The Prince Harryfication of Boris Johnson

The acting one sees upon the stage doesn’t show how human beings actually comport themselves in crises, but simply how actors think they ought to. It is the same with politicians, but they are not actors, only a sort of reductio ad absurdum of a thespian. Their profession bears the same relation to proper acting (so-called) as that of a card sharp or a divorce lawyer bears to poetry. Take Michael Gove, whom I have known since I was 21, and Matt Hancock, whom (I thank God fasting) I don’t know at all. Were this a play, Hancock would not have left his wife and three children for a well-known flirt, who I have seen in action on several occasions fluttering her eyelashes at other married men. As for the Goves, I am sorry that they are divorcing, but it is unusual that there is no third party involved. Politicians generally say this to make their divorces appear more palatable; thus friends of Boris made the same assertion when he and Marina parted, something that turned out to be untrue.

But it is not the case, as Sarah Vine recently wrote, that all political marriages end in failure. There are many happy unions in politics. My parents’ was one. Although my father was an MP, shadow minister and member of the Lords, I don’t recall his character changing for the worse, as Ms Vine claimed was inevitable. My father never neglected his wife or children or began refusing to wash up. He had always refused to wash up. (Incidentally, I would never let Michael Gove near my kitchen, as everything about the visible universe fills him with terror.) Admittedly, my father had four wives, but not for lack of attention, and indeed perhaps because of a surfeit of it; the first three left him for other men, including a conscientious objector and a male model.