Boris Johnson - TV Tropes

Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson MP (born 19 June 1964), sometimes nicknamed "BoJo" and commonly known simply as "Boris," is a former British Conservative politician, former Prime Minister from 2019 to 2022, the Mayor of London from 2008 to 2016, Member of Parliament for Uxbridge and South Ruislip from 2015 to 2023 (and for Henley from 2001 to 2008), the Foreign Secretary from 2016 to 2018, as well as a journalist, novellist, historian, classicist and TV personality. He is easily recognizable by his unruly mop of blond hair, general air of amiable distraction, and tendency to talk like a P. G. Wodehouse character.

He was born in New York City to British parents Stanley and Charlotte Johnson, giving him dual US–UK citizenship; he renounced the former in 2015.^note  He is additionally one of the most ethnically mixed high-ranking global politicians of the 21st century, being not only English, but French, German,^note  Russian, and Turkish.^note  (He's the whole Crimean War in one messy blond package!) Until the age of eight, he had severely impaired hearing due to a condition called "glue ear" and was "a subdued child" before it was surgically corrected. He attended Eton College and read Classics at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was elected president of the Oxford Union in 1986. In 1987 he went to work for The Times, but its editor fired him for the false attribution of a quotation. In 1989, he became the Brussels correspondent, and later political columnist, for The Daily Telegraph, then became editor of The Spectator magazine, then came to major fame with an appearance on Have I Got News for You. Ian Hislop had a transcript of a phone call in which Johnson agreed to help an old school friend of his beat up another journalist, which Hislop used to mock Johnson, something Johnson hadn't been expecting. Following this, he claimed in his column that the show was entirely scripted. Later, he reappeared on the show to retract this, reassuring "all the little children out there" that the show was indeed entirely spontaneous, and admitting that he'd agreed to come back purely for the money. He also appeared later as a repeat guest host.

After being elected to Parliament for Henley in 2001,^note  Johnson served as a shadow junior minister under Conservative leaders Michael Howard and David Cameron. He was fired from his position as editor of The Spectator in 2005 after management became dissatisfied with his lacklustre performance. He resigned from the House of Commons in 2008 after he was elected mayor of London. He was re-elected as mayor in 2012, with former two-term independent/Labour mayor Ken Livingstone coming second to him both times.

In the 2015 national election, Johnson was elected MP for Uxbridge and South Ruislip; as a result, he did not seek re-election as mayor the following year. He became a prominent figure in the successful Vote Leave campaign for Brexit in the 2016 referendum on membership of The European Union. When David Cameron resigned as Conservative leader following Vote Leave's victory, Johnson quickly announced his intention to run for the now vacant post, which had the premiership attached to it. Although he quickly became the favourite to win, he pulled out of the leadership election before it even started when his fellow Brexiter Michael Gove betrayed him and decided to run himself, claiming that Johnson would not be a capable PM. The erstwhile Remain supporter Theresa May won, then (needing or wanting to keep her enemies closer than her friends) appointed him Foreign Secretary. He and David Davis, the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, resigned from cabinet two years later in protest at May's approach to Brexit. Returning to the back benches, Johnson spent the next several months doing his best to destabilise May's position.

After May resigned in 2019, Johnson was elected Conservative leader and finally achieved his longtime dream of becoming prime minister, itself somewhat downscaled from a former espoused childhood ambition to be "world king". He reopened Brexit negotiations and in early September controversially prorogued Parliament; the Supreme Court ruled the action unlawful later that month. After agreeing to a revised Brexit withdrawal agreement with the EU, but failing to win parliamentary support for the agreement, Johnson oversaw the introduction and passage of a bill to call a snap election for 12 December 2019. He led the Conservative Party to victory: they won the most votes in British electoral history after John Major's 1992 win, their largest seat share and count since Margaret Thatcher's final win in 1987, and their largest share of the popular vote since Thatcher's first win in 1979. The United Kingdom withdrew from the EU on 31 January 2020, entering a period of transition and trade negotiations. Little sooner had Brexit taken effect, though, than the COVID-19 Pandemic became a major issue of his premiership; the government responded with various emergency powers, introduced measures to mitigate its impact, and approved the rollout of a nationwide vaccination programme. Many scientists criticised Johnson for his slow response to the outbreak, including his resistance to introducing lockdown measures, though others later praised him for the successful implementation of the vaccination programme as well as relaxing laws to allow fast development of a workable vaccine. He was also criticised for missing five emergency COBRA meetings on how to handle the rapidly approaching pandemic, with it being rumored that he had instead decided to finish writing his long-overdue biography of William Shakespeare.^note 

