A couple of weeks ago, I had a drink with one of Boris Johnson’s classics tutors at Oxford University, and asked him about his pupil’s chances of making it to Downing Street. “Capax imperii nisi imperasset...” he said.
As Boris will know, his old tutor was echoing the Roman historian Tacitus on the Emperor Galba: “He was up to the job of emperor as long as he never became emperor.”
That is the question on Tory lips this week at the Birmingham conference. Can Boris become emperor – or is he doomed to become the eternal jester of the Conservative Party?
His reception this week at Birmingham New Street Station was near-ecstatic – hundreds of activists cheering, “Bo-ris! Bo-ris!” as he got off the train. It’s hard to think of any other politician, alive or dead, who would get that sort of treatment; not even Lenin, when he returned from exile to the Finland Station in Petrograd in 1917. Winston Churchill, perhaps, but only after he had delivered the country, and the world, from imminent takeover by the forces of evil. In an era when stand-up comedians are bigger than pop stars, Boris’s reception was more like the spontaneous outpouring of joy that greets Peter Kay at one of his stadium-filling shows.
In fact, Boris is in many ways a brilliant stand-up comedian – he could sell out theatres across the land if he wanted, and not just in the Tory heartlands. A friend of mine, watching the Olympics opening ceremony in an earthy pub in Leith, Edinburgh’s port, was astonished to hear dyed-in-the-wool Scots Nationalist ex-dockers bellow out the now-familiar cry, “Bo-ris! Bo-ris!”
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