Grief experts have explained that the emotion that has surprised a lot of people, me included, over the death of someone aged 96 whom we never met, is real and defined as “parasocial”.
Professor Michael Cholbi of Edinburgh University, told the journal Nature that some people cope with parasocial grief by adopting some qualities of the departed person. Others pointed out that this grief wears off pretty soon compared with the regular, unremitting kind. Personally, I have taken comfort in what might be called parasocial joy: the near-simultaneous disappearance from public life of another person I never met: Boris Johnson.
His absence, along with the thought of his rage and indignation at being sidelined from national ceremonial at which he could have shown off as never before, is a delight that, even if it diminishes over time, will never not be the fondest of patriotic memories. And it’s not even over. There’s a prospect of further no-Johnson euphoria at Charles’s coronation, an occasion around which, were he still prime minister, his performance would certainly surpass the idiot ubiquity he achieved at the London Olympics (later advertised as a qualification for premiership). As it is, it’ll be a day return from Herne Hill, south London, where the arrival of the new Cincinnatus, an afflicted resident tells me, is already keenly resented.
Should there be any doubt of what Johnson, still in office, would have done with, or rather to, these events, the officially redundant version quickly positioned himself as Westminster’s lead mourner and king-welcomer. There were funereal Johnson tweets, a plangent tribute and a shamelessly past-expunging Commons speech. A human-style BBC interview about his last meeting with the “bright and focused” Queen may have impressed anyone unaware of Johnson’s readiness, when No 10 was a kind of plague pit, to infect her with Covid. Throughout, Johnson has been (vainly) trying to make his own coinage, “Elizabeth the Great”, happen; maybe he enjoys the echo of Alexander the Great, a comparison made on his own account, Alex being his real name, by admirers ranging from Jacob Rees-Mogg to Jennifer Arcuri, one of his mayor-period lovers.
At the accession council ceremony we saw the stricken rhetorician push his way to the centre of a row of comparatively successful or dignified (excepting David Cameron) leaders, most of whom he’d insulted or worse. Starmer he’d tried to taint with Jimmy Savile. Gordon Brown – standing next to him – he’d likened, with that characteristic resort to race-seasoned invective, to an “illegal settler in the Sinai desert”. The strategy can, however, barely have eased the anguish of relegation from the platform where, if only he hadn’t been done for lying, Johnson could have been madding up his hair, gurning behind the new king, winding up Penny Mordaunt or attempting some comedy pen business of his own. Remember that time he made his umbrella go inside out, upstaging Charles at a ceremony to honour fallen police officers? Some eye-catching bit of Johnsoning would have come to him, even – especially! – at the first accession ever televised.
Whatever Johnson has planned for his bit parts at the state funeral and coronation, it’s surely not indecently soon to reflect, when these contributions take an acutely reverential turn, that he enjoys the distinction of having twice, in a short premiership, had to apologise to the Queen, “the figurehead of our entire system”, as he called her last week. “Her Maj”, as he reportedly referred to her, in life, to the annoyance of her household.
First, he apologised for effectively deceiving her about the reasons she was asked in the final stages of Brexit to prorogue parliament. The supreme court, led by Baroness Hale, concluded that, since there had been no reasonable justification, the proroguing was unlawful. Thanks to Johnson’s genius for denial, this setback has already been converted into a triumph: among his invented victories is the claim “we saw off Baroness Hale”. The reality: after Hale’s court voided the proroguing, Johnson, while telling the public he had done nothing wrong, “got on to the Queen as quickly as possible to say how sorry he was”.
The second grovel followed the discovery that the night before Prince Philip’s lockdown-compliant funeral of under 30 mourners, staff in Downing Street partied until 4.20am. “It’s deeply regrettable that this took place at a time of national mourning,” his spokesman said, “and No 10 has apologised to the Palace for that.” A more calculated insult, that the Queen “loves the Commonwealth, partly because it supplies her with regularly cheering crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies”, was probably written too early to be among the reasons the Queen is said to have loathed Johnson.
“I believe she would regard it as her own highest achievement that her son, Charles III, will clearly and amply follow her own extraordinary standards of duty and service,” Johnson said in one eulogy. Charles has changed, then, since Johnson mocked him in 2020 as “king of biscuits”, adding for the benefit of a BBC crew filming a fallback tribute, that he feared Charles would “take the recipe to his grave”. Even minus the biscuits and a “disrespectful” visit to Birkhall, the two were unlikely to get along after the launch of the Rwanda human-exporting scheme. Charles called it “appalling”. An ally of the unlawful proroguer warned, in turn, of “serious constitutional issues”.
That his coming memoir will lose, along with his singlehanded victory over Putin, some fictionalised version of this historic premier-king relationship – how Johnson channelled Churchill to guide the grateful novice – is just another reason to celebrate the UK’s reprieve, at a critical moment, from being the theatre for Johnson’s fantasies. It is our ex-leader’s achievement finally to have lifted the spirits of the “gloomsters and doomsters” he tormented for so long: three cheers for the king of Herne Hill!
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
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