Boris Johnson's Unleashed reviews clown's memoir | Political books

WWritten after their authors had lost power, most prime ministers' memoirs attempt, at some level, to be reflective. David Camerons begins by admitting that he still has daily anxieties about having called the Brexit referendum. John Majors begins even more disarmingly, asking why he got into politics.

But Boris Johnson doesn't think. He never has and he never will. And neither does his new memoir, with the disturbing title, Unleashed. It covers his tenure as Mayor of London, Brexit campaigner, Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister. But if you're looking for confessions and examinations of the heart from the pen of Britain's most iconoclastic prime minister, you can stop now.

This is not the political memoir of the century as the Daily Mail has been touting for a week. Or, if so, 76 thankless years lie ahead for the publishing industry. Take this passage from the section describing how Johnson felt in April 2020 when he had to be transferred from Downing Street to St Thomas' Hospital suffering from Covid:

It wasn't just physical distress; it was the guilt, the political embarrassment of it all. I needed to be bee-oing-oing I came back to my feet like a rubber ball. I needed to be there, leading the country from the front, sorting PPE, repairing nursing homes, leading the quest for a cure.

There are many things worth analyzing. And a lot of things that are characteristic of Johnson's writing more generally. There is the image of the rubber ball and the exuberant vocabulary. But there is also outright dishonesty and lies. In reality, Johnson was a chronically indecisive prime minister, and certainly not one to lead from the front. The PPE was not sorted at all either, nor the nursing homes repaired. His solipsistic admission that he thought going to the hospital was an embarrassing look for a leader shows where his instinctive priorities lay.

Then there are the political omissions. Johnson records Professor Chris Whitty, England's chief medical officer, rightly warning at the start of the pandemic that the public would expect the Government to act, make rules and enforce them. Yet listen to the Covid inquiry, and the evidence of what was really going on at the heart of the Johnson government in 2020 is breathtaking. I have never seen a group of people less well equipped to lead a country, Cabinet Secretary Simon Case said in a WhatsApp message.

Johnson's book gives his version of the major episodes. But this evades the larger issues they raise. The description of what he calls the whole Partygate hoo-ha is typical. It's full of angry self-righteousness. But his conclusion that he shouldn't have apologized so much for Partygate is surprisingly sparkling. Although Johnson likes to display the trappings of his intellect, there is not a philosophical sentence in the entire book.

Yes, he often dresses his memoirs in fun, image-rich, alliterative language. Donald Trump is like an orange-colored blimp carried exuberantly by the inexhaustible Primus stove of his own ego, for example. Kate Bingham made Covid vaccine deals like a slightly drunk billionaire at the Grand National. Oliver Letwin is the Branestawm Professor of British politics.

And yes, he regularly uses a cascade of words when one would suffice. I wanted to create ladders, springboards, trampolines, catapults, anything that could help children with energy and talent, he writes about his upgrade policy.

The freewheeling nature of the memoir is entertaining but becomes irritating due to its lack of structure. You'll search long and hard to find another political memoirist who could think, after Cameron threatened to screw you forever if Johnson chooses to backtrack on the Brexit campaign: did I want to be screwed ? Forever? By a prime minister equipped with every damn tool a modern government has, and by thousands of assholes just waiting to do his bidding?

It's important to remember, though, that this has always been Johnson's way. He uses his wit, looks, and personality to distract from serious issues and advance his own cause. His language is a form of collusion with his audience to distance himself from the difficult task of governing. As Ed Docx observed in 2021 in these pages, Johnson has perfected the role of the Clown King, whose speech is not actually eloquent, but rather the caricature of eloquence. It’s the same thing with this memoir.

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This is not to say that some of his anecdotes are striking. Johnson really appears to have seriously considered a ridiculous armed raid on the Netherlands in order to bring millions of doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine to Britain. He almost drowned while on holiday in Scotland in the summer of 2020 because he was determined to sit out at sea in an inflatable kayak to avoid the Highland midges. And he's about to suggest that Benjamin Netanyahu personally installed a listening device in his department's private bathroom when Johnson was foreign minister.

Every once in a while there is a well of self-knowledge delivered almost casually. I am afraid, looking back, that I let the desire to be a father express itself in this thought, he writes. He's talking about Northern Ireland politics at this point, but the idea applies to many other aspects of Johnson's career, including Brexit, his progress and his ability to govern. This probably also describes his chances of returning to power.

Perhaps this overrated book is the only memoir Johnson is capable of. It's not going to change. Anyone who wants to know more about his time at the top will get better insight from a few pages of Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newells Johnson at 10 than from more than 700 pages of Unleasheds. Freed to do what? We never learn and even he might not really know it either.