Is Boris Johnson a Liar?
A few months ago, I saw Boris Johnson recount a story about his life that I’d never heard before—and he said something that was not, strictly speaking, true.
With most politicians, hearing a new tale can be unremarkable, but with Johnson—the subject of at least two biographies, countless newspaper and magazine articles, and someone who has been at the center of British political life for decades—almost everything that can be known about him is already known. Revelations that might once have troubled his ascent have long since lost their power to shock; character flaws are minimized in the public consciousness not through omission but through repetition.
On this occasion, the British prime minister was sitting in the atrium of Queen’s University in Belfast, talking to students and promoting his government’s new post-Brexit student-exchange program. As the conversation bounced around, one of the youngsters said they were thinking of studying in Australia. Johnson’s face lit up. He loves Australia and told the students he had once been a visiting professor of European thought at Melbourne’s Monash University. He then made a quip about the man who had invited him later being dismissed, adding with a laugh: “Other than that, it went well.” (Johnson has made this claim of a prior career in academia previously, in a 2011 speech and in one of his columns.)
I’ve followed Johnson my entire career (and wrote a profile of him this year), but the story about his professorial past was new to me. Andrew Gimson, one of his biographers, hadn’t heard about it either. Intrigued, I contacted Monash directly.
Johnson, it turns out, spent time at the university about 30 years ago. Yet he was not a “visiting professor of European thought.” He visited Monash on a two-week “professorial fellowship,” which involved a few classes, talks, lunches, and dinners. “He was here and gone,” says Brian Nelson, a professor of French at Monash who was there at the time, processed Johnson’s application for the role, and spent time
