Review: Stanley, I Presume by Stanley Johnson (original) (raw)

I came to this with high hopes. For one thing, there was the possibility that Stanley Johnson, father of Boris, would be another Ferdinand Mount, and his memoir, Stanley, I Presume, another Cold Cream, by which I mean that this would be a funny account of posh Tory life and feature brilliant and devastating sketches of well-known establishment figures. For another, there was Anne Robinson's plug for the book, printed on its cover. Yes, Anne Robinson, presenter of The Weakest Link. She calls it "a jaw-dropping account of a rollercoaster life" and "a triumph", which, given the lemony scepticism that oozes from her every pore, and the fact that she is teetotal (unlike some, she could not have written her voluminous puff at the end of a long, hard night on the cooking sherry) made it seem like a moderately good bet.

Well, it did not take long for my hopes to be dashed. Johnson is obviously a prodigiously energetic and adventurous man: he once rode a motorcycle from London to Afghanistan and his working life has at various times involved training as a spy, working for the World Bank and the UN, a stint as an MEP and the writing of several thrillers. When he was at Oxford, he won the Newdigate Prize for poetry - previous recipients: Matthew Arnold, Oscar Wilde - with a love poem called May Morning ("And I myself, a dubious thing of youth/ Changeful as the sunlight on the hill"). But I would not describe the trajectory of his life as "rollercoaster"; if we must resort to pleasure park metaphors, I would put him down as more of a hardy miniature railway, tootling enthusiastically along, pulling occasionally on his whistle to remind us all of his existence.

If this is an error on my part, and he is in reality dashing and thoroughly complicated, then the fault is all his: Johnson's prose is neat and tidy and immensely kind, but it is also somewhat ... plain. He does not do jokes, introspection or insight; he cannot do places or people. He goes all the way to the bewitching Isfahan in Iran on his bike, yet all he tells us about the city is that he ate an apple there. When he goes up to Oxford, he rooms with a bearded grammar school boy called Mike Masterson, at which point one could be forgiven for hoping for some Jill-style class angst (as in Larkin's Jill). But, no. All he reveals of Mike is that he was "perceptive as well as genial" and that the two of them still exchange Christmas cards.

The details of the Johnson ancestry will be familiar to anyone who saw Boris Johnson's appearance on the BBC genealogy show, Who Do You Think You Are? Stanley's paternal grandfather, Ali Kemal Bey, one of the last interior ministers in the Turkish imperial government, was murdered in 1922 by supporters of Atatürk during the Turkish War of Independence. Stanley's father, Osman Wilfred Kemal, grew up in England, where he was brought up by his English grandmother, his Anglo-Swiss mother Winifred having died shortly after giving birth. Stanley takes a delightful pleasure in his Turkish ancestry, but he is essentially - vitally - an Englishman. He loves school (he boards at his prep school, Ravenswood, and at Sherbourne) and he loves the remote farm on Exmoor where he grows up.

His attitude to life is: what fun! When a man who was a contemporary of his at Ravenswood reveals to him, over the buffet at a New Year's Day lunch party, that he was sexually abused by Major Hunter, the school's co-headmaster, Johnson's response is first: "He never made a pass at me!" and then: "I don't want to over-egg this Major Hunter business. On the whole, I still take a positive view of my time at Ravenswood."

Later, when the Chattanooga Times says of his third novel, The Urbane Guerilla: "Even a semi-literate monkey could have done better than this", its author tells us that he was discouraged only "momentarily". Yes, he is indomitable! He is also a bit hopeless. In a bid to lose his virginity, he takes a fellow student to Paris. But Johnson cannot find his way to where she is waiting for him. By the time he gets his co-ordinates right, she has given up waiting and legged it.

Realising that poetry is not going to "butter enough parsnips", Johnson enters the world of proper work. His professional life is admirably worthy - he works on population control and the environment - but not remotely interesting on the page. His time as an MEP is especially dull. Johnson seems to have remarkably little to say about politics, save to inform us that his Conservatism was born of a giant schoolboy crush on Mr Churchill. The idea of changing his politics is inconceivable. "For me, there is something deep down, instinctive, almost atavistic about this. It's like supporting Oxford rather than Cambridge, in the Boat Race." Er, right.

Does Boris, now running London, feel the same way? Dad is not telling, though parental pride is one of the sweeter things about his book. There are six Johnson sprogs by two wives and, in his final pages, he cheerily lists their achievements. Crikey. No degrees from the Polytechnic of North London here! Credit where credit is due, because it's thanks to his sprogs - or one of them - that Johnson now gets to appear on Have I Got News For You with the attractive Claudia Winkleman, and to have his memoirs stuck grandly between hardback covers. I don't begrudge him these late-life pleasures. He seems nice and decent and he has magnificent hair. But I do think that the puffers, not to mention his publisher, should stay calm. Triumph is not the word I would use.