Agreeing to review Boris Johnson’s memoir Unleashed seemed like a good idea when I made the commitment. I enjoy the process of encapsulating big books in a few hundred words. And in the case of Johnson, my interactions with him while he was UK prime minister and I was Scottish first minister give me some personal insight in the task.
That was my thinking. But when I was confronted with the reality of reading the thing, it didn’t seem such a great wheeze after all. Seven hundred and thirty-plus pages of BoJo in his own words. What could be worse?
At risk of understatement, Johnson and I are not political soulmates. We don’t even like each other very much. Our personalities are poles apart. An unthinking hatchet job, then, steeped in all my prejudices about the man, was tempting. But it wouldn’t be right.
So, I settled down to read (after consoling myself that it was an act of public service – if I read it, you don’t have to) and vowed to review this book as fairly as I would any other. And the unexpected truth? While it is unlikely to make my favourite-books-of-the-year list, it’s not as bad as I thought it would be. It might be a reflection of my low expectations, but if the book surprises at all, it is on the positive side.
It is an easy read, clipping along at a snappy pace, never feeling heavy or quite as long as it is. The tone is breezy, journalistic. However, what makes the book readable – dare I say, enjoyable – also highlights what, in my experience of Johnson, is one of his biggest weaknesses. He doesn’t take anything entirely seriously – not even the issues he claims to be deeply serious about. There is nothing that he won’t make a crass joke about if it serves his narrative purpose.
Indeed, he writes in the same slightly stuttering, public-school boy style he speaks in, with many of his verbal ticks simply transferred on to the page. There are regular exclamations of “my friends” and endless rhetorical questions posed to the reader: “What? You don’t understand what I mean by levelling up?”
The language is performatively hyperbolic. Thanks to “Remoaners”, the UK was “turning ourselves into the punk of Brussels, the orange-ball-chomping gimp of the EU”. Playground name-calling is his stock-in-trade. Keir Starmer is a “pointless traffic cone”. Theresa May is “old grumpy knickers”. In one downright weird reference, he describes his fixation on May’s nostrils, “immensely long and pointy black tadpole shapes, like a Gerald Scarfe cartoon, and the way she would twist her nose, as if to show them off”. It is often the lot of women in politics to have our physical appearance uncharitably critiqued by men who want to bring us down to size, and Johnson is a master of the “art”. When he has a go at me over Covid, it is my supposedly pursed lips and furrowed brow that get the treatment. Perhaps he thinks I should have created more of a party atmosphere.
His insult of choice for those he disagrees with is “lefty”. I started to count his use of this particular soubriquet but gave up as it cantered towards double figures. It is a label May escapes. Instead, she is “liberal” and “woke” – facts that passed many of the rest of us by at the time.
Depending on your politics, you may agree or not with the description of Ken Livingstone as one of life’s “socialist tyrants” but I am not sure that an alleged bias against bikes because “he wanted people on buses and trains: collectivised systems where he was in control” is the strongest evidence for the proposition.
More positively, Johnson covers some issues of substance surprisingly well. On generational inequality, and the deep economic divide in the UK between London and the rest, he is compelling. He puts more meat on the bones of his “levelling up” agenda in the book than he ever did in Downing Street. He waxes lyrical about programmes for infrastructure, connectivity, skills – how to use the billions of the state to leverage the trillions of the private sector.
On climate change, he is up front about his conversion from climate denier to net zero evangelist. He now seems to be a true believer in the moral and economic case for tackling climate change head on, and he is right. Initially, however, it was a crude calculation of self-interest. He wanted to be on the right side of history: “I decided to take a Pascal’s wager – and believe in global warming”. At least he is honest about it.
Of course, it is widely assumed that he made a similar calculation on Brexit. Johnson is at pains to rebut this. “I must ask you to accept what my opponents have so often disputed,” he writes: “that my arguments… were not somehow manufactured out of narrow consideration of political advantage”.
If he was torn, he says, it was between his belief that the UK should leave the EU on the one hand and loyalty to his family and friends – who overwhelmingly wanted him to back Remain – on the other. He admits that on the evening he announced his decision to back Leave, he did write two versions of the same article, but maintains that it was simply to stress-test his arguments. Maybe I am being overly credulous – or just turning soft – but on this I found him passably persuasive.
While he has a point in his assessment of the Remain campaign and why it (we) lost – “they lacked enthusiasm… none of them had anything truly positive to say” – he is wrong in his assertion that it called itself Project Fear: that was the No campaign in the Scottish independence referendum.
