What Boris could learn from de Gaulle

BORIS JOHNSON is taking a fortnight’s holiday in Scotland, armed with a volume of Lucretius, William Boyd’s novel “Any Human Heart” and Brendan Simms’s “Britain’s Europe: A Thousand Years of Conflict and Cooperation”. Few would begrudge him his break: he has lived a lifetime in the past year, having got divorced and remarried, had another child, almost died of covid-19 and struggled with the worst crisis since the second world war. But Bagehot would nevertheless suggest adding a fourth book to his pile—Julian Jackson’s “A Certain Idea of France: The Life of De Gaulle”. Though hefty, the book is enthralling, and offers a wealth of ideas with which to fill the empty box labelled “Johnsonism”.

Mr Johnson is keen on great men. He has written a biography of his hero Churchill and, modesty not coming naturally to a man who as a child announced that he would become “world king”, has recently taken to comparing himself to Franklin D. Roosevelt. But in many ways de Gaulle is a better fit than either. The French president saw eye to eye with Britain’s prime minister on the biggest issues. He regarded the nation-state as the basic building-block of civilisation. He opposed Britain’s membership of the EU on the grounds that Britain by its nature “looks to the sea, towards wider horizons”. He devoted his post-war career to restoring confidence and...