“No, we are a government working together,” Boris Johnson insisted post-jog to journalists in New York. “We are a nest of singing birds.” You could be forgiven for assuming that the classicist foreign secretary had reached for another Latin-lit allusion (Horace? Ovid?) to pooh-pooh the idea of continual Brexit bust-ups. In fact, the quote comes from Dr Johnson and has nothing to do with interpersonal harmony.
Quizzed by Boswell about his student days, the 18th-century Johnson noted how many poets had attended Pembroke College, Oxford, besides himself, adding “with a smile of sportive triumph, ‘Sir, we are a nest of singing birds’”. The original quote and its use are so bizarrely askew as to require imaginative inference about the workings of the bookish Borisonian subconscious: could he have referenced his namesake (despite the allusion making no sense) as a way of repressing the words he really wanted to use about the cabinet? John Webster after all came up with a much better known avian quotation (in The White Devil) in conjuring “a summer bird-cage in a garden” where “the birds that are without despair to get in, and the birds within ... fear they shall never get out”. Or perhaps Boris was thinking of another literary allusion by another namesake: Catherine Johnson’s 2008 novel A Nest of Vipers.
