For those wondering whether Boris Johnson’s memoir was going to begin with a factual error or a feeble gag, the answer turns out to be: both. The offending passage reads: “They say the hour is darkest before dawn.” (They may say it, but it isn’t true.) “Well, my watch said dawn was hours ago and it was still dark. What the hell was wrong? Oh yes. I was in New York.”
Johnson’s writing, from his 2004 novel Seventy-Two Virgins and his newspaper columns to his books on Rome and Winston Churchill, has always offered a window into his soul – if I didn’t generally avoid the expression “such as it is”, I would use it here – and at almost 730 pages, Unleashed offers the most extended encounter with his exotic interior landscape so far. The memoir is a rich and revealing exhibition of his tricks and gimmicks, slips and slipperiness, attempted analogies and botched reference points. He has always lived by the laws of internal coherence, not correspondence to external realities, and so reading the book offers a chance to understand how, for Johnson, it somehow all joins up. As he writes of his mishap on the zip wire in 2012, “There was no disguising the truth” – or, perhaps more accurately, no concealing the fantasies.
There’s an intriguing moment early in the book when Thomas Gray’s poem “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” is introduced as one of the inspirations for the belief in “levelling up” that, Johnson assures us, drives everything he does. He offers by way of support the famous 14th stanza:
Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flow’r is born to blush unseen
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
“So says Thomas Gray,” Johnson adds, “and I am with him.” It’s certainly the case that Gray says that the majority of people, in Johnson’s paraphrase, “could have been contenders.” But was he actually claiming they should have been? According to the poet and critic William Empson, Gray recognised the lack of, for example, a scholarship system in 18th-century England, but his use of natural imagery revealed his allegiance with the bourgeois belief in the inevitability of social injustice: “A gem does not mind being in a cave and a flower prefers not to be picked; we feel that man is like the flower, as short-lived, natural, and valuable, and this tricks us into feeling that he is better off without opportunities.” (A Christian poet and reader, he also pointed out, might well prefer a “blush” to be unseen.) One might reply that Johnson is entitled to his reading. As Empson says, two people “may get very different experiences from the same work of art without either being definitely wrong”. But it seems fitting that Johnson hit on the belief that he wanted to help the poor and unfortunate by misreading a conservative poem – at any rate a poem whose best-known interpreter (no communist) believed to be saying that “for the poor man things cannot be improved even in degree”.
Of course, there are plenty of matters on which Johnson is, in Empson’s phrase, definitely wrong. In a not unfamiliar move, he is seeking to fight disinformation using a book that is itself full of nonsense and half-truths. For example, the post-Brexit aspiration to do things “differently” and “faster” than our competitors was not the same as the image of a “Singapore-on-Thames”, so it was possible for Johnson’s “enemies” to disdain the second without rejecting the first. Was a missing Boris bike really found at base camp on Everest? Were the papers really “full of” stories of “Millennium Bug-style computer disasters”? Did Remainers “proudly” label their campaign – or parts of it –“Project Fear” (by most accounts this was Johnson himself)?
Other errors are more straightforward. The Ghent Altarpiece, the Van Eyck brothers’ Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, is not Jan van Eyck’s Adoration of the Blessed Lamb. The Chandos portrait of Shakespeare is not displayed at 10 Downing Street. It wasn’t only Johnson, along with David Cameron and George Osborne, who rebelled against Iain Duncan Smith on the matter of gay adoption; eight MPs did so, though in reality – that galaxy far, far away – Johnson and the other two were among the 35 who abstained (some due to absence). Cameron never lived on Oxford Gardens. The Rolling Stones played Hyde Park in 1969, not 1968. There were 52 people killed in the attacks of 7 July 2005 (excluding the assailants), not 36 – an especially sad and weird error in a book that devotes 120 pages to what a stupendous mayor of London he became just three years later. And though Johnson may have memorised Gray’s elegy at prep school, he no longer remembers the opening line (day is “parting”, not passing).
Occasionally Johnson contrives to misfire with every detail of a digression or anecdote, as if on a matter of principle. Edward Gibbon recalled having the idea of writing a history of Rome, not “a book on the decline and fall of the Roman Empire”, in 1764 not “back in 1776”, while sitting in the ruins of the Capitol, not the Forum, and quoted the elegiac words of the 15th-century, not 16th-century, Italian scholar Poggio Bracciolini. As with the material on Thomas Gray, it’s telling that Johnson should alight on the “Capitoline vision” – a story most later historians dismiss as a confection. (In a proto-Johnsonian flourish, Gibbon erroneously claimed to have noted the date in his journal.)