Despite criticisms of his actions early in the pandemic, his government maintained extremely strong approval ratings from the start of the pandemic until late 2021, thanks to a combination of the typically British mentality that it's bad form even to seem to undermine the government during a time of national crisis, sympathy from Johnson himself having fallen severely ill with the disease, the smooth rollout of the country's COVID vaccination programme, and a post-Brexit mentality among many voters that it was more important for the government to be patriotic than squeaky clean. All these factors contributed to his party enjoying a highly successful round of post-COVID local elections in May 2021, as well as the Conservatives winning the previously safe Labour Commons seat of Hartlepool in a landslide by-election on the same day.^note  Much like Tony Blair before him, Johnson earned the nickname "Teflon Boris" for his seeming ability to shrug off any scandal. In the best illustration of this, when Labour Party leader Keir Starmer attacked him over an expenses scandal concerning funds used to refurbish 10 Downing Street just before the aforementioned local elections, Starmer saw his polling ratings fall after Johnson dismissed him as an opportunist. Between that and Brexit, many assumed that he would probably enjoy at least a decade in power, joining Blair and Thatcher for longevity among modern PMs. As it turned out, however, he would barely even outlast his immediate predecessor's time in office.

Ironically, while at least some people felt Johnson had permanently settled the "European question" that had helped end the careers of so many Conservative prime ministers before him (including Harold Macmillan, Edward Heath, Thatcher, Major, Cameron, and May), he would end up losing power thanks to the other problem that had dogged his predecessors: sleaze. The first step towards his downfall came in November 2021, when he attempted to change the parliamentary standards rules in what many saw as an obvious effort to get his political ally Owen Paterson acquitted for a donations and lobbying scandal. Johnson and his allies claimed that the investigation was flawed and that Paterson was persecuted for being a Brexit supporter, but the public did not buy this, and it began what would soon prove a steady decline in the government's polling numbers.

Paterson subsequently resigned from Parliament, still maintaining that the investigation that resulted in his suspension was unfair, leading to his theoretically ultra-safe seat, North Shropshire, going to the Liberal Democrats in a subsequent by-election. Two other heavy by-election defeats the following summer, at Wakefield (where Labour reclaimed one of its "heartland" seats the Tories flipped in 2019, which was crucial to that victory) and Tiverton and Honiton (another safe Conservative constituency that went Liberal Democrat^note ), further imperilled Johnson's position. While he wasn't personally implicated in the events that resulted in the Tory incumbents vacating those seats (Imran Ahmad Khan was expelled from the party, then resigned as MP for Wakefield, after being convicted of sexual assault, while Neil Parish resigned as MP for Tiverton and Honiton after he was caught viewing pornography in the House of Commons), they reinforced the image of the Tories as sleaze-ridden — something they had tried hard to shake off during Cameron's and May's tenures — at the worst possible time for Johnson.

While still reeling from the Paterson fiasco, Johnson became embroiled in a more serious controversy when it was revealed that during the pandemic, he violated health restrictions on public gatherings by hosting parties in 10 Downing Street and other government buildings. Known as "Partygate", the scandal made him the first British prime minister to be sanctioned for breaking the law while in office when he received a fixed penalty notice in April 2022 for breach of COVID-19 regulations. Much of the Conservatives' polling and electoral success under his leadership was owed to the party being able to claim that they had displaced Labour as the party of the working class (mainly because they had delivered Brexit, which the working class overwhelmingly supported, but also because of a manifesto promise to "level up" economically neglected areas of the country, which itself many were now calling into question as just a load of Meaningless Meaningful Words). For Johnson's first two years in Number 10, they were willing to overlook a lot of his shenanigans, but the close proximity of the Paterson and Partygate scandals irreparably broke Johnson's and the party's image in this regard, leaving many voters annoyed that the Conservatives seemed to take their support for granted. The publication of a subsequent report on the scandal and a widespread sense of dissatisfaction led to a confidence vote among Tory MPs on 6 June 2022, in which 211 supported Johnson and 148 opposed him.^note 

