Boris Johnson: he couldn’t be bothered at Eton & Balliol & he isn’t bothered now
I’ve had a skim through the most recent biography of Boris Johnson by Tom Bower. Bower churns out biographies of the well known (and too him anyway) notorious. He certainly can’t be regarded as a reliable source, something he shares with Johnson.
Even so he does add some more detail about how Johnson’s time at Eton (and then Balliol) was viewed by those who had a degree of charge for him. It more or less confirms the view taken in the rather more serious and reliable biography Just Boris by Sonia Purnell.
The summary of his Eton years is that Johnson couldn’t be bothered and did just enough to progress while focusing not on what he should have been doing but on what he liked to do.
As Prime Minister 40 years or so on this seems to remain very much his operating model. He is not bothered about what he should be bothered about, only about what bothers him.
A review of an Eton production of Richard 111 where Johnson failed to learn his lines and stuck them on bits of paper around the stage noted ‘Johnson’s atrocious acting did not quite destroy this production’
In April 1982 his master at Eton Martin Hammond wrote to Stanley Johnson ‘Boris has adopted a disgracefully cavalier attitude to his classical studies’ and noted he risked dropping a grade at A level due to ‘fecklessness’.
By January 1983 Johnson had won a scholarship to Balliol and Hammond again wrote to Stanley Johnson ‘My fear is that Boris may take his easy-going ways with him to Balliol and add to the statistics of Etonians who do little work at Oxbridge’.
Hammond concluded that Johnson had ‘sharp intelligence’ but was easily distracted from serious matters.
Indeed.
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