Johnson's Life of London

by Boris Johnson

  Although the accusation was false, it was quite widely publicised, and Churchill and his mother, Jenny, sued for damages of £20,000—a big sum in those days—to get the thing corrected. Did he set off for Cuba, and other macho adventures, with the partial objective of expunging this falsehood once and for all? Or was it all about a subconscious desire to please and impress the shade of his father?

  Much more likely, he was just made that way. He was built on a bigger and grander scale than we are today. Don’t forget that he became an MP while Victoria was still on the throne. He imported into the twentieth century that Victorian confidence, that aristocratic desire for glory on the widest possible stage.

  Londoners responded to the confidence he showed, and there was a kind of psychic continuum between the leader and the led. As Philip Ziegler has shown, there was no “myth of the Blitz.” It truly was a remarkable time in the life of the city, when people felt more alive, more special, sometimes more “unmarried,” as the novelist Elizabeth Bowen put it—when they did countless acts of kindness for their neighbours. When a bomb went off, most Londoners neither panicked nor looted.

  A Hungarian doctor was at Bank, when the Underground shelter was hit. “You English cannot comprehend the discipline of your people,” he said. “I have not found one hysterical, shouting patient. It does not happen in other countries.” Preparations had been made for a network of psychiatric clinics, to deal with all the cases of bomb-induced neurosis. They were all shut down for lack of patients. Even under provocation, Londoners behaved with stoical reasonableness. When a man began kicking a captured German bomber pilot, the crowd did not object. But when it looked as though he was going to take the airman’s revolver and shoot him, the crowd intervened and held both men until the police arrived.

  It was the constant presence of death and danger that tinged events with greatness, and tinged the individuals most closely associated with those events. Churchill not only benefited from that effect but articulated the spirit of the country. “I was not the lion,” he later explained, “but I was privileged to give the roar.” By the end of his career it was as if his special characteristics were morphing into the special characteristics of the country as a whole. As the politician and scholar Enoch Powell, who served under Churchill, was later to put it: “By 1955 it was given to Winston Churchill to have become the living embodiment of the nation through the accumulation of its past in his one individual person . . . he enjoyed an enormous span of public life which made him, at the end of it, the incarnation of the British people.”

  It was like a much-loved pet and its owner. You couldn’t say who was imitating whom.

  Look at his features: the bulbous nose and cheeks, the slightly jutting chin, the protuberant lips. He is a Toby jug, a John Bull. He had a hundred-horsepower mind (as a contemporary put it, in the days when a hundred horsepower was a lot), and yet he was no intellectual. He had a long and happy marriage to Clementine, with four children, and not a whiff of scandal has been detected in his relations with the good-looking shorthand typists, which suits the generally no-sex-please approach of the British.

  He had become symbolic of the country, and also of the city he defended—magnificent, eccentric, traditional but obsessed with technological progress and above all resilient—so that it was entirely fitting, on his retirement in 1955, that the Queen should offer him the Dukedom of London. It turns out, rather disappointingly, that Her Majesty’s Private Secretary had previously ascertained that Churchill would turn it down.

  Which was the right thing to do, of course—and not just because the title would have been passed on to Randolph Churchill and his heirs and successors. Fiercely though Londoners admired Churchill, I am not sure how they would have reacted to the idea that he was now their Duke; many with enthusiasm, but by no means all. London and Londoners had changed in the Blitz, and Churchill was well aware of it.

  I was talking to Gerry McCartney in the Cabinet War Rooms, standing just behind the place where Cabinet Secretary Sir Edward Bridges used to sit. I was trying to imagine what it must have been like to be there, while so many treasures of the city were being smashed, so many lives lost, in the course of a bombardment that at least some of the victims and the dispossessed would blame partly on Churchill himself. I wondered what it must have been like to sit there in the mornings as the lists of casualties and disasters were brought in, waiting until Washington had got out of bed, so that you could get on the scrambler and see if they were getting any nearer to helping out.

