Boris Johnson inc. is about to go public

Boris Johnson the politician went bust in July when his Conservative Party colleagues forced him to resign as prime miner. Boris Johnson the business, on the other hand, is about to make a small fortune.
Political observers in England expect that Boris Inc. will follow the path of previous British leaders and become a one-man private corporation offering two products, a memoir and speeches. A born performer who offers a singular mix of gravitas and japery, he will market qualities that once charmed millions of voters, including a shambolic head of blond hair and an impish smile that says “I won’t take anything too seriously until I absolutely must.”
What he won’t do, a biographer predicts, is immediately angle for a return to power — or criticize his successor, Liz Truss, who has managed to crater both her poll numbers and the British pound in just a few weeks in office.
“It is too soon for him to make any attempt at a comeback,” said Andrew Gimson, author of “Boris Johnson: The Rise and Fall of a Troublemaker at No. 10.” “His downfall is still too recent, his own failings as prime miner are too fresh in people’s memories, and Truss’s failure is no means confirmed.”
If he chooses to, he will join the lecture circuit at an ideal moment. The most lucrative live events, like corporate conferences and annual meetings, have come roaring back in recent months after a two-year hiatus caused the pandemic. In late September, the Clinton Global Initiative held its first in-person conference since 2019, as did Fast Company’s Innovation Festival, which had some 5,700 regrants — 700 more than three years ago.
“The opportunity to collide with people who are not in your normal business or social circle, that’s something live events are really good at,” said Stephanie Mehta, the CEO of Mansueto, which owns Fast Company. “People are craving a chance to get out of their bubble.”
Johnson is expected to fetch as much as $250,000 per speech, and even more for his first outing or two, say executives at speakers’ bureaus. Because he remains a member of Parliament, he will need to report that income publicly, through what is called the Reger of Members’ Financial Interests. In 2019, after he quit the foreign secretary post, he reported earning 122,000 pounds (about $132,000) from Living Media India for a three-hour speaking engagement — a payday he is likely to routinely exceed now.
More than ever, he needs the money. A 58-year-old with two divorces, a third wife and six children, Johnson earned 157,000 pounds as prime miner, about $178,000. Along with those high overhead costs, the man has expensive tastes. When he and his third wife redecorated their official residence at No. 11 Downing Street, an invoice leaked to The Independent showed that the work cost 200,000 pounds ($226,000), including a 3,675-pound drinks trolley and a pair of sofas that cost more than 15,000 pounds. Johnson was accused in news reports of using Conservative Party donations to cover some of the renovations, and he repaid the money.
For the biggest paydays for speeches, he will need to leave the United Kingdom.
“He won’t be popular here,” said Gina Nelthorpe Cowne, co-founder and managing director of Kruger Cowne, a British talent management agency. “He’ll get occasional interest, and if he’s lucky he’ll get 50,000 pounds to 60,000 pounds a speech. But there were too many lies; he was too deceitful on too many levels. He’s humorous, but the British public have looked at the facts, looked at the damage he’s done.”
Audiences in the United States know about Johnson’s calamitous end and will have some familiarity with the assortment of scandals that led to his ouster. Unlike British voters, though, Americans are not simmering about the many debacles of his adminration, including the No. 10 Downing Street parties he attended at a time when such gatherings had been banned lockdown laws passed his government. After an investigation into the parties, the police fined Johnson and dozens of others.
None of the tarnish is likely to follow him across the Atlantic. Plenty of Americans could be eager to hear insider tales about world leaders and reverent stories about the recently deceased Queen Elizabeth II. And some will be spellbound his bumbling mode of speaking and his arocratic-adjacent accent.
“He’s always played this slightly farcical version of an upper class fool who is forever trying to remember what happened and keeps searching for the right words,” said Simon Kuper, author of “Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the U.K.” “And now that he’s been prime miner, he can do the Churchill thing and talk about what happened in the great rooms of power. He’ll weave those characters together.”
Johnson is expected industry veterans to sign either with the Harry Walker Agency in New York City or the Washington Speakers Bureau, which represents Theresa May, John Major and other former prime miners. Emails and calls to the companies were not returned. Discretion is prized when it comes to money and former political leaders who earn speaking fees, and that is especially true in Britain.
“The U.K. public is very sniffy about stories of former prime miners making money,” said Giles Edwards, author of “The Ex Men: How Our Former Presidents and Prime Miners Are Still Changing the World.” “Unreasonably so, in my opinion.”
