This article is taken from the November 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

---

“I beg readers to forgive the tone of what follows,” Boris Johnson writes on page 708 of his autobiography, “since it falls firmly into the category of blowing your own trumpet.” It is a little late in the book for such becoming modesty. Over the course of the previous 58 chapters, he has blown his own trumpet so thoroughly that it is astonishing his lips, and indeed the instrument, can take any more. 

Unleashed is a 731-page paean to the brilliance of the author, who turns out to have been right pretty much all the time about everything. Well, not everything. Even Johnson is forced to admit, humbly, that there were occasions where he was sadly let down by the people around him. But even then, we learn, he had private doubts about what he was being told. If only, the reader is left to conclude, Johnson had just had the courage to Be More Boris! 

Johnson needs no introduction. Which is a good thing, because a feature of Unleashed is its assumption that the reader is familiar not only with the events of the past decade — fair enough — but also with the details of Westminster life (do you know who “the ubiquitous Andy Parsons” is?) and the Johnson family tree. Who is “Ivo”, a “passionate Remainer”, who urges Johnson not to back Brexit? (His brother-in-law.)

Of course, it’s easy for an author to lose track of what they haven’t explained. This is where editors come in. Unfortunately there is no evidence that Unleashed had an editor. Perhaps it did, and they simply loathed the author. Exposure to too much of this kind of prose might well have that effect.

It’s not that Johnson can’t write. He has long been one of Britain’s best-paid journalists and his paragraphs slide down easily, even if his habit of reminding us of his every past witticism soon grates. A passage on the experience of trying to overtake a London bendy bus reveals why newspaper editors so rated him. But much of the time he simply can’t be bothered. The book’s very first sentence — “They say the hour is darkest before dawn” — tells you what you can expect, in that it’s both clichéd and wrong.

Two paragraphs later, still on the first page, we come to the book’s other stand-out feature. “I had come to New York with my wife-to-be,” he writes, of a trip in September 2019. Experts on the Johnson life story as we’re all assumed to be, we know this is Carrie. 

This strange verbal construction is there to conceal an awkward reality, that Johnson at this point had a wife-who-actually-was, who was recovering from cancer. It will be a hundred pages before he mentions “Marina and the children”. A hundred pages after that, we hear again of Marina, “who was my wife in 2016”. 

That is, at least, correct. Earnest bloggers are doubtless poring over the book as you read this, compiling all the errors of fact. It would be quicker to list the pages that are truthful. The contents pages are bang on, and the index is pretty good. As for what’s in between, this must be in competition for the most inaccurate work of non-fiction since … well, since Johnson’s last book claimed that the Germans had succeeded in capturing Stalingrad.

Not even Johnson can keep up. In the book, he angrily defends his dog Dilyn against suggestions he may have been less than the ideal pet. In interviews promoting the book, he’s complained that Dilyn ruined all the carpets and left the Downing Street flat looking like “a crack den”. 

The errors fall into three broad categories. Some mistakes are probably slapdash: Labour was not in power in Scotland in 2009, but someone uninterested in politics might not know that. There are the straight untruths: Ken Livingstone didn’t oppose London’s cycle hire scheme, he laid the groundwork for it. And there are the omissions. These are not simply to do with Johnson’s personal life (we never do learn how Marina departed the stage and Carrie arrived), but also central political moments.

 

After several pages denouncing Theresa May’s Brexit deal as utterly unacceptable, it quite slips Johnson’s mind to say that he voted for it. The parties? They didn’t happen, or he didn’t go, or he did go, but they weren’t parties, and anyway every office has parties, and no one thought they were doing anything wrong. 

The false narrative becomes overwhelming. Is anything in the book true? Whilst Johnson claims to have voted to allow gay couples to adopt, the record suggests the opposite. Perhaps he did have an editor, and they realised that if you removed all the untruths, there would be no book left. Or maybe Johnson really believes he voted the other way? But mental corrections of reality like this mean he never has to explain why he wishes he had done things differently.

