There are no prizes for guessing what motivated this book and it wasn’t the Roman. Though Ferdinand Mount strolls with effortless erudition round the careers of Caesar, Bonaparte, Hitler and even Indira Gandhi, it is the former Prime Minister who is in his sights.
Mount, a baronet, tries to temper his outrage. He is, after all, part of the noblesse oblige tradition, a liberal Conservative who believes in what Lord (Peter) Hennessy has described as the ‘good chap’ school of government, where politicians try to do what’s best for the country. The outgoing PM (but one), now stomping off to his tent, less like Achilles and more like a pudgy cross between Ted Heath and Prince Harry, is not of that ilk. Johnson’s classmates in the bad-chap school might include Victor Orbán and President Putin, with the class bully, Donald Trump, leader of the gang.
It was Hennessy, a usually mild- mannered historian, who first described Johnson as ‘tone deaf’ to the niceties of a constitution based on the outdated premise that Britain would always be run by people with morals. And Mount would no doubt endorse NICK GARLAND his conclusion that the man Conrad Black described as a fox disguised as a teddy bear ‘hasn’t got a single feel for either proper behaviour, proper procedure ... no sense of restraints’.
The purpose of the book, however, is notasamerecridecœur–a‘Why,oh why?’ polemic by disgusted of Islington –butmoreasaWhatIstoBeDone?As its subtitle promises, it charts not simply the rise of Caesars, big and little, but also how they come unstuck.
Moreover, drawing on the ultimate fates of his rogues’ gallery of authoritarians and dictators, Mount’s conclusions are broadly optimistic. He believes that Johnson’s ejection from office and the conclusions of the Privileges Committee inquiry are evidence that Parliament is at last righting the leaky ship of state.
I am not so sure. Full disclosure here. As my brother-in-law, Johnson has, in turn, charmed, entertained and horrified me for more than 30 years. During this time, I can barely remember him ever asking me a single thing about myself.
So, if that is the corrupt, subconscious driver for my own Johnson scepticism, it is also heavily reinforced by nagging guilt that, as his foreign editor on the Sunday Telegraph in the 1990s, I objected only mildly when his fanciful (not to say purely fictitious) copy landed – late, of course – from Brussels.
‘Oh, but it’s so well written,’ the then Sunday Telegraph editor, Charles (now Lord) Moore, used to say as I hovered, eyebrow raised, in his office doorway. ‘Bung it in.’
My theory as to why Sir Max Hastings, Boris’s editor at the Telegraph, is so splenetically anti-Johnson is that he created – and used to boast about the circulation gains of – the Boris-in- Brussels phenomenon.
Mount is not shy about detailing the charge sheet. Specifically, he lists the five Acts of Parliament in spring 2022 that extended executive control over Parliament, elections, the courts, immigrants and public demonstrations.
He castigates the scoundrel-like patriotism of the new flag-waving regime, the £2m White House style briefing room, the effort to prorogue Parliament and the night of the long knives when 21 Tory MPs – all ‘good chaps’ – were sent to the tumbrils.
‘Let’s be quite clear,’ Mount stresses. ‘A parliamentary Conservative party which contained anything like the traditional broad spread of opinion would never have conceived, let alone assented, to a single one of these ghastly laws.’
Nor does he hide his European sentiments. In a thundering peroration, he takes his scourge to the temple of the right-wing tabloids and their fellow travellers in the Commons.
‘Perhaps the most egregious aspect of the Brexiteers,’ he writes, ‘was their boast to be restoring the sovereignty of Parliament while doing their damnedest to prevent Parliament from scrutinising the terms of Britain’s exit – with catastrophic results for small exporters, fruit and veg farmers, care homes and a dozen other sectors.’
But if Mount is magisterial on the hows and the whats of the Caesar syndrome, he entirely ignores the whys. Perhaps the inexactitudes and equivocations of psychology – the very sociopathology of narcissism – are beyond his impressive powers.
For the reader, one pines for an explanation as to what drove Caesar himself to cross the Rubicon? Or how his midget imitators, Indira Gandhi or Johnson or Trump, decided that they, and only they, should impose themselves as national leader and were then willing to play fast and loose with constitutional custom and practice to stay there.
How too can one explain the furious loyalty of the fanbase for whom no outrage is outrageous enough? What lies behind the doe-eyed devotion of Nadine Dorries and the double- breasted, de haut en bas would-be patrician (now Sir) Jacob Rees-Mogg – the Tories’ own Gussie Fink-Nottle?
Mount never explains.
After he’s described the symptoms of the illness, his prognosis that – like the autoimmune response of an organism – Parliament will naturally rid itself of the disease feels Pollyanna- ish indeed.
The Make Britain Great Again horde has put Tories like Macmillan, Major and Mount to the sword. The dogs of Twitter are let loose; all we good chaps can do is ‘Cry “Havoc!” ’
Ivo Dawnay was foreign editor of the Sunday Telegraph
Big Caesars and Little Caesars: How They Rise and How They Fall – from Julius Caesar to Boris Johnson by Ferdinand Mount (Bloomsbury, £20)
