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.
Content from our partners
