Peter Oborne worked with Boris Johnson. For four years, he was dazzled by his brilliance when Johnson was editor of The Spectator.

Johnson, he says, had one of the quickest minds he’d ever encountered. “They were magical years, “ he says in his interview with The Currency.

“I felt enormously privileged to work for him when he was the editor of The Spectator. He was an uncannily brilliant editor who always had this unique ability, in my long experience in journalism, to see to the heart of a story.”

Johnson could grasp any topic instantly and was “a joy to work for”. Johnson was, Oborne writes in his new book, The Assault on Truth, “sunny, liberal, optimistic”.

Oborne wonders what changed. “I’ve found myself trying to reconcile the person I knew then with the prime minister of today,”he writes. “We are talking about two different people.”

But there is plenty of evidence, and Oborne records it, that nothing went wrong, that Johnson hadn’t changed.

A line can be drawn from the 23-year-old reporter fired by The Times for lying, to the prime minister who gave assurances about a sea border or the absence of one to unionists.

Oborne doesn’t feel deceived by Johnson but he does wonder if he deceived himself. “I am open to that charge,” he says.

Johnson benefitted from the conventions of the time. When he was sacked for lying to the Tory leader about an affair while editor of The Spectator, Oborne considered it, as many would, a private matter.

But the behaviours were the same. Deep down, Johnson was always shallow.

Oborne’s book deals with the emergence of Johnson and Trump and how they have been sustained by the tribal forces that dominate this era.

Johnson sprang from the media but his rise to power also underlines extent to which politics as sport, a game played between journalists, advisers and politicians, had become the default practice.

Boris Johnson In Dublin For Brexit Talks with Leo Varadkar in September 2019. Photo: Leah Farrell/RollingNews.ie

When Johnson declared his voting intention in February 2016 for the Brexit referendum, the Economist captured that media giddiness perfectly.

“Today the commentariat, and almost no one else, has been waiting excitedly for Boris Johnson to show his colours in Britain’s upcoming EU referendum,” Bagehot recorded.

That “almost no one else” was waiting, excitedly or otherwise, was overlooked. Johnson, it was said, ‘cut through’ like few politicians and the more the media believed this, the more they laughed at his jokes, the more true it became.

As with Trump, Johnson’s ability to entertain was placed ahead of other considerations. Perhaps they underestimated him as the US media did with Trump. Oborne never did.

He always believed Johnson would become prime minister, but he also feels that Johnson may be “almost uniquely ill-fitted to deal with the coronavirus pandemic. And does he have the self- knowledge to know that? I’m not sure. He’s a highly intelligent man, there must be glimpses of it. Is he enjoying it? Well, it’s what he’s always wanted to do. But I’m not a psychologist.”

Oborne believes that Johnson allowed himself to be hijacked by the Vote Leave campaign to become prime minister.

He was a willing hostage as he strived to fulfil his ambitions through Brexit.

Oborne supported Brexit although he subsequently changed his mind, but it was the approach of the Leave campaign that he found most startling.

“I did think, and I continue to think, that it was right to have a debate about Europe. And that the problem with Europe is that it has power too distant from voters, and it’s unaccountable. And I also felt that politics had become very remote from ordinary people. So I wrote in favour of Boris Johnson and Michael Gove entering a great democratic debate. And I completely think that was right. Now what I didn’t get right. I think I didn’t understand – unless you can say it was negligence – was the forces driving Brexit and the Vote Leave machine was much more unscrupulous than I understood.

“We’re talking about the utter contempt for due process. And I didn’t really wake up until Boris brought the Vote Leave machine into Downing Street in July 2019. That was when it became obvious that these people were completely unprincipled because all they started to do was to use the power of Downing Street to spread really filthy lies, smears against their political opponents. That’s what caused me to write the book. The moment I wrote the book was a ghastly episode when the Mail on Sunday newspaper ran a story that Downing Street was investigating three really respectable and decent people. Sir Oliver Letwin, Hillary Benn, the Labour man, and Dominic Grieve for taking money from a foreign power. And that story was followed up quite widely. It was complete fabrication from start to finish, but that was briefed by Johnson’s Downing Street, that’s when I completely lost it. And then Johnson sort of stood up the story on the following Monday or Tuesday, on the Today programme by saying yes, there are matters to investigate, and that is when I just felt revolted by what I what I was seeing.”

