The Mysterious Link Between Boris Johnson, Booster Seats and Brexit

This is a story about a mystery. A mystery that will take you to the heart of who Boris Johnson is – as a man, as a politician – and maybe, just maybe, help us to unravel the great riddle that is our national politics since around 2015.

The other week, my partner and I were having dinner round the house of a couple we know; new friends that we've made recently, after we'd moved to the opposite end of the country. Given the sensitive nature of this story, it would be wise to protect their identities – I'll call them Ellis and Rhiannon. We spent a very pleasant evening together– great meal, just the right amount to drink, and their dog was only sick on the carpet twice. At a certain point, quite naturally, the conversation turned to the issues of the day. And that's when someone mentioned Boris Johnson.

“Oh!” exclaimed Rhiannon. “Did you know he's obsessed with booster seats?”

“Excuse me, what?”

“Yes, a friend of my aunt's… [we'll call her Jean]. She was married to an MP. I can't remember his name. But he was friends with Boris Johnson. She's a teacher, at some private school. And so she asked Boris – I know, I know, I don't know why you would do this, but she did – she asked Boris to speak about British history at her school. And he came along. Only he didn't really do it. Apparently he only spent like two minutes talking about Britain before spending the next half hour talking about how much he hates children's booster seats. You know, like booster seats you put in cars so the seat belts will fit properly. He thinks they've been thrust upon us by the EU, I think he wants them banned. And then you see, the thing is-”

Ellis piped in. “I've a friend, [we'll call him Tony] who used to do media monitoring for the Labour party, back when Johnson was London mayor. He used to have to transcribe all his speeches. I was round his office once, I can't remember why, but I was watching him work. And each time… he'd get about 15 minutes in, and then turn the recording off. And I asked him why, and he said: 'oh, yeah. So every time Boris gives a speech, he says what he's been told he needs to say, and then he spends the next 45 minutes or so rambling about children's booster seats. All the journalists know about it, and they just ignore it. It's really boring, so we've stopped transcribing it.' And you know, I thought, that's odd. But then Rhiannon told me about this thing with Jean and I can't help but thinking-”

Yes. We were all thinking it. There's always been something strange about Boris Johnson. We all know who Boris Johnson is. But who really is he? That whole blustering, Bertie Wooster-buffoon thing he does, that Have I Got News For You? idiot schtick… we're told he artificially messes his hair up before he gives an interview. How much of it is real? How much of it is just an act? What does he really believe? Did he really used to be the Foreign Secretary? It is often said that Johnson coming out for Brexit swung the vote for Leave, but he dawdled so long in declaring how he thought the referendum should go. Is he a true believer – in Leave, in anything – or does he just want power? What's driving him?

Well, now we had an answer, or at least the hint of one: Boris Johnson hates children's booster seats. That's what he really cares about, what he's really motivated by. He wanted to leave the EU because he thinks booster seats are somehow associated with them. That's why the country, the whole country, is doing Brexit – because Boris Johnson hates booster seats. This is the most fundamental fact of our politics – everything else just proceeds, with a perfectly inexorable logic, from there.

But on the one hand: could this possibly be true? And if it was, then: why? Why does Johnson – how could anyone – hate booster seats so much, that he would risk damaging the UK economy, possibly irreparably, just to see the back of them?

And so, in the face of all this, I did the only thing that a responsible journalist (such as I am, at least for the purposes of this story) could do: I googled 'booster seats Boris Johnson'. I didn't find an awful lot of stories about Johnson and booster seats. But what I did find, seemed like it might be incredibly revealing…

This much we do know: in September 2006, Boris Johnson was very definitely On One about booster seats.

“Of all the sensations of joy and release that Nature in her kindness has bestowed upon the human race,” Johnson writes in his familiar, 'wow, we've not a had politician that articulate since Churchill *fart noise*' style, “there is little or nothing to beat the moment when you get rid of baby's car seat.”

“It beats getting off a long-haul flight,” he tells us. “It beats taking off a pair of ill-fitting ski-boots after a hard day on the slopes” (a relatable example that I'm sure will resonate with everyone).

Let's just take a moment to reflect on what Johnson has claimed here. On the one hand: Johnson appears to sincerely believe that the moment you are allowed to ride in a car without a car seat is a key childhood rite of passage, the sort of thing that you will never forget about growing up. It seems like this says quite a lot about how Johnson views the world? That car seat removal would be somehow fundamental to him? In a way it just simply isn't for other people?

At the very least, it might explain why Johnson – and we really can't let this point pass us by – describes the pleasure of removing a baby's car seat from a car as a deeply sensual one, almost to the point of being orgasmic.

It is therefore plausible to suppose, based on the evidence of this column, that Boris Johnson has some sort of car seat-removal fetish, possibly rooted in his own experiences of early childhood (I won't go any further into this, but if you want to imagine how such a fetish might have developed, try reading some Freud).

This then might explain why Johnson is so clearly upset about regulations regarding booster seats. It seems that, thanks to an EU directive approved in 2002, children are now obliged to remain in booster seats until they reach the age of 12, or obtain a height of 135cm, “whichever is the sooner.” If parents are caught flouting this directive, they could be fined up to £500.