The book is scattered with basic factual inaccuracies such as this. He gets the month of Dominic Cummings’ visit to Barnard Castle wrong. And he asserts that the Scottish government that controversially released the Lockerbie bomber in 2009 was Labour led. In fact, it was SNP.
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On Brexit, even if one accepts that his decision to back Leave was genuine, the over-riding take-away is Johnson’s shamelessness. Those who remember his scaremongering in the referendum about Turkish accession to the EU, might struggle to make sense of this: “I believe it was completely right that we became the biggest champions of the Turks in Europe.”
However, it is the complete lack of any sense of responsibility for the shambles that followed the Leave vote which, although true to form, takes the breath away. He rants about May’s inability to get a deal, without the merest acknowledgment that the failure of the Leave campaign ever to explain what Brexit meant in practice might have been the root problem. In fact, he doesn’t just shirk responsibility – he is incandescent at the very suggestion he might have borne any.
“Now what the hell were we supposed to do?” he thunders in response to David Cameron’s resignation. “We had no plan for government, no plan for negotiations, because it was not our job and in so far as the next few days were chaotic… it is utterly infuriating that we should be blamed.” It’s hard not to spit feathers.
The chapter on Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe – the British-Iranian woman who was imprisoned in Tehran on charges relating to national security – is deeply unedifying. He admits to the “blunder” of suggesting, in 2017, that she had been in Iran teaching journalism – potentially making the Iranian regime’s case – but then tries to wriggle off the hook. He implies that he was almost right, since teaching journalism was the business of her employer. He then blames his officials for not immediately jumping in to set the record straight. Rather than accept it was a slip that no foreign secretary should ever have made on a matter of such sensitivity and import, he shrugs his shoulders in an “accidents happen” kind of way, before going on to make himself the hero of her eventual release.
In fact, making himself the hero is a theme. In the chapter on the UK government’s response to the 2018 Salisbury poisonings – for which May deserves credit – he doesn’t even mention her. It was all him.
Where Johnson does deserve praise is in the UK’s support for Ukraine, and he writes powerfully and movingly about its battle for survival. As pressure potentially grows on Ukraine to strike a peace deal with Russia which rewards its aggression, voices like Johnson’s will be important – not something I’d say on other issues. Still, it is hard to square his stance on Ukraine with the support for Donald Trump that creeps into the text.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given how heavily the pandemic weighs on me, I read the Covid sections particularly closely. He chooses yet again to besmirch the success of the rapid roll-out of vaccines across the UK with the blatant lie that it was only possible because of Brexit. He heaps praise on Dr June Raine, head of the UK medicines regulator – rightly so – while omitting to mention that in 2020 she said: “We have been able to announce the supply of this vaccine using provisions under EU law which exists until 1 January.”
However, as I read his account of the almost unbearable burden of responsibility he felt for every Covid decision (so did I), or the devastation of having to “cancel” Christmas in 2020 (one of my own lowest points), I felt a sense of affinity with him. And then I remembered that this was rarely how he seemed at the time. In a section of the book about his early days as London mayor, he talks about feeling as though he was “skating over the intricacies of the job”. To be frank, that is how he always seemed to me, even during Covid.
Near the end, Johnson writes about the cognitive dissonance that often afflicts leaders so immersed in the job that they become blind to political trouble. There is a heavy sense of cognitive dissonance in much of this book. Maybe it is a feature of memoirs, but large chunks of this one feels like the version of Boris Johnson’s time in office he wishes were true. Or perhaps he genuinely believes it to be true.
He certainly displays something of a messiah complex. The boy who wanted to be World King was first attracted to the London mayoralty because “it was basically monarchical”. He is never wrong. His gaffes – which he freely admits – come about only because he insists on telling it as it is. His mistake in partygate was to apologise rather than defend himself more firmly. He is always the sinned against – by Rishi Sunak, Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings, who, we learn, committed the unforgiveable betrayal of briefing against Dilyn the dog – and never the sinner. His resignation came about not as a result of anything he did, but because everyone had it in for him.
Predictably, he thinks the Tories would have won this year’s election had he stayed at the helm. It is a sad reflection of the state of politics that he might be right. From the evidence in these pages, his return to politics can’t be ruled out. The only upside might be no more books. While this one wasn’t quite the ordeal I feared, I wouldn’t want to make a habit of reading Boris Johnson.
Unleashed
Boris Johnson
William Collins, 784pp, £30
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[See also: What Hillary Clinton knows]
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This article appears in the 16 Oct 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Make or Break