What do you do if you think you’re like James Bond? You’re convinced of it. “I’m so handsome and strong and brave and ruthless and intelligent and good at sex – I’m sort of amazing,” you say to yourself. “I admit I haven’t always behaved well in relationships, but I’m so incredibly attractive that I totally get away with it and anyone whose heart I’ve broken would say that it was all completely worth it just to meet me. Plus, in a crisis, I will literally always save the day. Like the song says, ‘nobody does it better’. That 100% applies to me.”
So, if you think that about yourself, and yet no one seems to be saying you’re like James Bond, or particularly terrific in those ways at all, what do you do? I suppose it depends how like James Bond you really are. Because if you say: “Hey everyone, I’m like James Bond! Can I get a bit of credit please?!”, you’re really being very unlike James Bond. James Bond is cool and that’s not cool. James Bond would never say that.
Obviously that’s partly because it would sound even weirder actually coming from James Bond – because he’s called “James Bond”. In a universe where James Bond literally, rather than literarily, existed, the phrase “I’m like James Bond” wouldn’t carry the same meaning as it does in this one. Because he’s a spy so he wouldn’t be famous. So, if he said “I’m like James Bond”, that would be an MI6 operative saying “I’m like me”, which would just be a cue to get him into occupational therapy and change all the passwords. But what I mean is that the character James Bond would certainly not say anything that meant “I am amazingly handsome, cool and capable”. He may believe those things about himself, but he’d be bright enough to realise that asserting it is not how you make people believe it.
Which brings me to Boris Johnson. Don’t worry, he doesn’t think he’s like James Bond. Which is something, because he’s right about that and it’s always nice when powerful people are right about things. Conversely, it’s always frightening when they’re wrong about things. So actually do worry, because I’m pretty sure he thinks he’s like Winston Churchill.
I was reminded of this when I read last week’s reports that Boris Johnson and Carrie Symonds call one another “Bear” and “Otter” respectively. Symonds, in case you don’t know, is that “friend” Boris has been “linked to”. Linked by his penis and her vagina is the implication. I don’t know if that’s true, I hasten to add before the paper goes bankrupt. I’ve never seen them screw. But it’s clearly what a lot of people reckon because, believe it or not, the fact that there is someone in the world who is sincerely an actual friend of Johnson is not in itself considered newsworthy. Apparently he’s got lots of friends. The world is a terrible place.
But whatever the literal or figurative nature of the Johnson-Symonds link, “a friend” told the Sun about this whole Bear/Otter thing. (This is obviously a different sort of “friend”. If Johnson was ever “linked to” this friend, it ended on a sour note.) And I think the furry nicknames are actually all about Churchill.
Johnson is obviously desperate to be compared to Churchill. He’s written a whole book about Churchill just to get himself in the same Google search; he goes around making portentous statements in a phlegmy voice. And, to my mind, the Bear/Otter business is a pretty clear echo of the fact that Winston and Clementine Churchill referred to themselves as “Pig” and “Cat” in the letters they exchanged. It’s pitiful. He’s like a dark age chieftain dressing up as a Roman emperor.
The news that Johnson may bring his Churchill fetish even into the linking room when linking with a friend is fascinating. Previously, I’ve thought Johnson’s attempt to appropriate the image of arguably Britain’s greatest prime minister, and a totemic figure among Tories for all that he was for many years a Liberal, was merely crass and cynical. But now I feel it’s sincere. He really genuinely thinks he’s like Winston Churchill.
To him, perhaps it seems uncanny. The tubby maverick charisma, the rhetorical exuberance, the journalistic background, the infectious sense of fun (by which, to be clear, I do not mean that either man spread venereal disease). Of course, Winston only went to Harrow, had less hair and never hosted Have I Got News For You, but then you’d expect the reincarnation to be a slight upgrade. “Why aren’t more people saying I’m like Winston Churchill?” I can imagine Bear grunting to Otter.
The reason this interests me so much is that it’s a rare glimpse of the real Boris. His whole shtick increasingly seems fake and disingenuous: the crazy hair, the crumpled clothes, the photo on the zip wire, the hesitant twinkly donnish speech pattern. There’s something undoubtedly likable about his demeanour, but what passed for refreshing a few years ago now comes across as a manipulative, if skilfully given, performance. He’s so deliberately foolish it feels like playing into his hands to call him a fool. Who is this person in the clown suit, capering closer and closer to the centre of power, somehow profiting from every gaffe and betrayal? It’s easy to flip straight from dismissing his gormlessness to fearing the genius within.
So the discovery that he actually believes himself to be of Churchillian greatness is a relief. It diminishes him in a way his shuffling gait and scuffed shoes no longer can. If he looks at his own political record, of opportunism and cheap populism, of shameless inconsistency and promises disregarded without a qualm, and genuinely says to himself: “That’s very much like what Winston Churchill did”, then we can all relax because it turns out he’s a massive idiot.
Winston Churchill had deep flaws and did some terrible things, but there the similarity to Boris ends. Ultimately, Churchill saved the world and Boris is a glib chancer motivated by vanity and lust. If anything, he’s more like James Bond.