Among book publishers and literary agents in Britain, a Johnson memoir is expected to fetch between $1.1 million and $2.2 million. That might seem like a large number, given that there is plenty of antipathy toward the man from the left and that many Conservative Party voters regard him as a public relations fiasco. But perhaps judging him the conventional metrics of popularity, like polling numbers, doesn’t make sense.
“With Boris, I think you could value him not just as a politician but in the way that you would a much-loved character actor or musician who has behaved badly in his career — a forgivable rogue,” said Patrick Walsh, a veteran literary agent. “Plus he’s annoyingly funny. I’m a social, but I smile at some of his jokes, despise his politics though I do.”
Variations on this sentiment are rife in parts of the British publishing world. Andrew Franklin, co-founder of Profile Books, said he wouldn’t touch a Johnson autobiography, even if someone paid him 1 million pounds for his time. That said, he is sure that the book will find an audience.
“He’s witty and clever,” he said, “and the fact that there’s no relationship between truth and the entertainment that he offers is not a barrier to entry for many of his admirers.”
Johnson spent years as a journal before entering politics and earned 22,000 pounds a month, about $25,000, writing columns for the Telegraph in 2019 after he quit as foreign secretary. An earlier book him, “The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made Hory,” sold well and was received with a mix of praise and derision, sometimes in the same review. The Times — the one in London — said it was “never boring, genuinely clever in parts, hopelessly biased in its judgments and sometimes irritating to the point of call-in-the-stretchers exhaustion in its verbal bumble.” The review added that Johnson wrote like a man being paid the word.
Likely buyers for a memoir include Harper Collins, which is owned Rupert Murdoch and has published books former Tory prime miners John Major and David Cameron. One wrinkle: In 2015, Johnson signed a deal with Hachette Book Group to publish a book about Shakespeare called “The Riddle of Genius,” promising a look at “the illicit sex and the power struggles; the fratricide and matricide,” according to promotional materials.
Seven years later, he has yet to deliver a final manuscript. Standard book contracts stipulate that an author can’t sell a different book to another publishing house until the original has been completed.
The British media has reported that Johnson hopes to finish his memoirs Chrmas, which would mean keeping that Shakespeare book on the back burner. He could sell the new work to Hachette, a choice that might relieve him of an obligation to finish his Shakespeare book first.
“He’d be off the hook if he sells to Hachette,” Franklin said. “If he sells to anyone else, I think Hachette would exercise their prenup.”
The CEO of Hachette UK, David Shelley, declined to comment.
As lucrative as his book advance is expected to be, Johnson could earn even more giving speeches at live events. For much of the past two years, the pandemic turned the lecture industry into a Zoom-based business, which meant reduced rates for most speakers.
“Most people discounted their usual fee 40 to 50%,” said Greg Friedlander, the founder of AAE, which books lecturers on behalf of universities and corporations. “Part of it is that speakers were worried about the economy, and when all in-person events were cancelled nobody knew what demand would be for virtual events.”
When online speeches took off, the pool of available talent grew. Celebrities with expertise in coping with isolation and anxiety were in high demand. That included astronauts like Garrett Reisman, a one-time crew member aboard the International Space Station, who found his pandemic-era bookings nearly doubled.
“And I didn’t need to fly to Armenia, like I did last week,” he said in a phone interview. “I could just roll out of bed and start doing these events. Didn’t even need to put on pants.”
Pants-optional events may have upsides for speakers, but there is clearly pent-up demand for fully clothed, face-to-face gatherings. The Fast Company Innovation Festival was swarmed with people on its opening day in September, in a spiffy and sprawling space in downtown Manhattan near One World Trade Center. The festival booked dozens of speakers, including actress and entrepreneur Jennifer Garner, director Judd Apatow, a score of tech executives and comedian Wayne Brady, who talked about life lessons he had learned through years of improv performances.
The festival included drone racing, city tours and other activities that were not possible when the event was virtual, as it was for the past two years. But the principle attraction didn’t require any equipment.
“I think you come to events like this mostly for the networking,” said Cecilia Mosze Tham, the founder of Futurity Systems, who had flown from Barcelona to attend. “How are you going to meet people randomly on Zoom?”
Johnson is more likely to keynote at the annual meetings of Wall Street banks than serve as the swizzle stick at a professional mixer. But close observers of his career say that life running a private enterprise will not hold his interest for long. As soon as possible, they say, he will vie again for Britain’s top political job.
“He’s not done at all,” said Kuper, the “Chums” author. Johnson, he noted, has flamed out at other jobs in the past: once as a journal at The Times, the British daily, after being accused of inventing quotes, and once as a shadow miner in the Conservative Party, over misleading statements about an affair.
“He’s accustomed to spells in the doghouse,” Kuper said. “Failures are part of the narrative.”