Is Boris Johnson a joker or the next PM?

ASK WHO IS THE most charismatic Conservative in Britain right now, and the answer will come straight back: Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, once shadow minister for the arts, now mayor of London, columnist for The Daily Telegraph, comic turn-taker, and coquette. And soon to be leader of the Tory Party? Not according to him. But the more he tosses his canary yellow locks and declares he has less chance of becoming prime minister than of being “decapitated by a frisbee [or] blinded by a champagne cork”—neither all that improbable given his lifestyle—the more we are convinced he thinks of nothing else. And the worse things get for David Cameron’s premiership—his party languishing in the polls after bad local election results and a budget of monumental indiscretion, injustice, and indecisiveness; his judgment in the matter of friends and advisers called seriously into question; his demeanor turning increasingly grouchy and preoccupied (so preoccupied that he accidentally left his eight-year-old daughter in a pub)—the better Boris’s chances look. Not that either man will admit to a rivalry.

We call Boris Johnson “Boris,” but we don’t call David Cameron “David.” That ostensibly small distinction, which you can bet your life does not feel small to the prime minister, conceals a world of difference. They are both Etonians, both graduates of Oxford, both onetime members of the Bullingdon Club—a secret dining and boozing society for the fatuously overprivileged, where the wearing of tails and the popping of champagne corks (if not the throwing of frisbees) is de rigueur—and therefore both, you would think, unlikely to strike a single chord of sympathy or solidarity with a British populace bleeding from a thousand cuts. Yet we refer to Boris as “Boris” and smile when we see him on television. It takes some explaining.

We could start with One Man, Two Guvnors, the phenomenal success of which is to be attributed to the British genius for pantomime. An update of a farce by Carlo Goldoni, the play tells the story of a cash-strapped glutton serving more masters and answering more demands than you would think it possible to remember, let alone satisfy. Uncompromised by subtlety or seriousness, it is a whirlwind tour through everything the British find funny: mistaken identities and bedrooms, maniacal resourcefulness, the failings and flailings of the body, and, above all, a class system whose very anachronism is its comedic virtue.

Boris Johnson mobilizes all these comic elements in the persona he presents to the public. His masterstroke is to consciously anachronize himself. He is amusing to look at, soft-mouthed, cherubic, a fallen angel uncomfortable in his clothes, tousled. “And how long have you been cutting your own hair?” David Letterman asked him recently, rather missing the joke, since those who know him insist he tousles himself with great deliberation before going on air. (One might pause for a moment to note that he appeared on Letterman’s “Late Show” at all.) Boris famously champions bicycles and as mayor has been responsible for a city-wide bicycle-sharing scheme, but he never looks entirely secure on his own; his rascally precariousness being of the sort he would like us to think defines his well-publicized role as extra-marital lover (the sort of man who keeps his socks on in bed) as well. He peppers his conversation with classical allusions in a way that manages to be both pedantic and a joke against pedantry, just as his lineage, as a scion of high-born families from every hegemonic corner of the globe, from Württemberg to the Ottoman Empire, at once justifies his pampered air and mocks it. While Muslims, Jews, and Christians jostle for genetic supremacy in him, the country it is easiest to identify him with is the imaginary kingdom of Ruritania. Thus, to his own amusement, he is prince of everywhere and nowhere.