  At once I knew what I must do. “We don’t normally allow people . . .” said Gerry. “The Churchill family are reluctant . . .” It was too late. I was sitting in the chair from which he directed the war, my elbows polishing the very wood that his sleeve had polished seventy years before. I wish I had felt a charge of Churchillian dynamism, or the wit to bark some brilliant piece of defiance. I am afraid that I felt nothing but a pathetic incongruity and a nervousness that one of the tourists would snap me on their cameraphone through the glass pane, and reveal my pretentiousness on Twitter. I got up hastily. All I can report is that the chair and desk are very small and ordinary for a man who helped save the world from tyranny—and that, I suppose, is in keeping with the attempt at equality of the postwar world that he helped to create.

  * * *

  On 30 January 1965 Sir Winston Churchill staged his last great manoeuvre. He had planned it meticulously, down to the very hymns that he wanted sung. It was called Operation Hope Not. For three days his coffin had lain in state in Westminster Hall, and 321,360 people had filed past to pay their respects to the greatest Englishman of the twentieth century.

  Then he was loaded onto a gun carriage and taken through vast crowds to St. Paul’s for the funeral. The coffin was then loaded onto a launch, the Havengore, at the Tower of London, and taken back upstream under London Bridge to Waterloo, where a special steam train conveyed the dead leader to his burial place at Bladon in Oxfordshire.

  The crowds were wearing coats, silent and sometimes weeping. A flight of sixteen English Electric Lightnings swooped over London as the little launch nosed upriver. But in perhaps the most touching gesture of all, the cranes dipped in salute as he went through the Pool of London—the bit between the Tower and London Bridge.

  Ten years later those cranes would be almost all gone. The docks would be no more. After nineteen centuries, since Aulus Plautius first created a port at the site, that port could no longer compete.

  As the 1960s and 1970s wore on, it was clear that London had entered a period of stagnation and decline. Old industries collapsed; the population fell. Humiliated by America at Suez, spurned by de Gaulle in her 1963 bid to join the Common Market, Britain was starting to feel down on her luck.

  And yet there were still some wonderful things that London was to give the world. If I look closely at the footage of those people watching the Churchill funeral, I can see that in some ways they appear to be from an epoch other than my own. The men outside St. Paul’s are in top hats. People lift their bowlers and blink stoically at the cameras.

  But when I study the women, I can see from their clothes—the boots, the knee-length coats—that the 1960s are in full swing. They look like some of the earliest photos I have of my mother. By the time Winston Churchill died the Beatles had already conquered America, and just four months after the funeral, the Rolling Stones released a song that came to Keith Richards in the middle of the night, and went to number one around the world. It was called “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.”

  Keith Richards

  He (and Sir Mick) gave the world rock music

  The ancients were familiar with the notion of a Bacchic frenzy. They knew what happened when you combined music and alcohol. Euripides tells us how a bunch of otherwise good-natured women were turned into sex-crazed groupies who laid hands on a chap named Pentheus and tore him limb from limb.

  Th
ey took off their stays and let their hair down. They were free from all cares and self-consciousness and behaved very badly indeed—and I cannot believe there is anyone out there reading this who has not done the same.

  Of course you need to have drunk just the right amount of alcohol—enough to retain some primitive sense of rhythm. You also need the right music. It was some time in my late teens that I found myself in a student house—and even now I hesitate to give the location for fear of reprisals—when someone put on “Start Me Up” by the Rolling Stones.

  I can hear you snicker.

  I am fully aware of what sophisticated people are supposed to think about those first three siren-jangling chords. My old friend James Delingpole once wrote a supercilious piece about “Start Me Up,” how corny he thought it was. But I can tell you that noise came out of that bashed-up old tape deck and seemed to vibrate in my rib cage. Somewhere in my endocrine system something gave a little squirt—adrenal gland, pituitary, hypothalamus, I don’t know; and pow, I could feel myself being transformed from this shy, spotty, swotty nerd who had spent the past hour trying to maintain a conversation with the poor young woman who was sitting next to me. . . .