This law, Johnson declares, is “crack-brained,” “stupid and impertinent.”

“Has Labour gone finally potty in asking the cops to spend their time poking their noses into the back seats of our cars?” he asks. “Why the hell are we doing this, when violent crime is going up, when burglary has been virtually decriminalised, and when the number of children killed in car accidents has been steadily diminishing for the past 20 years?”

Apparently, the government estimates that the new law might save the lives of 1.5 children every year. This, Johnson thinks, is risible. He simply does not believe that this child (and a half)'s life could possibly be worth the price of every parent in the country being forced to pay £30 for a new booster seat on which they must cart around their 10-year-olds. All in all, Johnson concludes, the booster seat law is “a perfect and justifiable reason for massive civil disobedience.”

Car-owning parents of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but… 1.5 children per year?

After writing this op-ed column, Johnson does indeed appear to have continued his campaign against children's booster seats – at least for a time. The focus of this story is some remarks Johnson made at a Tory conference fringe event, criticising Jamie Oliver for trying to get school children to eat healthily. The article reports Johnson as having digressed from this spat to further criticise the “nanny state” over the booster seats law, branding it “utterly demented.”

As far as I can tell, this is the only time Johnson is reported as having made these remarks – or similar – in a speech. But this would, crucially, fit the narrative that he was prone to waffle on about booster seats in otherwise unrelated speeches – maybe after this, all the journalists really did just get bored and stop transcribing them.

This news article details an incident in which Johnson was filmed by “a Sun reader” driving his Lamborghini fast down the M6 with both of his sons, aged 11 and six, sitting in the passenger seat. An RAC spokesperson called Johnson's driving “grossly irresponsible,” and said that “You need to make sure your children are securely strapped and have booster seats if they need them.” [my emphasis]

Note the date: August 2006. One month before Johnson wrote the Telegraph column, two months before he was documented as ranting about booster seats at conference fringe events. It seems we have a catalyst…

In August 2006, Johnson was criticised by the RAC for driving his children around without a booster seat. This alerted him to the fact that an EU directive had made it technically illegal to drive children under the age of 12/135cm around with booster seats. Johnson – who may or may not have a car seat removal fetish – was incensed by this. It set him completely dead against the EU, and he hasn't been able to stop thinking or talking about it since.

And this is it. This is what explains UK politics in 2018. If only that Sun reader hadn't filmed Johnson driving, all those years ago, we could have all been happily remaining in the EU under the sensible, centrist leadership of Owen Smith (or whoever) right now.

Only… I needed corroboration. And so I did, again, the sort of thing that any responsible (and definitely real, and qualified) journalist would do: I emailed Tony, Ellis's friend who works for the Labour party, to ask him to confirm the story about the transcripts.

Tony replied to my request. But he said he had no recollection, none whatsoever, of having a conversation with Ellis about Boris Johnson and booster seats. He'd had a look in the old transcripts of his speeches from when Johnson was mayor, but couldn't find anything in them on booster seats (of course, this would neither confirm nor disconfirm whether Johnson was really speaking about them, since the whole point was that no-one bothered to transcribe them, but still). Tony did, helpfully, attach some links to news articles about Johnson and booster seats – but it was just what I'd already found.

Fuck, I thought. Shit. For the best part of a single, beautiful day I'd thought I had a story powerful enough to bring down the government. And now… nothing.

So I decided to ask an old friend, who I'd known since university and has risen to become a Top Media Insider. “Top Media Insider,” I messaged him. “Have you ever, in all your years covering politics, and Boris Johnson, come across – at either first- or second-hand – a story about him being obsessed with children's booster seats, and that basically driving his whole political career?”

“Well,” he replied. “Having covered a lot of Boris speeches, he tends to find a funny story and then repeat it for a few months and then try another. The idea this [booster seats] was a constant refrain seems a bit overplayed. But it sounds about right – he probably did go back to it a lot. That's just… what he does.”

Light was beginning to shine gradually through the darkness.

“I guess the thing about Boris,” Top Media Insider continued, “is he doesn't put much thought into things, especially if there's a quick joke. By all accounts he filed that story about the Burkha stuff while pissed on a holiday with Carrie Symonds in Italy…. I don't think he meant to cause a stink, he'd just forgotten to file and tapped out 800 words as text on his iPhone. Obviously being casually racist is not great and says a lot about the man. But equally…. the idea it's a genuine fixation on any of this rather than just a sort of proto-shitposting is probably wrong.”

So there we have it. Johnson probably was obsessed with booster seats, but now he isn't. Probably hasn't been for years. 'Booster seats' can't stand as a grand explanation for Johnson and Brexit and whatever by itself.

But we do, nevertheless, seem to have gained a deeper understanding of what is driving Johnson as a politician and a man. Unfortunately, the answer is: nothing in particular at all. He's just a big empty cipher who's in it for… attention? I guess? I suppose we could probably have guessed that before. To be honest, I kind of wish he did just care about booster seats. At least he would have cared about something. That would actually have been a lot more edifying.

Oh well.

@HealthUntoDeath