A tale of two Borises: What do Boris Johnson and Boris Yeltsin have in common?

They share a similar mix of personal ambition – sometimes dressed up as concern for the nation – and recklessness, writes Mary Dejevsky

Like Johnson today, Yeltsin had no fear of ‘the people’ (Getty)

When the prime minister executed what was described as his “screeching U-turn” on attending the Cop27 climate conference in Egypt, various official explanations were offered for his change of heart. They included pressure from the public and his own MPs, a new appreciation of the importance of climate and the opportunities for networking, given that other heads of state and government will attend.

Call me cynical, but I doubt that the main reason was any of these. I bet it was the revelation that the PM’s predecessor but one, Boris Johnson, was already packing his bags for Sharm El-Sheikh and was guaranteed to hog the UK media limelight were the prime minister not to go. Johnson’s rushed return from his Caribbean holiday might not have sped him directly back to No 10, but – as his subsequent Sky News interview showed – Johnson’s hopes of a comeback remain alive.

Past prime ministers can be a pain in the neck for their successors – think Edward Heath, Margaret Thatcher and even Theresa May. And while leaving politics altogether might be the wiser course, the wiser course is rarely Johnson’s way. It seems rather that, by accident or design, he might be establishing a rival power centre, and there are precedents, if not in this country, for what could happen next.

It so happened that as news of Johnson’s Sharm expedition broke, I was immersed in Adam Curtis’s latest documentary, Russia 1985-99: TraumaZone, a seven-part epic recently released on the BBC’s iPlayer. And while, it seems to me, Curtis deliberately hints at certain parallels, notably with today’s war in Ukraine, there is another parallel that cries out to be drawn: between our own Boris Johnson and another blond Boris of recent memory, the Russian president, Boris Yeltsin.

They have the same big character, the same popular touch, the same love of a felicitous phrase and the same abundance of personal flaws. Above all, perhaps, Boris Johnson today and Boris Yeltsin in his prime share a similar mix of personal ambition – sometimes dressed up as concern for the nation – and recklessness.

Like Johnson today, Yeltsin had no fear of “the people”. And he used his populist gifts in his pursuit of power, or – if you prefer it, and historians are still debating this question – his mission to save his country. Boris Johnson led the UK out of the European Union – after, he insists, weighing the arguments on either side – in pursuit of essentially the same objective: national sovereignty.

That is the obvious parallel. But I would also suggest another. Mikhail Gorbachev’s efforts – through perestroika and glasnost – to save Soviet communism and the Soviet Union had the perverse effect of weakening (fatally, as it turned out) Soviet central power. As this was happening, through the late 1980s, Boris Yeltsin was able to build a formidable opposition force in his own competing centre of Russian power.

He succeeded in this partly thanks to his own personal magnetism, which contrasted with Gorbachev’s often grey and stern Soviet bureaucratic manner, which reflected his rise through the layers of communist power. Yeltsin had made his career in those structures, too, but he dared to defy them at the crucial time and, unlike Gorbachev, he could thrive without them. Does that perhaps remind you of anyone? Using recent changes to the Soviet constitution, Yeltsin then stood for election as president of Russia in June 1991; his victory gave him the democratic mandate Gorbachev always lacked.

But there was another key to Yeltsin’s rise, and this was the way he capitalised on the resentment of Russians towards Soviet central power. The resentment arose less from Russian nationalism per se, though Yeltsin was adept at wrapping himself in the Russian tricolour when it suited him, than about the sense of many Russians that they had no distinctive voice in the Soviet structures as they stood.

This had hardly mattered through the main Soviet years, but it started to matter when Gorbachev embarked on loosening the central political strings. It could then be seen that the other 14 republics of the USSR all had their own ruling Communist Party structures and their own legislatures, with their own leaders who had started representing their own regional interests, while Russia did not.

So dominant was the Russian Federation in size, population and economic clout that it had been treated as tantamount to the Soviet Union, with no need for a separate voice.

Again, does this remind you of something? England, like Russia, is the dominant nation in the United Kingdom in just the same ways that Russia was in the USSR. And just like Russia until the very last years of Soviet power, it lacks its own national parliament and other political institutions. That might not have mattered before devolution, but the more powers that accrue to the devolved nations, the clearer the English exception becomes.

The principle of English votes for English laws (EVEL) in the UK parliament tries to address that disparity. But this really is no substitute for a national legislature, is it? If Scotland and Wales (and Northern Ireland when it gets its act together) can pass their own laws, should not England have that right, too?

The difficulty, of course, is the same one that hobbled Gorbachev in his efforts to transform the Soviet Union from a top-down federation to a voluntary commonwealth of independent states. The imbalance, especially the economic and geographical one between Russia and the rest, spelled failure. Various solutions have been proposed for the UK; they include splitting England into its regions for the purposes of reconstituting the UK as a federal state. But they stall against the national issue. England, like Russia, is a nation, but it is too big to fit into a genuine, German or US-style federation of equal states.

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Boris Yeltsin arguably pre-empted the tide of history by building up Russia as his own power base and was able to watch as economic and institutional power drained from the weakened Soviet centre. He then seized his moment to take Russia out of the Soviet Union, before the whole edifice collapsed. He encouraged Ukraine and Belarus to leave, too. The complete disintegration of the Soviet Union was then a matter of days away.

Could this perhaps offer a blueprint for the other Boris? Tony Blair began the process of devolution in response to growing calls for more autonomy from Scotland. But devolution seemed only to whet the appetite for more. The trend was then reinforced by the contrasting votes in the EU referendum – to the point where the union itself was suddenly called into question, with the prospect of Scotland voting in a second referendum and Irish unity newly on the agenda.

To the surprise of some, English nationalism and calls for an English parliament were the dogs that didn’t bark after Brexit. How far this was because the vote took the steam – at least temporarily – out of the English question, with the vote showing Brexit to be a largely English cause, and how far it was because England lacked a leader can be debated. What there is, or at least could be here, is a gap that might one day need to be filled.

After the turmoil of recent months, it is not clear where ex-prime minister Boris Johnson fits into UK politics. But if he is looking for a role, then this is where he might find it: championing the cause of England as the union itself becomes ever harder to sustain. You think it won’t happen? Maybe.

But most metropolitan seers thought that the UK would never leave the European Union. Boris Johnson made that happen – and the great fragmentation, like the career of this Boris, might not yet have reached its end.