Simon Jenkins’ portrait of Boris Johnson as a failed Athenian leader is diverting (Is there a Greek hero in No 10, or just a bust?, 27 July). Unfortunately, Jenkins’ forensic demolition of the man still manages to flatter him by taking his classical pretensions seriously. A more relevant and prosaic model for Johnson can be found much closer to home, in the unlikely figure of Harold Macmillan.
Both were graduates of Eton and Oxford. Both could claim US citizenship. Both were better known for phrasemaking than policy success, and displayed contradictory, shapeshifting, political qualities.
Since Johnson has neither the executive power of Trump with which to realise his narcissistic fantasies, nor the political acumen of Churchill to allow him to assume his hero’s laurels, the comparison with Macmillan (though far from perfect) is both more realistic and suitably modest than the demigods of Johnson’s daydreams.
Johnson’s promise of a “golden age” is already claiming squatting rights on Macmillan’s “never had it so good” territory, so perhaps in a general election we can look forward to talk of “winds of change”. Certainly, Johnson is a perfect candidate to inherit the famous comic legend of Supermac: “How to try to continue to stay top, without actually having been there.”
Paul McGilchrist
Colchester, Essex
• It is a sure sign of a country that has lost its historical and cultural bearings that Boris Johnson could, without irony, launch a rehashed package of promises for the north of England while standing in front of Stephenson’s Rocket (Boris Johnson pledges £3.6bn boost for deprived towns, 27 July).
George Stephenson represented all that is opposite to Johnson. He came from a humble background and his parents couldn’t afford to send him to school. In early adulthood he learned to read and write at night school.
Later he faced prejudice from the scientific and parliamentary establishment because of his broad Northumberland accent. He made sure his son Robert was taught how to “talk proper” as a result.
And what contributed to Rocket being the winning locomotive at the Rainhill Trials? Well, international exchange and learning of course! Henry Booth, treasurer of the Liverpool and Manchester railway suggested to Robert Stephenson (who was himself back from a stint in South America) that he incorporate the fire-tube boiler, invented by French engineer Marc Seguin, into the Rocket design giving improved heat exchange.
Everything about the Stephenson story speaks to the real history of innovation in this land. The forces that scoffed at the ingenuity of George Stephenson because of his background, meanwhile, are the very ones that Johnson represents today.
Dr Olivier Sykes
Department of Geography and Planning, University of Liverpool
• Simon Jenkins is absolutely right that Boris Johnson resembles the villainous Alcibiades rather than the heroic Pericles but his idea that Michael Gove “must become Johnson’s Cassandra, warning him against the danger of his ways” seems somewhat wide of the mark.
Jenkins seems to have forgotten that Cassandra was cursed always to be right but never to be believed, so, even if Gove did metamorphose into this mythical Trojan woman of great beauty, her warnings would inevitably be dismissed as the utterances of Project Fear. To add to her frustration, she would also have to deal with Johnson’s priapic instincts but it seems likely that, having previously resisted no less than Apollo, the transformed Gove would survive with virtue intact.
Michael Pyke
Shenstone, Staffordshire
• I much appreciated Simon Jenkins’ article on whether Boris Johnson is more an Alcibiades than a Pericles. In view of the fact that he is likely to take us into an election sooner rather than later, would an analogy to Cleon, the demagogue much criticised by Thucydides, not be more appropriate?
Pippa Kent
Keyworth, Nottinghamshire
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