Boris Johnson’s classic fall

Farewell then, Boris Johnson, and to paraphrase another leader who had rather lost the support of his front bench, what an artist dies with him. Johnson was the most amusing prime minister in living memory, but also the most historically aware. The first British political leader since Harold MacMillan to read classics, he was hugely influenced by the ideas of the ancient world, in particular Fortuna. And as Tom Holland reflected in last Friday’s The Rest is History podcast, this obsession with the classics guided his career.

Classics, Holland said, had once been a ‘how to do politics’ course, from the time of Machiavelli to the aristocrats of the 18th and 19th centuries, seen as a guide to ‘how to behave morally and politically’. This became especially important as elites in Europe and America came to consciously imitate the ancients — five Victorian and Edwardian prime ministers read classics — but ‘that has not been the case for many, many years.’