Politics is a visual business, and Boris Johnson understands the power of images

The prime minister has been mocked for wearing an England football shirt over his normal shirt and tie, and mocked again for standing on a huge England flag in the street outside No 10. Then he was mocked some more, for holding up a smaller St George’s flag with the front door of 10 Downing Street festooned in bunting in the background.

The mockery seems to wash over him like water off a duck’s back, while the images remain in the memory, irresistibly identifying Boris Johnson with the nation’s sporting obsession. As Patrick O’Flynn observed in The Spectator, it doesn’t seem to matter that the prime minister looks ridiculous, or that he knows nothing about association football. He understands the power of images, and is better at deploying them than his rivals, who for these purposes include Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss as well as Keir Starmer.

Starmer is a genuine football fan, and the photos of him watching the semi-final in a Belfast pub were authentic, but they lacked the cartoonish quality that makes Johnson’s so memorable.

Visually, Johnson has stood out all his life because of his hair, which he keeps messy as a way of drawing even more attention to himself. As mayor of London, he was always pictured on a bike (or a zip wire) or shooting a basketball backwards. Now he is prime minister, a significant amount of energy and public money is devoted to keeping up a constant stream of images.

Every time he leaves Downing Street he is in hi-vis, or a company uniform, or a lab coat; his life seems to be a continuous round of driving things, operating machines, looking at test tubes and talking to schoolchildren. The propaganda output of the government’s official photographers is prodigious, and some of the photos are very good.

There was one last week of Johnson in the garden of No 10 talking to Max Woosey, a boy who has raised money for charity by sleeping in a tent for a year. The tent is between them, and Dilyn the prime ministerial dog is leaping out of it.

Johnson is a writer who has made his way in the world by the power of words and the ability to turn a vivid phrase. But he’s an artist, too – he drew the pictures for his 2007 children’s book, The Perils of the Pushy Parents. Above all, he knows how to think in pictures. As a journalist of the written word, it is too easy for me to overlook the extent to which politics is a visual business.

Yours,

John Rentoul

Chief political commentator