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Forced to choose one Boris story, I'd pick Eulalie. In his novel, 72 Virgins, Johnson hints throughout that his lead character, the bumbling antihero MP (geddit?) Roger Barlow, is about to be exposed for an affair—only to reveal at the end it's not an affair he's worried about...
In fact, on the second to last page, the reader discovers Barlow has actually given a large sum of money to a woman who's sunk it all into a lingerie shop-turned brothel called Eulalie. But why did he call it Eulalie?...
One of Johnson's literary heroes, PG Wodehouse, happened to feature a lingerie store called Eulalie in one of his books called Code of the Woosters. In that book Eulalie is secretly owned by the absurd would-be dictator Roderick Spode. It was his "dark secret."
Now, Johnson once wrote a stirring defence of PG Woodhouse for the Spectator, in which he likened all those who unfairly impugned Woodhouse's character to what he saw as contemporary "demagogues" like Alastair Campbell whipping up prejudice against Govt opponents...
Johnson writes: "Like Spode, whose dark secret it was to be the proprietor of 'Eulalie', a lingerie store, they will get their comeuppance. They have their dark secrets, too. Campbell has his Eulalie." archive.spectator.co.uk/article/25th-s…
Johnson's 72 Virgins was published in September 2004. In November 2004 he was sacked from the Tory front bench for lying about an affair with Petronella Wyatt. Hmm...
What is Johnson doing? On Desert Island Discs he was asked whether he liked playing with fire. "I see, this is your theory is it?” Johnson responded. “Well, I suppose there might be an element of truth in that. Anyway … not unnecessary risks, no.”
In 72 Virgins, Johnson hints at something else. “There was something prurient about the way he wanted to read about his own destruction," he writes of Barlow, his fictional MP. "Just as there was something weird about the way he had been impelled down the course he had followed."
He speculates about Barlow's state of mind: that maybe he was an akratic—or that he had a "Thanatos urge." (An akratic is someone characterized by a weakness of will, which results in making decisions against their better judgment. A Thanatos urge is darker: a death urge.)
What is really going on here? No-one will ever know, not even those closest to Boris Johnson agree. But to all those interested, here's my attempt to shed light on a man still far more known than understood, even as he stands on the brink of becoming PM theatlantic.com/international/…