Reflection on these errors – at, say, proof stage or while working on the second draft of a book with a retail price of £30 – might have prompted Johnson to realise that the mind, or the brain, can play tricks on you, that you can be utterly convinced you are right about something and still be provably wrong. If Unleashed has a message, however “unconscious”, it is that you are more likely to be definitely wrong if you are convinced you are right. The book is full of the words “right” and “wrong”, but almost never in the moral sense, almost always in the sense of “sane” or “barmy”, “reasonable” or “hysterical”, with a heavy helping of I-told-you-so, vindication for him, comeuppance for others. A young MP who tells Johnson that a Rishi Sunak premiership would help retain his seat “was vaporised, of course” in July 2024. The message of the 2011 London riots was disproved – overwritten – by the success of the Olympics the subsequent summer.
Johnson is not entirely unaccountable – the book is on the whole a bit less daft than one might fear or hope – but for the most part, when he admits an error or failing or failure, or writes the previously unimaginable words “I was wrong”, you wait to understand why – what use the concession will serve. He raises the idea that he might be, or have been, “mad” when the scheme in question – calling a snap general election in 2019, for example – happens to pay off, ie when the outcome (a landslide Tory majority) showed the decision was not mad. (He does not, however, explain away the “deranged” act of confiscating an ITV reporter’s phone and putting it in his coat pocket during a difficult interview, or why when he apologised, he did so “a bit tetchily”.) He only mentions that he was “thrashed” when standing in Clwyd South in 1997 as a prelude to revealing that the Tories won the seat in the election he seemed or felt to be calling. He was wrong about Ken Livingstone’s character but only in the sense that he missed his “dark side”. His early months as mayor “were, I am afraid, as shambolic as my enemies had predicted” – but the rest was shimmering, as they said it never could be. He messed up Brexit because he generously believed that the EU would be “reasonable” (this after more than 25 years of going on about the organisation’s inherent irrationality). He seems to confess wrongness in a passage on – of all lost causes – Dominic Cummings’s potentially myopic drive to Barnard Castle, though not for defending the adviser – the Durham Constabulary made no arrest, “confirming my view of what had happened” – but for thinking that his defence would be sufficient to settle the matter.
Describing the 2019 election, Johnson recalls two worries. One concerned “my own abilities”, the other his roll-call of enemies. No prizes for guessing which of these he mentions again to round off the chapter: “The sharks were out there beneath the waves – far more numerous than I ever imagined.” Johnson’s portrait of causality is hereabouts a little hard to follow. When introducing his enemies, he acknowledges that as both journalist and politician he had been “far from cautious about what I said or did”. Is someone who dislikes you because you’ve slagged them off a victim of incaution or an unconscionable predator? There’s a similar slippage in his presentation of the de-whipping of the 21 Brexit rebels. Johnson recalls the list with “stone-cold disbelief”. But it’s unclear whether Philip Hammond’s 45-year membership of the party or Nicholas Soames being the grandson of a politician who almost never defied the whip makes it worse that they rebelled or that he is kicking them out. “Was I really going to do this to my political allies, my friends?” He writes that he was being “asked to” do it, but also reports himself saying that we “gotta do it”. Then having done it, with an apparently heavy heart, he says that reaction “bordered on the hysterical” and later includes this in a very short list of “things that drove them nuts in SW1”.
He is willing to admit to more innocent shortcomings. At the Spectator he struggled to fire people. At school he was rubbish at football (though not bad at rugby, we know, when faced with the right competition). But his only genuine source of regret is not being more himself, more intensely doing his own thing – not going “faster” when cutting the Whitehall headcount, or when it came to partygate, not being “more robust”. He would have survived all that much better if he had just been more self-reliant, less “naive” and “trusting”.
It’s in this connection that he talks about suffering “cognitive dissonance” – a concept that might have appeared in almost every sentence of the book. As he explains, he simply didn’t believe that the Tories “would not be so foolish as to get rid of me”. He was wrong, in other words, to presume that his MPs would judge him at his worth. And by allowing the chief whip to let through the motion to refer the matter to the Privileges Committee, he made the “elementary mistake” of trusting his fate to “people who might turn out to be my enemies”. He seems to regret not telling his entire staff about the importance of not simply obeying the rules but seeming to obey them, presumably with an accompanying explanation of how you can do the former without the latter. Was this an oversight? If so, it was an extremely forgivable one: “I assumed it was understood.” So in a way, he had been right, and not wrong, to refrain from sending such a message.
