A Shakespearean in Downing Street

Mace | 6th February 2020 | Uncategorised

It was in another lifetime that Boris Johnson stood up – on the eve of the May era, in fact – and quoted Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar

“There is a tide in the affairs of men/Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.” On that occasion, bearing fresh backstab wounds, he decided that it wasn’t his moment. It was to be, in retrospect, his final moment of indecisiveness. Johnson is now installed in Downing Street rather like a hero in a Shakespearean history play. It has to be said that he has seized and practised the premiership with uncommon ruthlessness since. It’s worth taking a moment to celebrate the arrival of a literary man in Downing Street. Like him or loathe him, Johnson must be the best-read PM since Harold Macmillan. In Tom Bower’s biography of Corbyn, Dangerous Hero, he reveals that the Labour leader didn’t read a book for four years and his house hardly had a novel in it. Corbyn was no intellectual like Denis Healey, that’s for sure. But if you know your Shakespeare then you’ll know that the hero always has a flaw. What’s Johnson’s? Given the epic gamble of the election, the PM is no wavering Hamlet; m...

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