The Churchill Factor: politicians, writing and the path to posterity 

“I can’t wait till I can go back to writing, have fun and make money.” So, reportedly, said Boris Johnson last year. Being Prime Minister was “too much like hard work”. The remark reinforces claims made by his former chief adviser Dominic Cummings, last week, that Boris wants to win the next general election and then leave after “a couple of years” later rather than go “on and on”. 

But while it was the pecuniary and workshy aspects of the Prime Minister’s remarks that made the headlines, what has been less picked up on is the first-listed activity: writing. 

After all, before politics Boris worked for The Times and the Daily Telegraph, edited The Spectator and was the author of numerous books, including a biography of Winston Churchill and a novel called Seventy-Two Virgins. Of course, his journalistic career – like his political career – was marred by fabrication and missing deadlines, but both testify to his talent as a wordsmith (his controversial remarks are anything but unoriginal). Indeed, following Churchill and Benjamin Disraeli, Boris is only the third Prime Minister to have written a novel. 

But he is not the first politician with a background in writing and journalism. Some of the most notable statesmen in history were “men of letters”, including Cicero, Napoleon and Churchill. As the saying goes, politicians campaign in poetry and govern in prose. Either way, it’s through words.

Nowadays, many politicians are budding writers. Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband, Jess Phillips and Alan Duncan all have books released this year. Michel Barnier’s Brexit diary, La Grande Illusion, is seen as the starting gun for his anticipated French presidential run, while the much-touted potential Democratic presidential candidate, Stacey Abrams, has written nearly a dozen novels. 

Of course, not all politicians are wordsmiths. Many, like Donald Trump, outsource their writing duties to ghost-writers (although he maintains that he is currently “writing like crazy” on “the book of all books”). Some carefully cultivate the aid of “authorised” biographers, as Margaret Thatcher did with Charles Moore, while others, such as Lyndon Johnson, are immortalised by the work of independent hacks. 

But, by and large, politics – like journalism, advertising and the law – attracts the wordy and the mercurial. Disraeli famously described his great rival, WE Gladstone, as “inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity”. Politicians are word merchants – “snake oil salesman” as they are often called – who deal in the ancient art of rhetoric (nowadays more often referred to as “soundbites” and “spin”). 

It is, therefore, not surprising that many a journalist has switched the Fourth Estate for the greasy pole. Or, to borrow Johnson’s analogy (Lyndon, not Boris), gone from being “outside the tent pissing in” to “being inside the tent pissing out”. This has only become more prevalent in the age of mass media, as politics has become more driven by communications.

Indeed, many British journalists have worked for or become politicians: Robert Maxwell, Michael Foot, Nigel Lawson, Martin Bell, Alastair Campbell, Andy Coulson, Ed Balls, Ruth Davidson and Michael Gove, to name a few. This trend is symbolised in the Yes Minister character, Jim Hacker, who went from newspaper editor to prime minister. Earlier this year, the odds on Piers Morgan becoming Prime Minister were slashed to 20/1.

The consequences of this first materialised amidst the “spin” of the New Labour years and then, amidst Brexit, when it was highlighted that the Leave campaign was spearheaded by the former journalists, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove. “Good copy can be bad politics,” said Sunder Katwala, the director of British Future. “Boris Johnson and Michael Gove are journalists at heart,” wrote Alastair Campbell, “what matters to them is the story, the line”. Incidentally, both Campbell and Katwala were themselves once journalists, not to mention Campbell’s role as Blair’s “spin doctor”.

But the gist of their argument is correct. Indeed, in his recent testimony to Parliament, Dominic Cummings said that Boris Johnson is a “thousand times too obsessed with the media” – he “wakes up, reads the newspapers and then cannons around”. The government is a press-answering service, where everything is dedicated to the media, day in, day out”. Upon receiving the government’s Coronavirus Action Plan, Cummings alleges that one of his colleagues remarked: “This is a press release, where is the actual plan?”

A familiar picture emerges of a government preoccupied with headlines, stories and good press – of a press-answering service rather than a government. And it shouldn’t take the word of the spin doctors who built this press-answering service to highlight its salience as an issue.  

Boris, of course, is preoccupied with his government’s popularity for political reasons. His government’s unprecedented spending on polling has earned the epithet “government by focus group”.

But it is also psychological: he is more interested in being loved than feared – and perhaps remembered above all. In a recent interview in The Atlantic, he talked of the ancient poet Horace who wrote bum-sucking poems about his [patrons] saying how great they are…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?’” When the interviewer asked whether that makes journalists more powerful than politicians, the Prime Minister replied: “Exactly, exactly.” 

The pen, as they say, is mightier than the sword. Meghan Markle might call it “controlling the narrative”. Politicians like Boris not only want to make history but write it too. As Churchill, said: “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it”. As Boris labours over his biography of Shakespeare (rather than attending Covid meetings), he is undoubtedly aware that, one day, someone else will be doing the same for him. High office and literary repute are but stepping stones in the path to posterity.

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