不是--前总统本人将约翰逊奉为 "英国特朗普"，拜登曾称他是特朗普的 "身体和情感克隆"。

这是反对约翰逊的核心论点。就他所有的积极性和好心情而言，就他在谈话中抛出的拉丁文和古希腊文诗句而言，他比他自己说的更接近特朗普。约翰逊在美国投票给特朗普的同一年带头发起了 "脱欧 "运动，而这两个运动在表面上看起来很相似--民粹主义、民族主义、反建制。毕竟，英国脱欧是什么，不过是对一个表面上不公平的制度的反叛，由贸易和移民的双重愤怒所推动，旨在恢复英国失去的东西的感觉：控制。

阅读。为什么英国脱欧的混乱是值得的？

首相当然明白，这种观念已经深入人心。"美国的很多人，美国很多受人尊敬的自由主义舆论--《华盛顿邮报》和《纽约时报》等--认为英国脱欧是最令人震惊、最可怕的反常行为，是向民族主义的退缩，"他告诉我。"根本不是这样。"

至于约翰逊本人，在一些人看来，他过去关于少数群体成员的语言是与特朗普有亲缘关系的证据。约翰逊曾把穿罩袍的穆斯林妇女比作邮箱，写过 "挥舞旗帜的皮卡宁尼人"，并在缅甸时朗诵过一首怀旧的殖民时代的诗。他的支持者辩解地指出，他的第一任财政部长是一名巴基斯坦公交车司机的儿子；他的第二任财政部长是一名英国印度人。商务大臣是伊顿公学的校友，他的父母从加纳来到英国，而今年在苏格兰格拉斯哥举行的联合国气候变化大会的英国主席则出生在印度。约翰逊负责监督英国疫苗推广的人是一个在伊拉克出生的英国库尔德人，而负责治安的内政大臣是乌干达印度人的女儿。

还有一个问题是移民问题。在英国脱欧竞选期间，约翰逊确实呼吁对来自欧洲的移民进行更有力的控制，而且后来也兑现了这一呼吁。但与特朗普相反，他支持特赦无证移民；为数百万香港人提供了获得英国公民身份的途径；并重新制定了英国的移民制度，以平等对待欧洲和非欧洲移民。作为伦敦市长，他说，特朗普声称英国首都因伊斯兰极端分子而有 "禁区"，这暴露了 "令人目瞪口呆的无知"，特朗普寻求禁止穆斯林移民是 "疯了 "的。

即便如此，特朗普的问题是许多美国人首先想知道的，我告诉他。

"嗯，他们能有多无知呢？"他说。我大胆地说，国际政治的诅咒是，每个国家都通过自己的国家棱镜来看待别人。

"他们是这样，他们是这样，"他承认，然后继续说。"我正费力地试图向美国听众传达，这是一个反复出现的类别错误。"

"我试图向你和你的读者传达的观点是，你不能把这个政府误认为是某种排外主义者，"他补充说，"或自闭的经济民族主义者。" (在这里，即使是约翰逊的批评者也不得不承认一个区别。唐纳德-特朗普不可能在谈话中使用过 "自闭症 "这个词）。

为约翰逊主义拉出一个连贯的知识框架的第一次尝试是政府在3月发表的关于外交、经济和国防政策的 "综合审查"。它强调了深化欧洲以外的联盟的重要性以及更有力地捍卫民主价值观的必要性。它的推动者是约翰-比尤，约翰逊的首席外交政策顾问和《现实政治》的作者，这本书在约翰逊上台前四年出版，现在读起来就像约翰逊主义的入门书。根据Bew的说法，现实政治基于四个相互关联的原则：政治是强者的法则；国家在国内和谐的情况下是强大的；想法之所以重要是因为人们相信它们，而不是因为它们是真实的；最后，时代潮流是 "决定一个国家政治轨迹的唯一最重要的因素。"

约翰逊的执政蓝图可以在这些原则中找到。他对选民的宣传是，他将 "团结和提升 "这个国家，其前提是，只要英国处于分裂状态，经济不平衡，并且像它自己所显示的那样容易受到全球金融和健康危机的影响，就不可能成为一个决定性的、自信的国际行为体。

他还认为，自2008年金融危机以来，全球的时代潮流已经发生了根本性的变化，因此英国的外交政策也必须如此。这并不是一件短暂的、无足轻重的事情：选民不会再接受对自由贸易、去工业化或中国崛起的放任态度了。选民对这些问题的要求是否合理或具有建设性，这不是重点，它们是现实。

约翰逊和他的盟友强调，英国脱欧并不是在真空中发生的。哈佛大学经济学家丹尼-罗德里克(Dani Rodrik)在《全球化悖论》中指出，世界经济交织得越紧密，各国政府对本国公民生活的影响力就越小。长期以来，各国政府--包括英国政府--相信全球化的经济利益超过了这种代价。但是，当这种讨价还价开始暴露出它的空虚，特别是在2008年之后，选民们要求有更多的控制权。在英国，这种要求尤其强烈，因为英国的金融业规模过大，经济开放，比大多数国家更容易暴露。掀起一场 "夺回控制权 "的反抗的时机已经成熟，这是 "脱欧 "运动的核心承诺。

约翰逊发誓要利用政府的力量重振工业，促进伦敦以外地区的增长，他说如果这个国家还在欧盟，就无法利用这些杠杆。一位助手告诉我，约翰逊已经命令公务员拒绝关于政府干预是坏事的保守正统观念，并 "在我们选择支持谁的问题上更有创造性和更有信心。" 对于一个被讽刺为右翼思想家的人来说，这是一种不寻常的做法；在美国的政治光谱中，约翰逊的政策很可能属于中间偏左的位置。

