Boris Johnson’s memoir Unleashed offers some vivid insights into the protection of VIPs such as Johnson when Foreign Secretary under Theresa May from 2016 and then as prime minister from 2019 to 2022, Mark Rowe writes.
Towards the very end of his book among some stories about Queen Elizabeth II, Johnson tells in passing how Chinese premier Xi Jinping’s ‘security goons much to her indignation had tried to infiltrate her royal coach’. While Foreign Secretary Johnson, among other Conservative ministers, visited wartorn Libya and in particular the (self-styled) Field Marshal Haftar in the city of Benghazi. Johnson was invited to inspect ‘some of Gaddafi’s legendary female bodyguard …. which of course I did,’ Gaddafi having been the ‘monster’, the country’s dictator until overthrown and killed. As for the bodyguards, Johnson described them as ‘suitably statuesque and terrifying and one of them stared at me imperiously through startling blue contact lenses’. Johnson does have the eye of a writer such as Evelyn Waugh for the absurdities as seen by an Englishman abroad. Altogether more serious was his visit at PM to President Zelensky, in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, in April 2022.
Train ride
The journey had begun in the dark in a helicopter without lights from the lawn of Chequers, the residence of the prime minister in the Chilterns. Johnson opens his chapter during the 11 hours of his train ride from eastern Poland into Ukraine (air travel being out of the question as too dangerous). Johnson recalled that his advisers had told him it was ‘surprisingly difficult for the Russians to hit a moving train’. Johnson was travelling without mobile phone (presumably in case it gave away his location) and his usual police protection officers. The UK security establishment had taken weeks to ‘sign off’ the trip because they were nervous of the risk. Although Johnson did add that he was told the risk was about the same as cycling in London (a joke, perhaps, as one of Johnson’s claims to fame as Mayor of London from 2008 had been the hire bicycle scheme).
History
What of the risk? Certainly it’s the case that a VIP – whether an executive, a pop star, diplomat or royalty, besides a political leader – is more at risk when on the road rather than indoors, inside a guarded perimeter. Chequers is among the ‘designated’ sites under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005; it’s a crime to trespass on such sensitive sites (others include royal palaces, Ministry of Defence bases, and nuclear power stations; and 10-12 Downing Street, entrance gates, pictured). History has melancholy examples of important people assassinated while travelling: whether in open cars – the most consequential being Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo (1914) and President John F Kennedy (1963) – or simply out and about (Swedish prime minister Olaf Palme in Stockholm, 1986). Less well known is the murder in 1934 of King Alexander of Yugoslavia – forgotten perhaps because of the embarrassment to France, as it wanted to cement Yugoslavia as an ally against Germany, only for the king to be shot dead by Croat nationalist terrorists in Marseilles. The American historian Eugen Weber in his history of France in the 1930s, The Hollow Years, tells of how ‘arrangements for his protection had been bungled badly. The Ministry of the Interior and the Quai d’Orsay [the French Foreign Office] could not agree on how to share expenses, and so a planned cavalry escort did not arrive.’ In the confusion, Weber adds, the French foreign minister Louis Barthou, ‘who had been wounded slightly, was left unattended to make his way to hospital on foot and lost so much blood on the way that he died on arrival’. As an aside, that’s a further argument for ‘ten second triage’, the training and equipping of people to carry out emergency first aid to bridge the ‘care gap’ after an act of terror, before paramedics reach the scene; as featured in the November edition of Professional Security magazine.
Manhood
To return to Johnson, he wrote interestingly of stories he heard from his military-security advisers, and significantly used the word ‘manhood’; to a certain type of man, stories of war, or of evading it if escaping captivity, have an appeal. That applies above all to a Conservative like Johnson, as a biographer of the most famous Conservative prime minister of all, Winston Churchill, who as a young man served in the Army and found fame in the Boer War, having gone to South Africa as a correspondent, been captured by the Boers, and escaping. It helped to launch Churchill as a politician, still in his 20s. Because such acts are for the young; and the same is true for the work of protecting VIPs. Significantly, Johnson’s advisers were telling the stories of their earlier years. Close protection people will tell you of how it (like many physically demanding occupations, including soldiering) is for the young, and not only because of the long and irregular hours and perhaps lack of sleep. Being away from home interferes with any family life. Less glamorously, standing around, while the VIPs do their business, a CP operative in their 20s can do without a second thought; by your 40s, you may feel your hips, knees, back and shoulders.
Fitness
To work in CP, then, you not only need the Security Industry Authority (SIA) licence. The curriculum of courses for you to pass, so as to apply for the licence, covers the law, how to make dynamic risk assessments; to do route planning and ‘journey management’, to be aware of surveillance, and terror threats, among other things. What of ‘personal and professional skills’, that the curriculum also includes? Teamwork (because on a long journey, you can hardly be expected to stay awake or even be on alert 24-hours; you’ll need others to take shifts). Some skills are practical; radio protocols, and the phonetic alphabet, to understand when giving and taking messages. As an SIA document puts it neutrally, skills include ‘the importance of etiquette, dress code and protocol when dealing with different types of principals’. To expand on this; the CP operative has to fit in with the principal; know how to eat with the right knife and fork if necessary, to dress up or down. Some skills can come in handy, that you might not associate with security work. To return to Johnson’s visit; he picked up the train in eastern Poland. If your grandparents were displaced persons from Poland or Ukraine after the 1939-45 war and you learned the language, that equips you to iron out the 101 little things that may crop up.
Language definition
Dr David Rubens once defined to me what a claim on a CP operative’s CV ought to mean, if they say they can speak German. You can order two beers in a bar in Munich?! That doesn’t count. Some hitch crops up at a hotel, or you park for the principal and his entourage to get out, and a policeman comes up complaining about something – do you have the conversational skills to navigate your way out?! Other skills that may have their uses are, to name a couple, skiing, and swimming. Because; what if a principal wants to go on a family skiing holiday, in the Alps? And then go to the south of France and on a yacht?
