Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique (Nov 2023)
Le storytelling de Boris Johnson à l’épreuve de la crise sanitaire
Abstract
Boris Johnson’s term in office has been marked by many twists and turns: an epic confrontation with Parliament; the achievement of Brexit; a pandemic; a series of scandals and the beginning of the war in Ukraine. Throughout these three eventful years, Johnson often had to take the floor to justify his choices, celebrate his successes, explain his mistakes and so on. This article looks at one particular aspect of his rhetoric: storytelling.Storytelling is the art of telling stories in order to capture the attention or win the support of an audience. It is not limited to language and can draw on non-verbal semiotic resources such as images and visual representations. In politics, storytelling plays a key role in shaping the discursive ethos, i.e., the self-image that speakers construct in their discourse. It combines collective narratives with personal stories to create a vision of the world that appeals to voters. This narrativized representation of the world plays with the audience’s emotions, which facilitates the transmission of a political ideology, since the willing suspension of disbelief induced by the narrative format reduces our capacity to counter-argue and invites us to share the hero’s point of view.A former journalist and well-known orator, Boris Johnson is well versed in the art of telling stories. Johnson’s storytelling, which created the image of a charismatic, irreverent leader, close to the people and in opposition to patriarchal authority, was particularly well suited to the Brexit crisis, when the United Kingdom supposedly wanted to extricate itself from European authoritarianism and elitism. The narrative of Vote Leave, of which Johnson was an influential member, was both simple and highly structured: by undermining the country’s sovereignty, the EU posed an existential threat to a freedom-loving Britain lulled by the heroic tales of its exceptionalism and defence of democracy in the Second World War. The situation changed radically, however, when the country was faced with a global health crisis.This article proposes to analyse Johnson’s storytelling in his speeches at the 2019, 2020 and 2021 Conservative Party annual conferences. The aim is to see whether Johnson’s storytelling, which contributed to his success in the 2019 election, has evolved, to convince Britons that he was still the right man for the job during the pandemic.
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