Here’s an odd, but true, fact: If you do a search on the Irish Times website for “Boris Johnson”, you will find that he is mentioned in 7,069 articles in the history of the newspaper.
If you do the same search for Eamon Ryan, a current Irish cabinet minister, as well as the leader of Ireland’s Green Party, and one of the most influential people in Irish politics over the past 20 years, you will find only 6,376. Simon Harris, a long-serving Minister for Health, gets only 5,173 results. Paschal Donohoe, the present Irish Minister for Finance – the man who sets all our tax rates, warrants only 5,554 results. The Irish Times – note the name – has given more coverage over the years to a man who has been British Prime Minister for fewer than three years than it has to three men who have almost a decade in Government in Ireland, each.
Isn’t that an extraordinary statistic? Eamon Ryan first entered Government in Ireland in 2007, and served for four years as Minister for Communications. He has been leader of the Green Party for well over a decade. He is the third most senior member of Ireland’s Government. And yet still, Boris Johnson – for almost all of the time since 2007, a minor player in UK politics – has accrued more column inches in Ireland’s premier newspaper than Ryan has.
Simon Harris led one of the most high-profile referendum campaigns in Irish history, and spent five years at the helm of our most controversial, and troublesome department. All before Boris rose to the premiership. He, too, warranted less coverage.
Ireland, and its media, is spectacularly obsessed with Boris Johnson. Just yesterday, Fintan O’Toole was at it again:
Boris Johnson is prime minister of the UK because he convinced enough English people that they are different from the others. As the Brexit drama unfolded, the most bothersome of the others were the damned Irish – the tail, as he put it in such exasperation, that was wagging the English dog.
Is that even true? It seems very unlikely that it is. Boris Johnson first became UK Prime Minister because he won an internal leadership election to replace Theresa May – “English people” – had little to do with it. He then won a large parliamentary majority by promising to deliver a Brexit deal. Having paid close attention to that campaign, I for one cannot recall him ever having said anything indicating he felt the English were different to others. That, as opening paragraphs go, is complete invention by Ireland’s premier columnist.
Boris Johnson is not especially interesting: Like all good politicians, he is a spoofer. Bill Clinton was a spoofer too (I did not have sexual relations with that woman, etc) but of course, we all loved him here in Ireland. Our concern for the integrity and honesty of foreign leaders is not, shall we say, always applied consistently.
Indeed, Tony Blair – another UK PM with a record for spoofery – was widely beloved here, too, at least until the Iraq war happened. All of which makes it hard to credit that Irish journalists have a sudden and newfound appreciation for integrity in public office in the United Kingdom, and the United States. So, what is it?
Is it, perhaps, that Johnson is a very specific kind of English? Not a working class lad from Brixton, like John Major, or a smooth and charming home counties lawyer, like David Cameron or Theresa May. Instead, Johnson is unabashedly a toff – the kind of fellow who says “jolly good” unironically and seems unconcerned about Britain’s colonial past. He’s every Anglophobe’s idea of an Englishman.
And of course, then there are his sins: Not the sins of which he is currently accused. Irish Journalists don’t care a whit about parties in Downing Street – after all, they hardly climbed on their high horses to worry about Simon Coveney’s department hosting a bash during lockdown. No, the sins which Johnson committed are more serious than that: He betrayed his class.
Johnson, after all, was a journalist first. He is a journalist who has risen high, and been very successful: At one point, his Daily Telegraph column was earning him even more money than Fintan O’Toole makes – a lot, in other words. People enjoyed reading his pieces. And what he said actually changed people’s minds. In truth, Boris Johnson is the most consequential journalist on these islands in a century or more. And many of his old colleagues – both in Ireland and the UK – transparently cannot stand it.
What’s more, Johnson is an educated, upper middle class, well-off sort of fellow. And yet, his political appeal extended to people who simply shouldn’t be appealed to: People concerned about immigration, crime, and a loss of national identity. Johnson won votes and seats in places that are supposed to vote Labour, and have always voted Labour, and have always been places of the left. Not only then is Johnson a class traitor, but to some of these people, he is a thief: He stole votes he had no right to.
And then there is the final, and perhaps greatest, insult: Boris Johnson does not, especially, seem to care about Ireland, any more than he cares about any other foreign country. In fact, it might be said that he’s the first UK Prime Minister to treat us exactly as we’ve claimed to want to be treated for a century: As just another independent country which the UK deals with and doesn’t give any special treatment to. He doesn’t fawn over our historic, familial connection, or anything like that, as we secretly like UK Prime Ministers to do. The UK has interests, and he pursues them without caring too much about us. That provokes howls of rage. Because we still harbour – many of us – the idea that to the UK, Ireland should be special.
But the bottom line, at this stage, is that Irish coverage of Boris Johnson has grown demented, and obsessed. He is just another politician, who may last, or may not. The Irish media’s obsession with him says much more about them, and their prejudices, than it does about him.