WITH his wretched, inept, self-serving and typically duplicitous performance at the Covid inquiry, many would like to forget disgraced former Prime Minister Boris Johnson ever existed.
 
If we look back through history, we can see many examples when unsavoury characters (and some blameless) were totally erased from the public record, in terms of both writings and physical memorials.
 
This removal came to be known by the Latin phrase coined in a German academic thesis in 1689 as “damnatio memoriae” meaning “condemnation of memory.”
 
 

Forget-me-not

 
Back in the bad old days of the Roman empire (and more recently in the former USSR, China, North Korea, and previous Warsaw Pact countries), those who were thought to have disgraced the honour of the state — or were inconvenient reminders of how the present occupants got there — were swiftly expunged from official memory.
 
After his fall and execution in AD 31, the emperor Tiberius’s “Partner of my Labours,” the super-ambitious Praetorian Prefect Sejanus became a non-person, and to make sure of this, his former wife and their children, plus his extended family and supporters were also rubbed out. A scene memorably depicted in the classic 1976 BBC series I, Claudius.

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Although popular with the plebs due to his lavish entertainments and belittling/selective culling of the aristocracy, Nero (37-68 AD) proved too much for the Senate, who outlawed and condemned to death the last Julio-Claudian emperor in 68 AD, prompting his suicide and alleged accompanying cri de cœur, “What an artist dies in me!” Echoes of Johnson’s own literary pretensions?
 
Great Caesar’s ghost
 
Nero's head was subsequently removed from the colossal statue that later stood outside the Flavian Arena, and replaced by a generic one of Apollo. After the statue was broken up for the lime kilns during the Dark Ages, the name Colossus became associated with the arena, which of course eventually became known as the Colosseum.
 
Nero’s vast Golden Palace was built over and his memory was defamed, although commoners apparently had fond memories of him; the emperor is the only imperial ghost. It was said to haunt his burial site on the Pincian Hill until exorcised by the construction of the Santa Maria del Popolo in 1099 AD.
 
Over a century later, the name of the reviled Emperor Commodus (AD 161-192) of Gladiator (2000) fame was effaced from documents and many of his statues were slighted or remodelled. To little effect, as, thanks to the movie, he is one of the better-known Roman emperors.
 
Probably the most famous example of “damnatio memoriae” is that of Geta (189-211 AD), brother and co-emperor of Caracalla (188-217 AD). Caracalla decided he didn’t fancy sharing power with his sibling and senior ruler, and had him knocked off within a few months of their joint ascension to the imperial throne after the death of their father, the soldier-emperor Septimius Severus (AD 145-211).
 
Now sole emperor, Caracalla went so far as to scrub pictures of Geta from family portraits, something that would be difficult in the case of Johnson, bearing in mind his ever-expanding brood sired by multiple partners.
 
Centuries later, the Council of Constance revived the practice with the damnatio memoriae of Lollard reformer John Wycliffe in 1415.
 
The 20th century saw a resurgence that surpassed even the Romans, with Stalin’s Russia (Leon Trotsky, Nikolai Yezhov etc), Red China (Zhao Ziyang), and Nazi Germany (Ernst Rohm) all seeking to excise the memory of either internal rivals or convenient targets scapegoated for incompetence.
 
In Ireland, longtime PM Eamon de Valera resented his assassinated former comrade-in-arms Michael Collins to such an extent that he prevented the press from attending the erection of a new tombstone in 1939, personally decreeing the exact dimensions and words allowed to be inscribed on the memorial. A degree of pettiness that Johnson would appear fully capable of, given his known habit of nursing decades-long grudges.
 
On a lesser scale, the first Labour PM Ramsay MacDonald (1866-1937) was regarded as a pariah by his former colleagues after he deserted his party to become the figurehead of a so-called “national government” during the great depression.
 
He remains persona non grata among many Labour members, a greater traitor than even the SDP Gang of Four of Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams, David Owen, and Bill Rodgers.

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Don’t let the door hit you on the way out
 
More recently, former president Donald Trump tried a more ham-fisted version of the damnatio memoriae, denying knowledge of cabinet members, close confederates and so-called friends when it suited his purposes — or alternatively stating that they were useless, even if they were his direct hires.
 
Short-lived secretary of state Rex Tillerson was “dumb as a rock,” defence secretary “Mad Dog” Mattis “overrated,” former attorney general Bill Barr was a “gutless pig,” and national security adviser John Bolton “grossly incompetent and a liar.”
 
Sadly, I very much doubt we will forget Boris Johnson, no matter how much we may wish to. The consequences of his disastrous time as prime minister and the chaos caused by his actions as one of the prime movers behind Brexit will, like Nero’s ghost, continue to haunt Britain for many years to come.