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This article originally appeared in our Elevenses newsletter.
If I had to list the celebrities, dead or alive, that I would invite to my dream dinner party, Boris Johnson and Steven Bartlett would be rooted at the very foot of that list. One is a charlatan, a buffoon and is among life’s great chancers, while the other is a former prime minister, and talking to the pair of them in cahoots would, in my humble opinion, be simply unbearable. Yet owing to a long car journey and my wife’s insistence that as a political journalist, I should show at least a passing interest in Johnson’s appearance on Diary of a CEO, I got a taste of how such a nightmarish evening might unfold – and it’s an experience I’m in no rush to repeat.
Bartlett, a ’90s child, has enjoyed meteoric success on the back of a podcast in which he extolls his worldly advice to an audience eager to suckle at the teet of a barely-born dot-com entrepreneur with an erroneous belief that has it all figured out. It’s where Molly Mae got her first taste of public outcry for suggesting that we “all have the same 24 hours in a day” and where Gary Neville was able to turn arbitrary words like ‘holiday’ into business-sounding ‘mini-retirements’ in the gaze of a starstruck host. If you find phrases like “never compromise your self-story” and “always prioritise your first foundation” to be inspirational, then this is the place for you.
So far, Bartlett has managed to keep ‘DOAC’ relatively politics-free, claiming in a 2023 chat with the Telegraph that the then-prime minister Rishi Sunak is the only politician he would interview (he’d already talked to Matt Hancock by that point). But the lure of Johnson, ‘unleashed’ and eager to plug his new biography, was simply too big to turn down, and while the interview contained few surprises – not least the very apparent fact that Bartlett had not read the very book he was discussing – there was one morsel of information that deserves wider consideration.
Johnson’s assertion that the pro-Leave camp was not responsible for planning for life outside the EU is – and I hate to admit it – a fair one that goes to the heart of how flippantly David Cameron treated the referendum. As he puts it, “the government’s stated policy was to implement the referendum result”, not to disappear if the outcome was not the one they had hitched their wagon to. Had Cameron adopted that view from the start he would have been required to develop and perhaps even inform the public of the roadmap out of Europe rather than simply presenting them with a yes/ no choice that allowed vague assumptions to rule supreme. It would have squashed misguided assumptions about immigration, regulatory freedom and money to the NHS.
Quitting because the referendum didn’t go the way he wanted was a total dereliction of duty from Cameron and set in motion the chaos that engulfed the May/ Truss and Johnson administrations. As Danny Dyer stated two years after the vote with the country still scrambling to find a route of the mess that had been created, what happened to the t*** who called it all on? “He’s in Nice with his trotters up. He should be held accountable for it.”
Now there’s a man I could enjoy a dinner with.
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