The book’s structure, diving between his time as PM and early incidents in his life, is engaging, but it assists in his evasions. Difficult moments simply aren’t mentioned. His sacking from the Tory front bench for lying about an affair? You imagined it.

It’s not simply factual honesty Johnson avoids. There is no emotional honesty either. How did he feel about nearly dying of Covid? About losing his mother? About losing friends over Brexit? About the collapse of his government? This is a memoir that devotes a chapter to some forgotten prime ministerial jolly to India and a sentence to 62 of his ministers resigning.

In the end, the book is only unintentionally revealing. We learn chiefly that Johnson is an amazing hater. Several paragraphs are devoted to a banker who asked him a slightly hostile question in 2008, delighting in the fact that the man later lost his job and concluding: “I expect he is out there somewhere, like the rest of us, giving motivational speeches.” These are Alan Partridge levels of grudge-bearing.

To those of us who feared he was oblivious to how the world regards him, it is enormously comforting to learn that Johnson remembers every insult and imagined slight, down to Huw Edwards looking insufficiently happy at the 2019 election result. For all the outward bonhomie, the impression we’re left with is a man who believes everyone is against him. Which, by the end, they were.

The other side of that coin is a neediness that comes through in every chapter, nowhere more so than the acknowledgements, where he lists every Tory MP who didn’t call for him to resign. It may be the most pathetic page ever printed in a political memoir.

The index meanwhile is a work of comic genius. The first entry under “Conservative Party” is “BJ’s enemies in”. They get as many pages as the mother of four of his children. Saddam Hussein gets slightly fewer. 

The end of the book is a tour of Borisland, the paradise-on-earth he claims was builded here. Everything is so wonderful — the fire burning, wine mulling on the stove, kids collecting pennies for the guy — that you do start to wonder why he was ejected. In this context, Sir Graham (now Lord) Brady’s memoir Kingmaker is like a bucket of cold water. 

Brady, who chaired the 1922 committee of Conservative MPs throughout the party’s time in office, isn’t the prose stylist Johnson is, but if you want to know why the Tories rejected The Greatest Prime Minister Who Ever Lived, his book is much more useful. As he explains, they got tired of the endless lies.

“He vomited forth a torrent of words,” Brady writes of one meeting with Johnson. “One of his favourite tactics is talking rapidly whilst not leaving space for anyone to interject.” There’s a line they should consider putting on the cover of Unleashed. The pen portraits of other prime ministers are similarly waspish.

The book provides an invaluable service to history, in that it records how many letters calling for a confidence vote in the prime minister Brady had in his safe at various crucial moments. As one of the journalists who regularly had to explain to editors that no one else actually knew this, I took great satisfaction from learning how wrong some of my colleagues had been.

The book also reminds us how important personal relationships are in politics. Brady felt sneered at by David Cameron and hasn’t forgotten it. This is perhaps why, towards the end of the book, the ambitious Robert Jenrick goes out of his way to help Brady with a constituency issue. 

It’s not clear that Jenrick’s opponent in the leadership contest thinks that way. Kemi Badenoch is the subject of Blue Ambition, a rapid-reaction biography by Britain’s most prolific political author, Lord Ashcroft. He (or his researcher Miles Goslett) has done the work of nailing down the facts about the woman who might soon lead the Tories.

“She had very strong views,” someone says, describing … let’s face it, it could be pretty much any point in her life. As, indeed, could this line: “She was prone to turning up late, complaining and picking fights.” Perhaps she has become more punctual over the years.

Whether Badenoch becomes leader of the opposition or leader of the opposition to the leader of the opposition, Ashcroft’s book will be valuable to journalists. Brady’s will be invaluable to political scientists trying to understand the turmoil of the last decade. And Johnson’s book will outsell them both, but really will be enjoyed only by fans of trumpet solos. ●