Premier Writer

The ACW can breathe a collective sigh of relief. The election is over and the British people have spoken decisively. The danger is receding that divisive political debate will break out inside our writerly safe haven. 

But without being partisan, can we be a bit more positive than this?  There’s a new, and for us, possibly exciting factor. We have elected a Prime Minister who has a second calling that most of his predecessors lacked. Like us, he is a writer. 

And he is an all-round writer, too. He started out as a journalist, and has explored most of the inevitably murky crevices of that profession, honing his facility with words along the way. He has developed the journalist’s ability to encapsulate a situation vividly. 

He later graduated to writing fiction. I’ve read the first few chapters of his political thriller Seventy-two Virgins, and he seems to have learnt the technique of writing racy, throwaway narrative that keeps you turning the pages. I’ve also read that the book is too long and too relentlessly joky and that it’s like P. G. Wodehouse. 

But he’s also written serious non-fiction: perhaps the most important book of this kind is The Churchill Factor. Again, I’ve only read the first few chapters of this, but I found it both engaging and insightful.

Johnson can write amusingly and ingeniously. Here’s an example:

When the anti-Churchillians heard him rail portentously about Hitler, and the dangers of German rearmament, they heard a man who had railed before and would rail again, and whose railings had just become part of the landscape — like the railings of Hyde Park.

Some critics say that Johnson has tried to remake Winston Churchill in his own image or to use Churchill to justify his own actions. Undoubtedly there is a strong resemblance between them — and this might be taken as a sign of hope. 

But let’s not get political. More to the point is that Churchill is the only other prime minister of recent times to have been a writer, and this fact has clearly impressed itself on Johnson.

So like us, he’s a writer. Is he, also like us, a Christian? Well, here again he parts company with his predecessors, virtually all of whom have adhered with a fair degree of consistency to the Christian faith. A recent writer in the Spectator who interviewed him about this, concluded

Religion is for him a weak spot, a relatively unexplored side of life, and...he vaguely knows it. It’s something he would like to have taken more seriously but to do so is at odds with the flippant persona that earns him such adulation, fame and fortune. Religion, it may one day dawn on him, is where flippant jokes fall down.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the full meaning of the Christian gospel did dawn on him? I think we should pray earnestly for that day.