A Funny Pain in the Agora

In a BBC documentary from April 2019, including the corporation’s political editor in soft focus conversation with the man who is now our Prime Minister, Laura Kuenssberg, the editor in question opined that Johnson ‘just wants to be liked’.

That would seem to be an obvious wish for anyone wanting to be a successful politician and so hardly a very penetrating analysis, and so the deeper, unasked, question would be by whom does he want to be liked?

This is the man who both announced the subtle idea of ‘fuck business’ and claimed to have supported bankers in their hour (30 seconds in ordinary mortals' time) of need more than anyone else. The answer to the question above is that he wants everyone to like him, changing his colour to suit his surroundings. Most recently from blue in Berkshire to Red in Yorkshire.

Johnson has an expensive classical education, which he shows off at every available opportunity. The writer only has a poor pass in ‘O’ level Latin but knows that Janus was a Roman god depicted as having two faces and so a perfect metaphor for Johnson’s behaviour and, conveniently, only a consonant away from a pen portrait to boot.

Janus Johnson knows some ancient Greek words as well and can’t resist spraying this scent-mark of a proper toff even in the novel wot he wrote with the odd ‘thanatos’ (death instinct) or ‘akratic’ thrown in to describe the state of mind of the central character who is a not very well disguised self portrait of Johnson himself.

But is this merely showing-off or self-awareness?

‘Akratic means literally “not being in command of oneself” and is translated variously as “weakness of will,” “incontinence,” and “loss of self-control.” To Aristotle, an akratic is a person who knows the right thing to do but can’t help doing the opposite, to this one might add, depending on how much money and power is on offer.

— Bob, your uncle.

Acknowledgement:

Fintan O’Toole.

"Stultus akratic"