He explored further the relationship between the media and politicians. So much of it is, he insists, false.

“That gladiatorial image created by the media, the fearless media which is chaotic taking on the powerful, it’s almost completely fake. The media in Britain like to style themselves  – or we like to style ourselves – as Lords of misrule, holding power to account, Actually media has become part of the system of propagation of lies in Britain. It’s not just over politics, but over foreign policy. And it’s very, very hard to kind of write the truth. And somehow with the arrival of Boris Johnson as prime minister and Michael Gove, who is really the emissary from Rupert Murdoch, he worked for The Times for a long time, and is probably by some distance the British politician currently most trusted and admired by Rupert Murdoch, you had essentially a government of journalists and for journalists. We’re all in this, you know, rather revolting business, which none of us fully understand. But journalism is not about reality, in many ways. It’s about power. It’s about the way in which the powerful communicate with the masses. A lot of journalists, as I show in the book, have become the voices of the powerful.”

Oborne’s long career in journalism included time at the Mail and the Daily Telegraph. His resignation from the Telegraph in 2015 became a story in itself. Oborne claimed that the Telegraph’s coverage of HSBC was affected by the advertising revenue they received from the bank. The Telegraph rejected his allegations.

Oborne sees those issues again as part of a wider point.

“Well, journalism itself is in an economic crisis, which is to say, it’s not dissimilar and it’s not unrelated to the political crisis. And I’m quite sure this is true, not just in Britain, which I know very well, but in many other countries in the west, where the rise of the Internet and its various outlets has led to a collapse in newspaper readership. So revenues have contracted, you know this as well as I do. Advertising revenues have contracted and in order to carry on making profits, or even just to stay afloat, papers have entered into more and more troubling relationships with advertisers. And some of them are borderline ethical, and some of them are completely unethical. That was the background to my departure from the Telegraph, because I was brought up to believe, and we all were, that really advertisers couldn’t interfere or commercial interests should not be able to interfere with reporting, the reporting standards should be completely straight. But I do understand, the huge pressure on papers to survive.”

The media may have seen Johnson and Trump as entertainment but there has been a price to pay.

“What the journalists have done, and most of Britain’s senior political editors I’m afraid fall into this category…I was a lobby journalist for quite a number of years, you do need access, you need people to tell you what’s going on and give you stories. But what they have done is, rather than properly interrogate those stories, establish their accuracy and then go ahead. They too often, as a matter of course, and systematically so, in return for access – bearing in mind that with broadcasting editors, they need the interviews of the Prime Minister and the leading ministers –  they pass on rubbish. And they pass on partisan commentary which favours the narrative created by the government of the day, in this case, the Johnson government. There’s was always an element of this, but it’s completely blatant and awful, during the 2019 general election and running up to it.”

The media’s creation is now prime minister and the ‘sunny, liberal, optimistic’ is sometimes glimpsed, but usually at the wrong times during the pandemic which has such a toll on lives in the UK, even if their vaccine campaign has been a staggering success.

Johnson has what he wanted but at a time he could not have envisaged. Meanwhile Oborne’s articles have stopped appearing in the media he criticises. He no longer writes for the Mail and last year he says he managed to get two pieces printed in the UK mainstream press.

“My income has just collapsed. I cannot really get published. It’s quite early days, it’s only been a week since publication [of his book] but the BBC has completely ignored this book. The Murdoch groups of papers have completely ignored it. The Associated papers have completely ignored it. The Telegraph completely ignored it. We’ll see where we go from here, because it’s not a very popular message in the British media. What I say is the Johnson government lies and the media collaborates in those lies. We’ll see how we go from that. We’ll see how many people review it.”