After Marcus Rashford on school meals, Johnson’s record on letter writing
Marcus Rashford is reported to have sent a ‘personal letter’ to Boris Johnson about the school meals issue and received no response.
One might conclude that Johnson only writes something when he commissioned to and paid by the word for it.
A scan of the growing number of biographies of Johnson reveals that he doesn’t seem to write speeches he makes personally but simply scribbles a few key words and speaks to those. It is a decent oratorical technique if you can do it.
The letter writing balance sheet does not look so good.
When he was Editor of the Spectator one account suggests that his desk was ‘appalling untidy, with piles of papers, letters, empty sandwich boxes and old coffee cups..he would simply sweep them all to one side when he needed to write’. Purnell, Just Boris)
To be fair it does sound like my fairly rarely visited office desk (aka the archives)but it doesn’t seem to suggest a pro-active approach to writing letters.
When be became MP for Henley Purnell reports that he might receive 200 e-mails and as many letters a day. These of course were answered not by Johnson but by an aide.
Again that is not that unusual although Johnson was mostly in this period a backbench MP.
There is some evidence that Johnson did on occasion indulge in letter writing to pursue a love interest or on occasion to ‘grovel’ for one of his numerous faux pas but there is nothing to suggest he does this in the twenty-first century.
The epistolary art may be declining but there is no question that Johnson does know how to write letters, its just that in the last 20 years or so he cant mostly be bothered too. There are inevitably some scribbled exceptions…
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