Sporting Prime Ministers | Patrick Kidd
“II spoke to you with Boris,” the press secretary, covering the 2009 boat race for The Times and my colleagues at the Telegraph, whispered conspiratorially to me. “But only the two of you,” he added. “Don’t tell the others.”
That seemed strange. Boris Rankov, this year’s race referee, was an easy-going guy. Why the secrecy? We wondered what news Rankov would reveal. Perhaps the discovery of an unexploded mine off Chiswick Eyot, or the decision to evict all rowers who graduate with an agricultural degree?
It was therefore somewhat disappointing to be ushered into a room and not to find a professor of Roman history and a six-time rower, but a different Boris, blond, not bald, who shared the referee’s love of classics but clearly had no interest in boats. The Mayor of London gave a rah-rah-rah about the capital, saying how great it was that the Olympics would use Alma Mater’s lake. It didn’t make paper. However, it was the first time I met our future leader.
A prime minister has rowed in the boat race, but not a British one. Henry Waddington, born near Le Mans and trained in rugby, was part of the Cambridge crew in 1849. Thirty years later he was Prime Minister of France for eleven months.
But Boris Johnson was no boatie. If he had entered the race as a student, in old Wooster fashion, he would have stolen a cop’s helmet. To adapt the Eton Boating song, the only “swing-swing together” Johnson likely cared about was with his body between someone’s sister’s knees.
At Eton he was a dry bob who excelled at the wall game in his own messy and physical way. “Completely directionless, he has to point in the right direction or he can knock over the wall,” said a school report card in 1980. A year later it was noted that he “played like an echidna [a type of spiny anteater] on heat”. When he became captain of the Collegers in 1982, he was nicknamed “the blonde behemoth”.
He shared this with Harold Macmillan, his colleague at OE PM, who was more fearless than his bookworm might suggest. This is the man who spent 10 hours in a shell hole with a bullet in his pool in 1916, dosing morphine and Aeschylus. Seven years earlier, Macmillan had played his part in a historic Wall game: the last time a goal was scored in the big game on St Andrew’s Day.
Other prime ministers had sporting talent. Alec Douglas-Home played first-class cricket for Oxford and Middlesex. Wisden reported being good against spin and useful on a sticky wicket, which may have helped in politics.
John Major was no less eager, if less able. At a summit in 1991, he opened batting in a charity match with Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke. Hawke kept stealing the strike, but Major didn’t mind until the refs waved her off after a couple of overs.
“Time for real cricketers,” said the referee. As they walked in, Major Hawke asked if he knew they would only be given limited time. “Gosh, yeah,” Hawke said. “Not true?”
David Cameron was a decent collegiate tennis player, described by John Bercow, his doubles partner for the Commons team, as “like John McEnroe when he made a mistake, but tolerant and encouraging when I did”. Winston Churchill was a public schoolmaster in fencing. Clement Attlee played billiards for Oxford. And Ted Heath won the Sydney to Hobart yacht race on Morning Cloud in 1970 before leading Britain to victory in the Admiral’s Cup a year later as Prime Minister.
Johnson’s approach to sport – and politics – differed from his predecessors. He had the same enthusiasm and will to win: he just didn’t care if he was doing it within the rules. Johnson once said his Wall Game tactics were “sudden spasms of uncontrolled aggression.”
Maurizio Gaudino would agree. The former Germany midfielder was attending a charity football match in 2006 when a red-robed Johnson, who, as the Telegraph put it, was playing “like a maniac combine”, plowed into him with a hands-free rugby tackle. At least Gaudino was a grown man. In 2015, during a rugby show in Tokyo, Johnson charged Toki Sekiguchi shoulder first, sending the 10-year-old child through the air. “Unfortunately, I accidentally flattened him,” Johnson said. “But he rebounded.” The boy said he was “in pain but OK”.
This gung-ho competition extends to the tennis court, where Johnson plays with a distorted wooden bat that throws the ball at unpredictable angles and scares opponents away with his deep gorilla grunt, and to the annual cricket match between his family and the by Earl Spencer. for which he famously chooses such distant cousins as Kevin Pietersen and Monty Panesar.
Johnson would no doubt agree with Vince Lombardi’s dictum. “Show me a good loser,” said the American football coach, “and I’ll show you a loser.”
It reminds me of a story my former Times colleague Philip Howard told about his father Peter, who was England’s rugby captain in the 1930s. Losing to Ireland at half-time, he rallied his team. “Look boys, are we going to play like real Englishmen in the second half?” he asked. “Or should we try to win?” Then the dirtiest 40 minutes of foul play followed. Although England still lost by a point, I suspect Johnson would have approved of the spirit.