Weeks later, he was forced from office by the Chris Pincher scandal, where he first denied knowing that multiple people had accused Pincher of sexual harassment at the time he appointed him to the important position of Deputy Chief Whip of the Conservative Party; then got other cabinet members to tell the media that he didn't know about the allegations as well; then was forced to admit that he'd known about them all along. (Compounding the scandal, he was later accused of joking about the allegations, too, calling his appointee "Pincher by name and pincher by nature.") The ensuing mass resignations (61 MPs resigned from government or senior party positions in all, including 36 in a 24-hour period, a record in British history, and he dismissed Gove from his cabinet post for urging him to resign) finally forced him to announce his own departure. Despite Brexit being a huge part of his political legacy, he is the first Conservative PM since Alec Douglas-Home whose departure from Number 10 had nothing to do with Britain's relationship with Europe.

He was replaced as PM by the winner of the September 2022 Conservative Party leadership contest, Liz Truss, the UK's third woman to hold the office, two days before the passing of Queen Elizabeth II. However, in October, after Truss herself was driven from office after a short, disastrous tenure, Johnson attempted to mount a comeback and declared his candidacy for the next leadership election. This was met with ambivalence among the Tory electorate: some thought he could get the country back on track since he could claim a mandate through his victory at the last general election, while others felt his presence would remind the public of his various failings, which would just weaken the Tories even further after the Truss debacle. Ultimately, he withdrew from consideration despite previously declaring that he had the 100 votes in the Parliamentary party necessary to stand^note  — a claim that was generally met with scepticism. Consequently, after Penny Mordaunt also withdrew, Rishi Sunak was acclaimed as leader of the Conservative Party on 24 October.^note 

Johnson sat on the Tory back benches for nine months after leaving Downing Street. Barring his abortive attempt to succeed Truss, he was largely quiet during her ministry, but he became a thorn in Sunak's side via all sorts of public announcements about what he felt the government ought to do, complicating Sunak's efforts in areas such as the war in Ukraine and sorting out the Northern Ireland situation with respect to Brexit. He eventually resigned from his seat in June 2023 as continued investigations into his conduct while he was PM — including charges that he hosted in-person parties during COVID lockdowns, and crucially, that he lied to Parliament about said parties — which looked like they might get him ejected,^note  intensified. Ironically, considering the crushing series of parliamentary by-election defeats that the party experienced between the start of 2022 and the next general election in 2024, Johnson's former seat of Uxbridge and South Ruislip was the one seat the Tories didn't lose in this period,^note  though most people attributed it, rightly or wrongly, more to backlash to a controversial greenhouse gas-emissions regulation that was due to be imposed on older vehicles in London than anything to do with Johnson. At the following year's general election, which the Conservatives lost badly, Labour candidate Danny Beales went on to flip the seat from Conservative Steve Tuckwell, who won the by-election partly by downplaying his connection to his party and largely not even mentioning Johnson.^note 

Less than three weeks before Sunak announced that he had requested and received permission from King Charles III to dissolve Parliament for a general election, there were local elections, including for police and crime commissioners in England and Wales. From the locals Johnson made headlines when he initially forgot to bring his photo identification with him to vote for the Thames Valley police and crime commissioner. His own government had passed the photo ID requirement for elections in Great Britain in May 2022.

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Books he has written

• Friends, Voters, Countrymen: Jottings on the Stump (2001)
• Johnson's Column (2003)
• Lend Me Your Ears (2003)
• Seventy-Two Virgins (2004)
• Aspire Ever Higher/University Policy for the 21st Century (2006)
• The Dream of Rome (2006)
• Have I Got Views for You (2006)
• Life in the Fast Lane: The Johnson Guide to Cars (2007)
• The Perils of the Pushy Parents: A Cautionary Tale (2007)
• Johnson's Life of London (2011)
• The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (2014)
• Unleashed (2024)

In Media

Johnson's political career has been the subject of several television docudramas, with varying actors playing him:

• Stuart McQuarrie in the 2005 television film A Very Social Secretary.
• Christian Brassington in the 2009 drama documentary When Boris Met Dave.
• Will Barton in the 2017 BBC drama Theresa vs. Boris: How May Became PM.
• Richard Goulding in the 2019 HBO/Channel 4 drama Brexit: The Uncivil War.
• Kenneth Branagh in the 2022 Sky Atlantic television drama This England.
• In Channel 4's drama Partygate, real news footage of Johnson is mixed with dramatised scenes where he's The Faceless and voiced by Jon Culshaw.
• Johnson is the protagonist of Jonathan Maitland's play The Last Temptation of Boris Johnson, with Will Barton playing him in the original production.

