Make the Tories Johnsonian Again

Stout and tall, almost blind in one eye, a double chin crafted from an animal appetite for Bologna sausages, punch and roasted oranges, a sonorous voice and ‘immoderate’ laughter, a ratty grey wig, a lacerating wit, a deep quick memory, a carnival of lowlife and cultured friends, women who loved him, a melancholic soul and an adventurous bent, a dogged work ethic driven by guilt and compassion for others, combined with a luxuriant ability to enjoy a morning in bed reading and above all a preference for commonsense over ‘airy notions’ – this is the sort of person I want leading the Tory party: Samuel Johnson, he of the 1755 Dictionary, not Boris, he of lockdown and wallpaper.

Just listen to him!:

There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as a tavern… I never desire to converse with one who has written more than he has read… I have always considered it as treason against the great republic of human nature, to make any man’s virtues the means of deceiving him.

We Romantic Tories must drag Dr. Johnson squarely back into the national consciousness, for it is within Samuel Johnson’s vast human and humane spirit that Tories and the nation will be revived. Forget the meagre milksops half-heartedly attempting to lead the Tory party today, we need a figure of Johnsonian stature. What counts for Tory grit today has been reduced to Farage meekly smoking a cigarette outside in anticipation of Chief Tool Starmer’s ban. No, British Tories should have much more to offer and their commonsense spirit will find ballast in the memory of Dr. Samuel Johnson, a man deeply erudite, adventurous and constitutionally allergic to hypocritical, sanctimonious twaddle. 

Picture Johnson, the son of stolid Lichfield booksellers, in his London rooms, legs astride, bracing his stomach, hurtling through heaps of books, scratching out notes, writing The Dictionary and delighting in the fact that the French required a committee of 45 for such an activity. But no dry, erudite genius is he, for Johnson is an Englishman and combines a sharp mind with a hearty appetite and a realistic understanding of what makes life worth living: faith, good friends, books, physical activity and pleasure. Just as happy in the chophouse as the theatre, Johnson was no foppish snob and had no priggish disdain for luxury. His descriptions of food are sensible: “A good piece of meat,” or “Two good pieces of meat.”

If he was alive today his Rambler and Idler sheets would be #1 Substacks, his poetry would be all over Insta and he would be fronting hilarious ‘man of the people’ travel shows. He would certainly host a #1 podcast because his chief aim in life seemed to be to defeat people with words, with persuasion and with stabbing truth. He was lauded as ‘England’s Moralist’. He is laugh-out-loud funny, slam dunk honest and able to articulate why certain things matter and others do not. 

After only two months of Grey Labour, what is it that we all need now? A rollicking good hoot and then sensible light touch Government – none of these ‘airy notions’ (thank you Miliband). With a laugh like a “rhinoceros”, Dr. Johnson was able to find humour in the driest of episodes. When his friend Benet Langton drew up his will, Johnson took it as an opportunity to mercilessly mock his pomposity, reminding him that it was the lawyer who was doing all the work. Eventually shooed out of the house, Boswell describes how:

Johnson could not stop his merriment, but continued it all the way till we got without the Temple-gate. He then burst into such a fit of laughter, that he appeared to be almost in a convulsion; and in order to support himself, laid hold of one of the posts at the side of the foot pavement and sent forth peals so loud that in the silence of the night his voice seemed to resound from Temple-bar to Fleet-ditch. 

[Seriously, he’s hilarious. When poetically describing different batches of Londoners, Johnson mentions a female atheist who talks you dead.]

Johnson was a devout Anglican and monarchist, and though born over 300 years ago, the mess Britain was in was as complicated as our own times. A constitutional crisis saw the crown pass from the Stuarts to the Hanoverians (Tory was originally used to describe those in favour of the Stuart succession), religion seemed on the wane with Cathedrals dreadfully unkempt, slavery was the talk of the town (Johnson was vehemently opposed), Britain and France were fighting the Seven Years War over America (Johnson thought neither should win as both countries had stolen land from the natives) and the great question of the day concerned emigration – how neglectful had Britain, particularly Scotland, become that people were leaving in their droves?

Who can forget his lashing out at the hypocrisy of the American colonists, asking “How is it we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” That the memory of his quips, if not the man himself, remains dimly within the national consciousness is down to their being grounded in truth. And this is what the Tories, and the nation, need to reacquaint themselves with: truth in all its ugliness. As he writes, “Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it.”