  And then I was hit by the second bar, the same crashing three-note electric tocsin, and in a second it was pure Jekyll and Hyde. It was Clark Kent in the phone kiosk. I won’t say that I leapt to my feet and beat my chest and took the girl by the hand. But I can’t rule it out, because frankly I can’t remember the details, except that it involved us all dancing on some chests of drawers and smashing some chairs. I remember the feeling, the psychic rush that music gave.

  To this day I have only to hear that opening riff by Keith Richards and that feeling comes back. That is how it is for billions of human beings. It is these hundreds of snatches of rock/pop music that remain on our mental iPods to intensify our experience and provide the soundtracks of our lives.

  I would argue—no, there is no argument—I would assert without fear of contradiction that rock/pop was the most important popular art form of the twentieth century and continues to occupy that rank today. It has no serious challenger from the visual, plastic, poetic or literary arts, and is far more culturally pervasive than film. It is therefore one of the greatest triumphs of British culture that rock/pop had its most beautiful and psychedelic flowering in London in the 1960s.

  It was, on the face of things, a surprising triumph. We have seen so far that London has produced some of the world’s greatest poets, playwrights, novelists, painters, architects, scientists, libertines, orators and lexicographers. But in the almost two-thousand-year history of the city, there aren’t that many moments when we could say that native Londoners were the acknowledged global leaders in music. There were plenty of people who came to London to perform their music, because that was where the money and the patronage was. But they had vaguely foreign-sounding names like Haydn or Handel.

  In the second half of the twentieth century, however, the musical scene was like the sixteenth-century cyclotron of theatrical talent that produced William Shakespeare. There were at least two flashes, two supernova explosions that were seen around the world. There were the Beatles, the most musically influential group of the last hundred years (OK, OK, they were from Liverpool, but almost all of their songs were recorded in London, and London was where they made their name). And then there were the Beatles’ fractionally more energetic rivals, the Rolling Stones—the biggest and most successful touring act in history.

  True, there were many other constellations that rose over the London suburbs and were hailed around the world. But we are relatively safe in saying that the Beatles and the Stones were the two brightest.

  All this is to some extent a matter of taste. People will dispute my verdict, just as they will dispute precedence between the Beatles and the Stones or between individual Beatles and Stones. Middle-aged Stones fans tend to be either votaries of Mick Jagger (like Tony Blair), or else they think Keef is the really cool one. Since quite a young age I have believed fiercely that Keef was the man.

  Someone who claimed to know about it told me at a critical moment in my adolescence that Mick was the frontman, the Orphic show-off, while Keith was the better musician. He did more than his share of creating the aching, plangent, slow stuff: “Angie,” “Fool to Cry.” He was equally adept at the sublime swooshing choral stuff like “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” And he was definitely the go-to man for the volcanic intro, the double-triple crump of chords that make your eyes dilate, your lips go green and your twitching hands reach for a chair to break.

  Think of the opening artillery of “Satisfaction,” or “Brown Sugar,” or “Jumping Jack Flash.” That’s all Keith, I was told. He was a man who knew all about how to start with an earthquake and work up to a climax. It was Keith I pathetically aimed to emulate at the age of about sixteen when I bought a pair of tight purple cords (a sheen of sweat appears on my brow as I write these words) and tried with fat and fumbling fingers to plink out “Satisfaction” on a borrowed guitar; and my abysmal failure to become a rock star only deepened my hero worship.

  My understanding of the Mick-Keith arrangement was that Keith was the genius of the Glimmer Twins, who managed for years to hold the number-one spot on the New Musical Express list of Rock Stars Most Likely to Die—and yet who contrived to sleep with some of the most exotic women of the Western world: Uschi Obermaier, Anita Pallenberg, Patti Hansen, you name it.

