As long as I have yet to read War and Peace, Middlemarch and the first volume of Chris Jericho’s memoirs, there’s no way I’m going to read Boris Johnson’s mammoth account of his time in politics. 

Life is short and Unleashed is long, coming in at 784 pages in length. You could give a man brain damage by dropping it on his head from a first floor window, and you could give a Critic online editor brain damage by forcing him to read it.

Still, as Johnson — whose talents as a self-promoter have never been in doubt — has been hawking his book, interesting revelations have come to light. He is “no longer sure” that lockdowns worked during the pandemic, for example. Well, I’m also a regretful lockdowns advocate, but it seems convenient to turn against them once you’re safely out of the political firing line.

Mr Johnson has always had a keen sense of where the wind is blowing. He supported the invasion of Iraq, mocking people who “prophesied thousands and thousands of deaths” and suggesting that it was a work of “creative destruction”. Once the thousands and thousands of deaths predictably arrived, he was moved to speculate that Tony Blair should be on trial for war crimes.

We’ve all made mistakes, of course, and changing one’s mind can be a very fine thing, but it does feel like Johnson changes his mind when it happens to suit him.

Once he had staggered through the doors on Number 10, Johnson’s premiership was a complete disaster

Sometimes, indeed, it feels like Mr Johnson can hold two wildly different opinions at once. Famously, before throwing his weight behind the Leave campaign, he wrote two articles — one pro-Leave and one pro-Remain. This could be a fine exercise in testing the merits of one’s arguments. But was he testing his arguments on himself as an epistemological exercise or testing his arguments on himself as one might try on different sets of clothes?

Once he had staggered through the doors on Number 10, Johnson’s premiership was a complete disaster. Lockdowns dragged on with at best diminishing returns. “Levelling Up” was a failure and a distraction. Energy infrastructure was neglected. Prisons filled up without new prisons being built. Immigration went through the roof — reaching historically unprecedented levels, largely as a result of non-EU migration.

This must have seemed very odd if you were someone who took Johnson’s words seriously. In 2016, he had insisted that leaving the EU meant taking back control of immigration. In 2019, his winning manifesto promised that “numbers will come down”. The opposite happened — and on an astonishing scale. 

Johnson claims that Britain needed “hands to do the work”. He also tries to shift responsibility onto the Migration Advisory Committee, by saying that they called for “a lot of people to help with social care”. Interestingly enough, in 2020, Brian Bell, chair of the Migration Advisory Committee, wrote to then Home Secretary Priti Patel arguing that “the right way to address the workforce issues in the sector” was “funding social care to a level that enables higher wages to be paid”.

But what was Johnson saying then? In 2021, as some on Twitter are recalling, he was on the television saying that “when the Roman Empire fell it was largely as a result of uncontrolled immigration”. “It can happen again,” Johnson declared.

Whatever your views on immigration, the sheer audacity takes the breath away. Talking — and, of course, in historically contentious terms — about uncontrolled immigration being a civilisational threat while raising immigration to historically unprecedented heights is so bizarre that I’m struggling to think of similes. (It’s like feeding fast food to your kids while lecturing them about the risks of heart failure? The comparison is a lot less shameless than the real thing.)

With the Conservatives unlikely to avoid a period of in-fighting and uncertainty, it would take a fool to count out the prospect of Johnson shambling back into the picture full of amiable jokes and undimmed optimism. His hero Winston Churchill had two terms after all. Boris will unite us, I can imagine people saying. He’s a vote-winner! He tells it like it is!

Well, I don’t disagree that Johnson has the personality to win more votes than a charisma vacuum like Rishi Sunak. His wit and charm are undeniable (or we wouldn’t be talking about him now). But he doesn’t tell it like it is. Sometimes, it doesn’t even look as if he tells it like he thinks it is. Moreover, there’s no point in being good at winning power if you turn out to be very, very bad at using it.