Johnson was not ideological, and this is the point. Tories should not be ideological but concerned with the sensible business of government. He pithily writes: “How small, of all that human hearts endure, That part which laws or kings can cause or cure. Still to ourselves in every place consign’d, Our own felicity we make or find.” He straightforwardly perceives the limits of rulers, of government and articulates the uselessness of state interference. What Johnson understands to matter is: personal virtue, private comfort and God. Government is insufficient to satisfy the deep and troubling needs of mankind. As an individual, Johnson was shamelessly kind, supporting all sorts of waifs and strays and blind poetesses. He understood instinctively the unfairness of life and the inability of authorities to change the inherent problems caused by human freewill. 

What I love most about Johnson is his relentless opposition to hypocrisy, facile generalisations, foppishness and cant – a word that surely demands an immediate resurrection. Johnson despised cant, which he defines as: “A whining pretension to goodness, in formal and affected terms.” Doesn’t that just describe the whole rotten lot of politicians? Is anything said by Tom Tugendhat, James Cleverly, Mel Stride (?) or that strange man who wanders around fields in suits, Bob Jenrick, anything other than bilious cant? Even Kemi Badenoch has succumbed, writing in the Telegraph: “We are all Taiwan.”

The nearest we came of course to a Johnsonian Tory was dear broken Boris. In a poignant 2009 episode of BBC Radio 4’s Great Lives, Boris nominates the Great Doctor. It is a wonderful listen. Boris performed at his bravura best: warm, enthusiastic, full of fun and tender concern for others. I had to listen to the programme twice, so unlike the Boris of recent memory did he sound. Boris finished the episode with a brilliant rendition of Samuel, by then 50, being woken by his friends at 3am, “What? Is it you, you dogs?,” bellowed Samuel from the top of the stairs, “I’ll have a frisk with you.” They then go boating and begin monkeying around with a bunch of costermongers. Boris was intoxicated with the animal spirits of the man. I thought despairingly of Boris blathering on at the post-lockdown 2021 G7 summit about how we should be “building back greener and fairer and more equal, and in a more gender neutral and in a more feminine way”.

“What CANT!” both Johnsons would once have roared.

The need remains, nevertheless, both for the Tories and for the nation, for a figure of Johnsonian (S) stature: one willing to travel the length of Britain pointing out in a straightforward fashion everything that is wrong and offering small, practical, non-ideological solutions. Could the brilliant Dominic Sandbrook be persuaded to take up the Johnsonian baton? 

I leave you with a passage from Johnson’s A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. He writes in 1773 after visiting Bamff and observing they haven’t yet mastered windows that can open and insisting that these small inconveniences are important:

Life consists not of a series of illustrious actions, or elegant enjoyments; the greater part of our time passes in compliance with necessities, in the performance of daily duties, in the removal of small inconveniences, in the procurement of petty pleasures; and we are well or ill at ease, as the main stream of life glides on smoothly, or is ruffled by small obstacles and frequent interruption. The true state of every nation is the state of common life. The manners of a people are not to be found in the schools of learning, or the palaces of greatness, where the national character is obscured or obliterated by travel or instruction, by philosophy or vanity; nor is public happiness to be estimated by the assemblies of the gay, or the banquets of the rich. The great mass of nations is neither rich nor gay: they whose aggregate constitutes the people, are found in the streets, and the villages, in the shops and farms; and from them collectively considered must the measure of general prosperity be taken.

We can ask today, how is our general prosperity to be considered?

Some useful Johnson’s definitions from the 1755 Dictionary:

Female – Not male

Freedom – 1. Freedom, as opposed to slavery. 2. Exemption from tyranny or inordinate government.

Politician – 1. One versed in the arts of government; one skilled in politicks. 2. A man of artifice, one of deep contrivance.

Reality – Truth; verity; what is, not what merely seems.

Riot – 1. Wild and loose festivity. 2. A sedition; an uproar.

Tory – [A cant term, derived, I suppose from an Irish word signifying a savage.] Once who adheres to the ancient constitution of the state, and the apostolical hierarchy of the Church of England, opposed to a whig.

True – Not false; not erroneous; agreeing with fact, or with the nature of things.

Visionary – One whose imagination is disturbed.

Wisdom – 1. Sapience; the power of judging rightly; the knowledge of divine and human things. 2. Prudence; skill in affairs; judicious conduct.

Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence mentor.