Boris Johnson’s war correspondent days show he is not the man many think he is

Reporting by the now-prime minister in Kosovo and Iraq was starkly different to the ‘cushy’ life many believe he has, writes Kim Sengupta

Boris Johnson produced numerous reports from war zones (Getty)

Boris Johnson’s lack of fitness due to a cushy lifestyle, according to some in the social media, will make it difficult for him to deal with the coronavirus that forced him into intensive care.

But the prime minister, according to Downing Street, is not suffering from any serious health problems, and his friends insist that he is, in fact, in quite robust condition despite being a bit overweight. Will Walden, his director of communications when he was London’s mayor, told the Today programme that Johnson is a “really, really strong guy” who “will whip anybody’s backside on a tennis court. He runs regularly, he doesn’t smoke, he drinks moderately”.

Willpower alone will not defeat the virus. But the idea that Johnson’s career before becoming an MP, mayor, foreign secretary and prime minister was spent sitting behind a desk at all times should be reassessed. His life was not entirely about sending stories from Brussels about supposed EU diktats on straight bananas, or editing The Spectator from its elegant offices, or writing his columns for The Daily Telegraph from home for an alleged quarter of a million pounds a year.

It is not much remembered, but Johnson was a war correspondent, covering pretty violent conflicts, operating in often difficult conditions at times at risk to himself.

I remember running into him at the Grand Hotel in Pristina in 1999 during the Kosovo war. I was among journalists who had come in from Macedonia with British-led Nato forces and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). We had spent some time with the Kosovar Albanians who were fighting the Serbs. Johnson had come down from Belgrade from where he had been reporting on the Nato bombing of Serbia for The Daily Telegraph.

Johnson’s writing was hardly uncritical of the western, including British, air strikes. One piece read: “Nato succeeded in decapitating a priest as he crossed a bridge in broad daylight on the feast of the Holy Trinity. They killed a toddler as she sat on her potty.

“Of course, this was not intentional, in the sense of some brass hat at Mons did not target this priest or that toddler. But you could say that it was intentional in that Nato dropped bombs from 15,000 feet in the sure-fire knowledge that civilians would be killed.”

I told him that I had enjoyed reading his dispatches. “Thanks, not everyone in London liked them, you know,” he said. “You guys were with the Kosovar chappies, so I can see why your take was different.” We briefly discussed journalists getting “Stockholm syndrome” in reporting conflicts and made a provisional plan to visit some armed Serbian nationalists holed up in an area called Kosovo Polje.

But then Russian forces suddenly turned up in Kosov and there was a standoff at Pristina airport. General Sir Mike Jackson, the British commander of Nato forces, refused – point blank – the order of the American General Wesley Clark, Supreme Commander Europe, to take military action against the Russians (“I am not going to start the Third World War for you,” he said). Other things kept happening at a fast pace and the Kosovo Polje trip fell by the wayside.

I met Johnson again in April 2003 as another war of western intervention was under way. I was with colleagues in Amman after months in Iraq when Johnson, then an MP as well as the editor of The Spectator, turned up. He joined a few of us for dinner and announced that he wanted to go to Baghdad. The really savage violence had yet to begin in Iraq by then, but it was still a pretty hazardous place to go to.

Johnson wanted to borrow my flak jacket. But he ended up taking one from the BBC’s distinguished correspondent Fergal Keane instead.

Johnson mentioned how glad he was to have the body armour as he went around Baghdad. He wrote in his piece: “I went partly to satisfy my curiosity, but mainly to clear my conscience. I wrote, spoke and voted for the war, and was hugely relieved when we won. But owing, no doubt, to some defect in my character, I found it very hard to be gung-ho…

“It was troubling that we were preparing war against a sovereign country that had, so far, done us no direct harm. And the longer Blix and co fossicked around in search of weapons of mass destruction, the more cynical I became about the pretext.”

This was a time when George W Bush had declared victory in Iraq, and Tony Blair was declaring the mission a great success. Questioning the reason given for the war, the non-existent WMDs, and the utter lack of planning for the chaotic aftermath brought accusations of appeasement. I remember being shouted at by a Foreign Office minister at the French embassy’s Bastille Day reception in London that we were all Saddam Hussein apologists.

Johnson went back to Iraq in 2005. The bloodletting was on an industrial scale by then. It was a time when some of us remember for personal reasons. Our hotel in Baghdad was blown up by suicide bombers. A couple who had become close friends of mine, the wife a Shia, the husband a Sunni, were kidnapped by insurgents. He was murdered; she had to flee the country. The driver of one of our colleagues was shot dead.

Johnson wrote then: “We have spent something like £5bn of UK taxpayers’ money, and the Americans have spent $400bn. We have invested this country with 150,000 foreign troops, and built bases so big that it takes a chopper minutes to overfly the prairies of humvees and half-tracks. We have tried bullying and kindness, bribery and bullets, and look at the state to which we would seem to have reduced Iraq.

“Here we are in 2005, and not only are all the main public buildings still twisted and pancaked and full of gaping cruise-holes, but the lights are still intermittent, sanitation mediaeval, inflation at 30 per cent, petrol queues lasting two days, and corruption – without the restraint of Baathist terror – worse than ever. Do they blame us? The evidence is that they do.”

Johnson was to change some of his views, in public at least, as he climbed up the political ladder. He praised Blair for forging a strong relationship with Bush and said about his own war reporting: “I think, in retrospect, that I failed to see the wood from the trees… You can say what you like about Tony Blair but he has participated in the toppling of two tyrants, Milosevic and Saddam, whom (John) Major had left in power.”

In 2016, returning to Kosovo as foreign secretary, Johnson told the country’s parliament: “I was there when the British army came in and I remember seeing the joy on the faces of villagers and how they threw roses in the path of the British army vehicles. I remember seeing the burning mosques and the villages that were torched, sometimes razed almost to the ground, by the retreating force.

“Britain wants to work alongside you as a partner. I’m proud that Britain was one of the first countries to recognise Kosovo’s independence in 2008. We were allies then; we are allies now… I am sure today that you will have a truly great future and as you achieve that great future for Kosovo and realise the potential of this country. I want to assure you that you have friends and supporters in the United Kingdom.”

I went back to Kosovo last year for the 20th anniversary of the war. Bill Clinton, the US president at the time of the conflict, was very much the star of the show with his then secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, leading the supporting cast of past and present members of the administration.

No senior ministers from London were present among the representatives of other major European states. Tony Blair, who had visited Kosovo just after the war, before Clinton, to a rapturous reception, a man so popular that there was a vogue of naming baby boys “Tonybler”, was not there. Neither was General Sir Mike Jackson, the head of Nato’s Kosovo force, present. However, the American General Wesley Clark was in the US delegation.

Johnson visited Iraq when he was London mayor in 2015. The British government blocked his plan to visit the frontline against Isis, although he did get to see the Peshmerga militia in the Kurdish region. He spoke about the trip when I ran into him at a reception. We also discussed his previous journeys to the country, and the risk one took in reporting at the time. I wondered what had happened to Fergal Keane’s flak jacket. “Ah. Good question, let’s see, I am trying to remember...” he mused, scratching his head.

I do not know whether Fergal ever got his flak jacket back. It would not, perhaps, be entirely surprising if it is lying somewhere, gathering dust, in Downing Street having seen honourable service.