Is Boris Johnson a great man of history?

Boris Johnson has always been an enthusiastic proponent of the long unfashionable ‘great man’ theory of history. As he argued in his short biography of Winston Churchill, Churchill was a living refutation of the notion that great men and women are just ‘meretricious bubbles on the vast tides of social history’, a ‘withering retort to all that malarkey. He, and he alone, made the difference’.

Boris’s own downfall is a magnificent demonstration – though perhaps not of the sort he would have hoped for – that he was onto something. Character does make a difference. It wasn’t ‘events, dear boy, events’ that did for him – though heaven knows he was rocked by a few of those. Everything he got wrong, in the end, came down to defects of character: he dithered over difficult decisions because he wanted to be loved; he hadn’t the patience to get across important detail; he put himself and his unregulated appetites first; and when the threat arose of having to take responsibility for anything, his reflex was always to tell a fib.