It was perhaps unfortunate for Boris that when I read a long and sympathetic account of his childhood unhappiness (his mother had a long breakdown, probably caused by his father’s infidelities) I had just returned from the Jankel Adler exhibition at the Ben Uri Gallery, which specialises in the art of the dispossessed.
Here I learnt that Adler and his friend, Josef Herman – while refugees in this country – heard that their entire families had been murdered. But this did not turn either one of them into the kind of greedy, lying, irresponsible buffoon that Boris has become. On the contrary, after Adler had nursed his friend through a breakdown, they both produced remarkable work and were soon to have families of their own.
But they did not forget. Josef kept this painting – given to him by Adler – in his living room, for the rest of his life.
Orphans 1941, Jankel Adler
That tragic episode in his mother’s life does not excuse Boris. Nor does it appear to have jinxed the lives of his siblings who, presumably, comforted each other during her absence.
No more did being turned down by a prestigious art school excuse – or account for – another leader’s murderous rage. What these two inadequate men ‘suffered’ is no more than a pin prick when set against the suffering one of them inflicted on millions, and the hurt and confusion the other has already left in his wake.
No one, surely, gets through childhood without some painful setback: ranging from having to flee one’s country of birth, to never being picked for the first eleven. But it seems we are wired to survive, and time brings with it a mix of forgiveness and forgetfulness.
What makes the Trumps and Johnsons of this world different from the rest of us is their abandonment of the principles – the common humanity – which stop most people from putting their own desires above those of everyone else. These two exemplars of the school bully, these two monsters of self-gratification have, somewhere along the line, and of their own volition, lost touch with ‘the court of conscience’.*
Let’s hope that Boris, with his backpack of classical allusions, has also read Shakespeare, and remembers that the evil that men do lives after them.
* ‘There is a higher court than courts of justice, and that is the court of conscience.’ Mahatma Ghandi