Shortly after my review of Tom Bower’s biography of Jeremy Corbyn had been published, I bumped into a former aide to Tony Blair, who commiserated with me on the painful task of making one’s way through Bower’s uneven and error-marked prose. Still, they said, I should consider myself lucky: when Bower’s Blair book came out, they had to read it twice.
I have read The Gambler, Bower’s new biography of Boris Johnson just once, but as I turned the pages, I had an uneasy sense of having read it at least twice before. Johnson has already been the subject of two excellent biographies: the sympathetic and intimate Boris by Andrew Gimson and the critical and lucid Just Boris by Sonia Purnell. There is little that is genuinely new or of interest in Bower’s account that has not been uncovered by Purnell or Gimson. That might be bearable if the resulting book was a pleasure to read, but Bower is no stylist, and his attempts at dramatic flourishes result in moments of accidental farce. Johnson’s first bid to become president of the Oxford Union, Bower tells us, “coincided with Margaret Thatcher’s new government being threatened by Marxist trade unionists, especially the miners, in a febrile political atmosphere”, leading us to believe that perhaps Johnson’s political ambitions will be thwarted by the Balliol College branch of the National Union of Mineworkers, or failing that by some posh Trots. Neither is forthcoming.
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