{"id":6064,"date":"2019-12-13T10:28:48","date_gmt":"2019-12-13T10:28:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/townhouse\/articles\/the-telling-detail\/"},"modified":"2019-12-13T10:28:48","modified_gmt":"2019-12-13T10:28:48","slug":"the-telling-detail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/the-telling-detail\/","title":{"rendered":"The telling detail"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alert readers will have noticed that there was an election in Britain yesterday, one that produced an emphatic result. Boris Johnson \u2013 love him or loathe him \u2013 was the frontman of that campaign and that success. And the funny thing is \u2013 I know him. Only a teeny-tiny bit, admittedly, but we were at college together, a year or two apart, but still close enough to know each other by sight.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the intro, but this isn\u2019t an email on politics. It\u2019s one about writing. And it struck me that almost the only memorable moment of the whole election campaign was a curiously personal one.<\/p>\n

Boris Johnson was touring a hospital, with a swarm of cameras following him. A local journalist, from the Yorkshire Post<\/em>, asked him to look at a photo. The photo was of a boy, with suspected pneumonia, lying on a hospital floor, because there was no bed for him.<\/p>\n

That doesn\u2019t strike me as a particularly tough situation for a politician. You look at the photo. You manage a frown of concern and sympathy. You say that\u2019s terrible. Then you say (if you\u2019re one of the rogues who have been in power), \u201cWe have to look into that. Thanks so much for bringing this to our attention.\u201d Or you say (if you\u2019re one of the rogues in search of power), \u201cThat just shows why the whole system needs reform.\u201d<\/p>\n

Johnson took neither of these well-trodden routes.<\/p>\n

He refused to look at the photo. He kept trying to fire off his \u201cGet Brexit done\u201d lines. He looked uncomfortable at the prospect of the emotional encounter expected of him (concern, human sympathy, frustration at a system that didn\u2019t deliver.)<\/p>\n

The journalist pressed the point: here\u2019s a photo, look at it.<\/p>\n

Johnson tried a little more to evade, then actually took the photo from the journalist\u2019s hand and pocketed it. \u201cNow, finally, we can talk about Brexit again,\u201d he said, in effect.<\/p>\n

Taking someone else\u2019s phone is hardly an assault, but it is a bit odd. It smacks of the alpha male, the bully \u2026 except the eight-year-old version of that. A kind of playground dominance.<\/p>\n

Why did that little scene make a noticeable ding on a busily argumentative election? Or, transfer that little vignette to the pages of a manuscript, why would it work so well there? Why would a scene like that, properly written, seem to rich and shimmering with life?<\/p>\n

While you ponder, here\u2019s another Johnson-anecdote.<\/p>\n

My father was a judge at the very top of his profession. (Here\u2019s his Wikipedia entry<\/a>, if you\u2019re curious.) Because people at the top of public life tend to bump into each other, my father knew Boris Johnson too. Not well, but a bit.<\/p>\n

And at one point they were both up in Scotland, in some rattly castle, at a conference on \u2013 I don\u2019t know, the sort of conference people like that go to. My mother was also there. The castle was close to the sea. Johnson had a car with him and my parents didn\u2019t. A trip to the sea was planned. Boris Johnson offered to collect them and take them down there.<\/p>\n

And \u2013<\/p>\n

He didn\u2019t show up.<\/p>\n

He did go to the sea, yes, but he didn\u2019t drive the one minute necessary to collect my parents. My father then must have been seventy. My mother not much younger. And back then, Boris was just a jobbing MP with a large public profile. My father was the most senior judge in the country.<\/p>\n

The injury done was hardly very extensive. My parents waited for their ride for about twenty minutes, then decided Johnson wasn\u2019t coming and called a taxi instead. When they were next in Johnson\u2019s company, he didn\u2019t apologise. Didn\u2019t refer to the broken promise \u2013 which my father says was very clear and explicit \u2013 in any way.<\/p>\n

Two tiny anecdotes, about a man who is now emphatically in charge of the British government.<\/p>\n

What do we make of these things? Not as students of politics, but as writers of stories. What do we make of these things?<\/p>\n

Well, look, the obvious way to parse these episodes is:<\/p>\n