Boris Johnson's memoir, Unleashed, has been reviewed on Kapow! Kaboom!

For someone who has read numerous car accident interview transcripts with Johnson, the book has an immediately familiar feel. He does his usual thing, beating up his opponents in his usual bombastic manner, which many people enjoy. Yes, that Johnson brand shtick wears very thin and very quickly, but we've had a welcome few years of it. As such, it is at many points genuinely funny. Childish fun, of course, but childish humor has its place.

Some of his jokes land. The election slogan of Dominic Grieve, a Conservative backbencher, is expected to be “Mourning for Beaconsfield”. He describes chief whip Mark Spencer, a Nottinghamshire farmer with huge hands strangling pheasants, just after removing the whip from 21 Tory MPs, as looking pale, even for a man accustomed to slaughterhouse scenes.

It is no surprise that it was Johnson's choice to publish in the first serialization of the book the alleged plot to invade the Netherlands to recover the blocked Covid vaccines. This should never have happened, but it nevertheless remains superficially plausibly true, which is more than enough for him. It is well known that Johnson made his name as the Daily Telegraph's Brussels correspondent with stories of spectacular exaggerations, such as the ban on folded bananas and plans to blow up various EU buildings that , decades later, are still standing. The story of the Dutch invasion reveals nothing about what was happening in government at a time of high tension, but it does reveal a lot about the prime minister of the day, who remained unchanged.

What you don't get Unchained is any sort of bowling change. Topics that might require introspection are avoided. Anyone who knows Johnson personally knows how well-formed he is, colored by an unusual and quite difficult childhood. The whole subject of his early years is avoided.

The story of Michael Goves' betrayal in the 2016 leadership election is being told, but only with a fresh layer of bile and bitterness, and without any of the soul-searching that might be possible in eight years' time. This is of course true of Johnson, but the first and most essential quality of the writer is the courage to lay bare his own soul. There's none of that here, just the usual stylized and chaotic fight to hide it.

He claims elsewhere in the book that Queen Elizabeth II praised him for his general lack of bitterness. It is remarkable that His Majesty was able to rise even higher in the esteem of nations, even beyond the grave. Who would have thought him capable of such deadly dry humor?

Johnson's worst detractors are incapable of even recognizing his great intelligence. He knows several languages, including ancient Greek. His love of the classics is very real. Privately, he is more than capable of applying the same intellectual analysis to himself as to the writings of Aeschylus or the speeches of Pericles. And yet, in public, to the extent that this book is a public document, the tone is set by the epigram of the book Hasta la vista, baby of Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

The cartoon Boris mask can never really slip for a second. No idea or event is ever elucidated without a Kapow! of a suddenly emerging kind. For example, the vaccine task forces' bets are paying off, so it's kerchingeroo! The book is very readable because it is very generously seasoned with juvenile gags, some of more than acceptable quality. But it doesn't read like the work of a man worthy of a $500,000 fee for a Shakespeare biography, which may partly explain why this book is still eight years overdue and counting.

Yet he writes with energy and originality: he describes how, during confinement, his team at No 10 micromanaged human behavior. How many people should be allowed to attend a funeral? Did a Scotch egg served in a pub count as a meal? Pig scratches? His government, he writes, against all my previous instincts, has enacted these strange restrictions on human contact, like something out of Leviticus, adding that we have self-napalmed our own economy like a suicidal Buddhist monk.

There is a small element of contrition, particularly in his brief forays into the world of climate change denial in the early 2000s, seduced, as he was, by a weather expert he had discovered called Piers Corbyn. He admits he was wrong about all that, back when it was still early enough to do something. But it's an entirely strategic mea culpa, done purely to create the space to argue that he's absolutely right about it now, and that Rishi Sunak and others have betrayed him by mocking net zero and by returning to the environmental commitments I had made. do.

There's a whole subsection devoted to how to win at Prime Minister's Questions, something I don't remember ever seeing him do. He rarely looked less than magnificent at the Conservative Party convention. He was not in the House of Commons.

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This is a book filled with many unintentional revelations. Johnson writes with moving affection for Queen Elizabeth II, who, he says, seemed to know things even before I was informed of them. He cites the example of an expensive RAF fighter jet that was destroyed because someone left a plastic tray over the air intake. It's doubly embarrassing to hear this from the Queen, he wrote. Yes, and it is triply embarrassing to then write it in an autobiography, and thus reveal the long-suspected fact that perhaps she simply read his briefings and the Prime Minister of the day did not do.

It also confirms what has already been widely reported, that the Queen was suffering from bone cancer at the time of her death. But it was also widely reported that she wanted this information concealed on her death certificate (on which the old age was listed instead). So she may not have appreciated the prospect of its inclusion in her autobiography.

The fact that Johnson's world suddenly fell apart is well known, but how it happened is not yet fully known. Those hoping to learn more about how, say, Carrie Symonds arrived on the scene (and how Marina Wheeler left) will be disappointed. The Downing Street internecine wars between Symonds and Dominic Cummings played a significant role in shaping the national response to a deadly pandemic. Johnson could have made an important contribution to explaining these disputes in Whitehall, but he chose not to do so.

You never know, with Boris Johnson, which Boris Johnson will run. His first speech to the party conference as prime minister, for example, was significantly below par. His next one, after the pandemic, was a real bolt from the blue. From the outside, it has never been easy to understand why on some occasions Boris shows up on the phone and on others he is all-conquering. Why does he sometimes deliver a speech armed only with a Peppa Pig anecdote? He describes this notorious incident, in this case, at a CBI breakfast. I looked at my text and found that the pages were hopelessly jumbled. I looked up and tried to improvise. I have been a corpse, and a corpse.

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The question of whether Unchained is itself a typical Johnson phone-in effort that is rather more nuanced. He's not lazy. His biographer Andrew Gimson is a fan of the term lazy workaholic. But Unchained It seems to be a work that failed to maintain the interest of its author. Johnson was probably never happier than when he was an MP, Mayor of London and editor of the Spectator. There was always something more interesting to move on to. What shines through UnchainedWhat is above all is that the future King of the World believes that there should be more subjects, more years of mandate to ruminate on. That the autobiography stage should have come later.

Unchained by Boris Johnson (William Collins 30 pp772). To order a copy, go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK Standard P&P on orders over 25. Special discount available for Times+ members