  Keith has spent decades slurping, shooting and snorting such prodigious quantities of chemicals that he looks as though the stuff has taxidermied his tissues, like some Inca mummy; and all that while he has produced work of such quantity and originality that he has changed the face of rock music as decisively as he has changed his own physiognomy.

  He has become very rich. Between 1989 and 2003, for instance, he helped the Rolling Stones to earn £1.23 billion. And yet he still fizzes with so much energy—well into his sixties—that Johnny Depp borrowed his camp, be-ringed and bangled style for the blockbusting Pirates of the Caribbean. At the time of this writing he is thinking of yet another tour. If he didn’t look so epically raddled, you might be tempted to say that he was an advertisement for the health-giving properties of very pure heroin and cocaine.

  In the course of years of brooding on this chapter, I have been all over Richards’s London. I once went to open a riverside park in Twickenham, and looked over towards the cottages and houseboats of Eel Pie Island. I gazed at the dank mud flats and tried to imagine the scene before the famous Eel Pie Island Hotel was mysteriously burned to the ground—those magical sixties evenings when the air was full of the yowling of Keith’s guitar and the scent of dope and patchouli while the girls in brightly patterned cheesecloth dresses gambolled in the shallows. I have been to the 100 Club in Oxford Street, and even tried to help a campaign to keep it open.

  I have nosed around the chewing-gummed alley off Ealing Broadway, where Alexis Korner had his famous club and where fifty years ago—12 July 1962—Mick and Keith first played with Brian Jones, and the Rolling Stones effectively came into being. Many times I have cycled up and down Edith Grove in Chelsea, and looked out for number 102 and the kitchen window of the flat that Keith shared in the early days with Brian Jones, a place of such indescribable squalor that in the end they gave up on the contents of the kitchen, left it all piled in the sink and sealed the door shut with gaffer tape.

  For years I have snuffled on his spoor but never come across a trace of the man himself; until not so long ago, when fate dealt me the most incredible slice of luck.

  I was due to attend a ceremony in Covent Garden, where the objective was to make a short speech in honour of the noble and learned Lord Coe and to give him a prize.

  When I reached the Royal Opera House, the road was jammed with huge limos, glossy black Bentleys and Maybachs. Even though it was well after 10 p.m. there were still large crowds of autograph hun
ters, cheering and yelling at anyone who went through.

  Within was taking place the most important and mystic rite of the national cult of celebrity. I went into the atrium, shaped like a giant arched greenhouse, and watched as the roving spotlight played on the tuxedoed crowd.

  These weren’t just A-listers. They were A-plus. It was a triumph of sycophantic bidding-up by the organisers, in which you tell Bono’s people that Sting is going to be there and you tell Sting’s people that Bono is going to be there—and bingo—they both come; and you have a roiling celebfest of mutual congratulation, in which Salman Rushdie is to be seen explaining his next plot to Kylie Minogue, and Bill Clinton has Madonna perched on his knee while Mother Teresa of Calcutta whispers a dirty joke in his other ear—you get the point. The rest of us B-, C- and D-listers feel a kind of insane helium pleasure just to be allowed to share the same airspace or to quaff some Jacob’s Creek from the same chalice or grail that has touched the lips of the gods.

  That was how I felt when I had found my seat and made my salutations to A+ politician George Osborne and A+ theatre impresario Trevor Nunn and their gorgeous A+ womenfolk.

  “I am sorry I am so late,” I gasped to an impossibly tall, thin and yet somehow curvaceous hostess who appeared at my side.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “Stephen Fry spoke for so long that we are running a bit behind.”

  “Oh fine,” I said. “When am I on?”

  “Not long now. You are speaking after the Writer of the Year, which is going to be Keith Richards. He’s just over there,” she said, in answer to my hoarse exclamation of disbelief.

  “Where?” I goggled.

  “There—right up at the front,” and she pointed towards an unmistakable grey bird’s nest of hair.