Likewise, he has also been the subject of parody, mainly due to his bumbling mannerisms and distinctive hairstyle:

• In the 2008–2012 children's TV cartoon Ben and Holly's Little Kingdom, the mayor of Fairy Town, voiced by Alexander Armstrong, is based on Johnson, who was mayor of London at the time.
• Johnson is voiced by Lewis MacLeod in the fourth and fifth series of 2DTV as well as the radio revival of Dead Ringers.
• MacLeod reprises his voice role as Johnson in the puppet/CGI sketch series Newzoids.
• He is voiced by Jon Culshaw in Headcases. In it, Johnson is portrayed as a half-man half-dog who would rather engage in acts of canine behaviour, such as chase his tail, than answer questions.
• In the webcomic Nixvir, he is caricatured as Gnome President Mesthion, likely due to the author's anger at his mismanagement of the Covid-19 Pandemic.
• In 2019, James Corden portrayed Johnson in a sketch on Saturday Night Live.
• In the 2020 revival of Spitting Image, Johnson's puppet is voiced by Matt Forde.
• Once & Future: He is strongly implied to be the Faceless Prime Minister who a malevolent King Arthur and Merlin manipulate into revealing the existence of the supernatural to the British people, leading to Britain being sucked into the Otherworld and the Prime Minister having his head ripped off by Arthur on a live TV broadcast. His face is never seen, but the severed head has his distinctive hair.
• In The Undeclared War, set in 2024, Boris Johnson is mentioned to have been forced out of office 15 months before, having lost a confidence vote. Ironically, while the series was airing, Boris Johnson did have to resign, even though he'd won a confidence vote just before the series began airing.
• For the fifteenth anniversary of the Revival Series of Doctor Who, Russell T Davies wrote an epilogue to his novelization of its debut story, "Rose", where the Nestene Consciousness merges with the corpse of a man heavily implied to be Johnson, who in-universe was killed during the Auton attack.

He has even been the subject of British music and music media:

• Robbie Williams plays Boris in the music video for his 2020 festive single "Can't Stop Christmas".
• Johnson is the subject of the 2020 song "Boris Johnson Is a Fucking Cunt" by Kunt and the Gang. It reached number five on the UK Singles Chart. The group released a sequel song, "Boris Johnson Is Still a Fucking Cunt", in 2021; it too reached number five in the chart.

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Tropes applied to Boris Johnson's works and appearances in media:

• Author Avatar: In the mid-noughties, while he was an opposition MP, he wrote a novel called Seventy-Two Virgins, which stars "a tousled, bicycling Tory MP who believes everything is up for grabs". Sound familiar?
• Colbert Bump: Johnson's appearance on an April 1998 episode of Have I Got News for You is credited as being what brought him to a far wider audience; emphasising a bumbling upper-class persona, he was viewed as entertaining and invited back on to later episodes, including as a guest presenter. After these, members of the public came to recognise him on the street, and he was invited to appear on other television shows, such as Top Gear, Parkinson, Breakfast with Frost, and Question Time.
• First-Name Basis: Subverted. In media portrayals of him, he usually goes by the name "Boris", the only British political figure to be portrayed this way outside of the Royal Family. However, he started going by the name "Boris" when he arrived at Eton in 1977, prior to which he had gone by his actual first name "Alex" (his full name being Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson). Although most treat "Boris" as his first name, the trope that's actually in play in the media is therefore Middle Name Basis.
• It's All About Me: One sceptical review of his book about Winston Churchill was subtitled "All about our greatest leader (plus a bit about Churchill)", because of the amount of time Johnson spent in the book talking about himself.
• Politician Guest-Star: He appeared so frequently on Have I Got News for You that they produced a DVD collection with his appearances called The Full Boris.

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