The curious tale of Johnson and the biography of Shakespeare

It’s been about six years since Boris Johnson agreed to write for the first time Shakespeare: the enigma of genius, receiving an advance of at least £ 88,000 to begin work on a book whose publisher hoped it would bring his “characteristic curiosity, enthusiasm and ingenuity” to recount the life of the greatest British author.

Johnson, its publisher dit, would determine “whether the Bard is really all he has been.” As the world waits to hear the answer to this urgent question, Downing Street is wondering if the prime minister has spent time writing his book instead of leading the country.

Westminster is inundated with talk that Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s former chief executive at the No. 10-turned-critical archive, will make an appearance before lawmakers Wednesday to say the prime minister was working on his Shakespeare biography instead deal with the impending Covid-19 pandemic.

Johnson’s spokesman flatly denied on Monday that the prime minister would focus on the book in January and February 2020, as the crisis approached. “The prime minister has been at the forefront of the government’s response to the pandemic,” the number 10 said.

However, Downing Street did not deny that Johnson worked on Shakespeare’s biography, for which he received the 88,000 pounds in advance of its publisher Hodder and Stoughton UK in May 2015, since he became Prime Minister in July 2019.

Johnson’s financial difficulties, such as funding the divorce, child support and renovation of his Downing Street apartment, are well documented, although his allies said he had not submitted any work to the publisher during his tenure. time at number 10.

But the mystery has long surrounded Johnson’s disappearance from public view for 12 days in February 2020, during which time he retired to Chevening, a government house of favor and favor, with his fiancée Carrie Symonds.

During the first two months of 2020, Johnson did not attend five meetings of the government’s Cobra emergency committee to discuss the coronavirus. Downing Street said they were chaired by senior ministers and that such an agreement was not unusual.

Britain was also hit by heavy flooding in February, but Johnson did not visit the affected areas. Finally, he chaired a Cobra meeting on Covid-19 on March 2, three weeks before the country was closed.

Shakespeare’s biography was originally published in 2016, coinciding with the 400th anniversary of the Bard’s death. Hodder, the editor of Johnson’s biography of Winston Churchill, paid for the initial advance and maintained the rights to the United Kingdom, while Riverhead planned to publish the book in the United States and McClelland & Stewart in Canada.

Publishers typically make more payments to authors by delivering a manuscript and publishing the book. Some media reports have placed the value of Johnson’s book deal at about £ 500,000, a sum the publication’s executives said had nothing to do with his prominence or record as a best-selling author.

When he signed the agreement, Johnson was mayor of London and received the lead a few weeks after being re-elected to parliament in the May 2015 general election. Along with his book writing, Johnson also wrote a column for in the Daily Telegraph, for which he paid about £ 260,000 a year.

But these commitments soon became difficult to juggle. Johnson missed the first term for Shakespeare’s biography, which coincided with the 2016 Brexit referendum campaign. He was forced to leave the project later that year after being appointed secretary of state at the time. Prime Minister Theresa May. Hodder said at the time that the book was delayed “for the foreseeable future.”

Once Johnson rejoined conservative banks after leaving the post of foreign secretary in 2019, a new date was set for the unfinished book for April 2020. But that was also postponed after Johnson won the Conservative leadership race in July 2019.

Hodder said Monday: “After the success of Boris Johnson The Churchill factor, which was published in 2014, Hodder & Stoughton hired him to write a book about Shakespeare, which he initially planned to relate to Shakespeare’s birthday in 2016.

“When Boris Johnson became secretary of state, we agreed that we would delay publication until a more appropriate time and we have not scheduled the book to be published in the foreseeable future.”

Johnson’s friends said they wouldn’t be surprised if he had worked on the book at number 10, partly because he needs the money and also because he writes to relax.

In 2009 he advocated writing his Daily Telegraph column while serving as mayor of London, saying there was no reason why, on a Sunday morning, “he should not leave an article as a form of relaxation”.

In 2019, during the Conservative leadership campaign, Johnson said he had already begun preparing his Shakespeare biography and suggested he intended to complete it, though not as “quickly” as he had hoped.

“This unjustly neglected author will no longer get the treatment he deserves as quickly as otherwise,” he added. “It simply came to our notice then. . . I love writing about him. “

Anthony Seldon, a chronicler of successive prime ministers, said it would be “fantastic” that Johnson had found time to write books during his time at number 10 because it would elevate his mind above the day-to-day running of his office.

Additional reports from Jasmine Cameron-Chileshe and Sebastian Payne in London