每当你与约翰逊交谈时，你都会遇到一个包罗万象的信念，即事情会好起来。
首相告诉我，他不希望欧盟分裂，只是不希望英国成为其中的一部分。约翰逊和他的团队认为，长期以来，英国一直在 "执行一个已经消失的世界的外交政策"，他最亲密的顾问之一说。北京和莫斯科已经向我们展示了基于规则的秩序的局限性。英国再也不能成为一个 "维持现状的大国"，天真地试图复活一个已经失效的系统。"世界正在加速发展，"这位顾问说，"因此，我们必须振作起来，与之一起加速发展。"

约翰逊坚持认为，要做到这一点，英国必须独立、团结和灵活。他的外交秘书多米尼克-拉布(Dominic Raab)告诉我，英国需要的不是 "一些笨重的大鲸鱼"，而是 "一条更灵活的海豚"）。首相已经表明这可能是什么样子，对俄罗斯实施人权制裁，利用七国集团主席的身份将该集团变成一个更广泛的民主国家联盟，并试图加入跨太平洋伙伴关系。

世界是混乱的，而约翰逊喜欢混乱。他认为关键是要适应。他一生都在把野心、机会主义和无情的自我推销变成非凡的个人成功。为什么一个国家不能做同样的事情呢？

TK
2019年，约翰逊在怀特岛开展竞选活动（上），2021年在伦敦举行的联合国安理会气候与安全会议上。
( Dominic Lipinski / WPA Pool / Getty; Stefan Rousseau / WPA Pool / Getty )
粉红色规则
每当你与约翰逊交谈时，你都会撞见一种包罗万象的信念，即事情会好起来。例如，他相信苏格兰独立的威胁会随着时间的推移而消失，英国脱欧作为一种向心力将英国拉回到一起。

然而，约翰逊比他的批评者和对手更了解政治的艺术。他是对的，他是一场书写国家故事的战斗，而这需要向人们提供希望和代理权，提供一种乐观和自豪的感觉。他已经表明，他是寻找选民想听的故事的高手。

他是成功还是失败，在英国的国界之外也很重要。当民主国家寻找方法来回应选民的关切，而不陷入东欧的欧尔班专制主义或吞噬共和党的特朗普民粹主义时，约翰逊正在开始试运行一个保守的替代方案，该方案可能被证明具有吸引力，或者至少是可行的。

但是，随着英国最终退出欧盟，约翰逊现在必须解决那些仅靠信念无法解决的问题。如果他的国内经济项目失败，一些人担心国家会转向仇外的身份政治。如果他不能在国内统一国家，他让英国在世界舞台上更加自信的努力可能被证明是不可能的。如果他不能抵御苏格兰独立的要求，国家将会分裂。"告诉大家一切都很好，并不等于一切都很好，"托尼-布莱尔告诉我。

现在，约翰逊已经赢得了他的革命，他是否有足够的精力将其进行到底？甚至他最亲密的助手之一也表示担心，这位首相没有系统地思考英国的问题，他太依赖不可动摇的信念。


我最后一次见到约翰逊是在英格兰的东北部。"超级星期四 "已经过去了，他在英格兰取得了巨大的胜利，尽管在苏格兰没有，支持独立的政党在那里赢得了小幅多数。我们在塞奇菲尔德（Sedgefield）见面，这是布莱尔的长期选区。当我还是个孩子的时候，人们开玩笑说，那里的工党选票并没有被计算在内，而是被衡量了。现在，那里是保守党的地盘。

约翰逊承认对布莱尔有某种 "勉强的钦佩"，他在20世纪90年代和2000年代赢得了三个议会多数席位。我说，就我所知，这两个人之间的区别是，布莱尔通过进步的棱镜来看待一切：那些站在历史正确一边的人，比如他自己，以及像约翰逊这样试图阻挡不可避免的人。

"他感到历史的手在他的肩膀上，不是吗？" 约翰逊说，他嘲笑布莱尔在北爱尔兰签署《受难日协议》前不久的一句名言。

约翰逊并不这样看待这个世界。"我认为，历史--社会、文明和国家--可以兴衰，我认为事情可以倒退，"他说。

这听起来可能是一个警告。但对约翰逊来说，英国脱欧是英国崛起的燃料，而不是它的衰落。他认为，今天的英国比离开欧盟之前拥有更多的 "动力、推动力和魔力"。


与约翰逊一样，很难从叙述技巧中分辨出真正的信念。我不断回想起他早些时候在我们讨论勒卡雷时告诉我的话："所有的浪漫主义者都需要愤世嫉俗的砂浆来支撑自己"。他的性格的双重性继续让我着迷。他有光明和色彩，他想让世界看到--他的笑话和无遮掩的乐观主义。但也有一个阴影，即大多数认识他的人都承认的黑暗面，即反省和计算的时刻。

我希望再次看到更多反思的约翰逊，我向他重复了这句话，并开始问他是什么意思。

"我想知道...... "在约翰逊插话之前，我只说了这句话。

"我说过吗？"他问。"我真是太自大了。"

这篇文章出现在2021年7/8月的印刷版上，标题是 "鲍里斯-约翰逊完全知道他在做什么"。当你使用本页面的链接购买书籍时，我们会收到一笔佣金。谢谢你对《大西洋》的支持。

汤姆-麦克塔格是《大西洋》杂志驻伦敦的工作人员，是一名作家。