Looking back at the words of his final speech as prime minister, in a bit of mind-frying circular logic, he finds that “you know what, I fervently agree with them”. Can someone possessed of a limited capacity for changing their mind, and a nearly non-existent capacity for self-censure, be said to “agree” with their two-year-ago self? Elsewhere, he says of a speech, “Frankly, I felt it caught the mood of the moment,” and, of Jeremy Corbyn, “I have to say that he looked pretty damn ridiculous” (despite the fact that he does not, in fact, have to say). Johnson even contends that he and his colleagues were not merely proud of what they had achieved but “right to be”, though perhaps it’s no surprise to discover that Johnson’s world is one in which the person best-equipped to mark his homework is himself.
Johnson uses “wrong” again in a marvellously bad passage about the hearing in which he referred to Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, the Iranian-British dual citizen, as having been “simply teaching people journalism” – more or less the charge on which she was being detained. He expands his apology by noting two ways in which his statement was “true” – it merely sounded “seditious to the Iranian ear”. So in what sense was he wrong? Wrong to tell the truth? But then he says that Zaghari-Ratcliffe was “merely” on holiday, inviting the question of why he has just insisted that her employer, Thomson Reuters – which Johnson struggles to spell consistently – and her former employer, the BBC World Service Trust, “certainly have a role in educating journalists”. Is this simply to clarify why he would have been right if he had been right? He concludes by noting that neither the experienced Foreign Office officials beside him nor the members of the select committee he was addressing “noticed anything awry”. So again – in what sense was he “wrong”?
It’s amusing to read the claim that banks used terms like credit default swaps and collateralised debt obligations to “conceal the reality of what they were doing” when of course these were just technical descriptions (with the key term present), whereas Johnson himself, in describing his own actions, is pathologically unable to call a spade a spade. Take his account of the oven-ready Brexit deal. He acknowledges that the new relationship with the EU had not been negotiated (though only because Theresa May had agreed to the withdrawal occurring first). But the shape of the deal was “obvious”. As he glosses his own gloss, in a moment of almost visionary silliness: “What was absolutely ready to bang in the oven was our plan to leave the EU.” That’s not a dish! That’s a recipe – and one over which other cooks (from other countries, with greater gastronomic nous) had considerable influence. And however loose you try to be with your analogies, you can’t put one of those in an oven. A credit default swap is a contract in which one party insures another against a borrower’s failure to honour their debt. But a one-sided “plan”, devised by a party with little bargaining power, is not a bilateral agreement.
When Johnson writes, “I usually sleep soundly – the sleep of the just,” he is fusing his two senses of right. He admits – or notes that he has previously admitted – that his hero is the mayor in Jaws, a not “particularly attractive character” who is “proved spectacularly wrong” but was “reasonable – on the basis of the data he first received – to think that things would sort themselves out”. Johnson wants to be wrong in the right ways – wrong for believing in precedent, and hoping for the best – or in the service of the right causes. As he puts it, his approach to cake is “pro having it and pro eating it” – as if the author of the original proverb was not a nimble logician but just a stick-in-the-mud.
Even the book’s title is “wrong”. The whole point of Unleashed is that Johnson was almost always leashed. Only when serving as mayor of London, a role whose “monarchical” character he openly admires, was he able to act as he saw fit. Here he could embody and, in the process, effectively institute his libertarian philosophy without being hamstrung by the poor strategy of his colleagues, superiors and predecessors or the archaic and arcane machinery of government – or before then, the whims of newspapers editors and magazine proprietors, who want him to tell the truth to readers about the European Union, or to confide in them about his extra-marital, intra-office sexual adventures and whether he intends to run for parliament.
Of course, the title adjective applies in a narrower – almost meta-literary – connection, as a description not of the subject matter, the story told, but of the narrative and authorial approach, offering as it does what the jacket copy calls an “unvarnished” account – “what really happened”, to quote an index entry on partygate – of 15 years of tutelage and straitjacketing. Johnson is able to hold forth here without the intervention of reporters, or a ghostwriter, or a fact-checker, and so, as in very few other scenarios, is able to say with pride, a full sense of rightness, that “any mistakes are of course my own” – though getting him to acknowledge them would be an entirely different matter.
[See also: The battle after Brexit]
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