Unchained by the regrets of the Boris Johnson review? Not even a few | Autobiography and memoir

SSpare a thought for the factcheckers from the publisher HarperCollins. For an ordinary political memoir, these guardians of textual accuracy could, imagine, raise a question perhaps half a dozen times in each chapter. In the more than 750 pages of Boris Johnson UnchainedHowever, I suspect they were probably working at a rate of close to one red ink alarm bell per sentence. No sentence Johnson writes in this book is entirely free of hyperbole or self-serving spin. It was hoped that editors were paid according to the marginal note and had access to physiotherapy for RSI.

Just take the book's headlines (for which Johnson can expect to earn €3 million), those stories broadcast earlier this week across the world. Daily Mail. The claim, for example, that the former prime minister had to be stopped from letting British special forces invade the Netherlands in order to secure a batch of Covid vaccines seized by the EU; or that after a game of tennis with David Cameron at Checkers, the then Prime Minister vowed to screw him over forever if he supported the Leave campaign; or that Emmanuel Macron told him that Britain deserved to be punished for Brexit; or that the queen's last words, two days before her death, were an expression of approval for her carelessness as to the manner of her defenestration.

All of these claims, like almost everything else in this book, are not accompanied by any documented footnotes. You quickly realize that everyone is demanding what has always been the most absurd of Johnson's demands: that you take him at his word.

There are many illustrative examples where the truth of controversial boasts has been established a thousand times over. Exhibit A could be Johnson's perpetual assertion that without Brexit there would have been no accelerated vaccine rollout during the pandemic. Even though it has been repeatedly shown that the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines would never have required EU approval (due to regulations that had been in place since 2012), Johnson never tires of repeating fiction. He adds a decisive element here. It didn't take long, he claims, before graffiti appeared on the wall in Portobello Road, west London. Brexit saves lives, he says.

It's been exactly a decade since Johnson's book The Churchill Factorin which he attempted to align his then-nascent political ambitions with those of the great war leader. This book argued that Churchill and, by hopeful extension, Johnson offered a resounding humane rebuttal to all Marxist historians who believe that history is the story of vast, impersonal economic forces, one man can make all the difference .

The years that followed, as this volume shows, have proven Johnson both right and wrong in this assertion, to all our cost. It has undoubtedly made a difference; Public life has undoubtedly become more fractured, venal and superficial because of the leading role he plays in it. But his tenure also revealed one of Marx's most trenchant observations that history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce. Once again here, Johnson reveals himself, in his desperate pastiche of his hero player instinct, incapable of any register other than snark. You will find no convincing note of solemnity or compassion in this book, for where is the sneer of Bunterish in this?

The major irony is that fate presented Johnson with every circumstance in which he could have proven his courage as a leader: the great struggle to normalize relations with the EU and the existential crisis of the pandemic. In his reflections on both he appears hopelessly deficient. Looking back on his childhood resolve to get Brexit done, he notes that his efforts to curry favor with President Macron involved not negotiating the fine print of an effective trade or cross-border security deal, but suggesting a Hydrogen-powered Concorde and a bridge. across the Channel.

Meanwhile, Covid saw him dwelling not on the strained infrastructure of public health but, inevitably, on his knowledge of the classics: Pericles died of the plague, I had reminded my old man earlier friend Michael Gove, he remembers, and his glasses seemed to shine at the thought, like the penguin in Wallace and Gromit. His own time in intensive care, which put his life in danger, briefly led him to ask himself dark questions. [if] it was a kind of cosmic judgment on me, on my entire worldview. This doubt does not survive his return to health. Rather than, say, attending Cobra meetings, his main feeling remains that I needed to get back on my feet like an Indian rubber ball fixing nursing homes, leading the quest for a cure.

Of course, Johnson is not a man made to regret. He reiterates the far-fetched belief that he would have won the 2024 elections if he had not been removed from office by his colleagues who were victims of a collective steam attack. And he returns, inevitably, to his big idea of ​​upgrading formed partly at Eton when confronted with the surprising fact that hereditary toffs were not necessarily the sharpest knives in the drawer.

Countering this much-vaunted commitment to social mobility is, of course, the many occasions on which he has proven himself to be the most enthusiastic promoter of cronyism. This, for example, is how he describes the appointment of Kate Bingham, whom I had known since I was 18, to head the vaccine task force. She was part of a group of bright and energetic Paulinas (former pupils of St Pauls Girls School) who roamed Oxford in the mid-1980s, terrorizing and breaking the hearts of their male counterparts. She had married an old school friend of mine, Jesse Norman, and she had also gone to school with my sister, the omnipresent Rachel. It was precisely because I knew her that I knew she was extremely qualified for the position. There is less to say about Dido Harding, also the friend and wife of a Conservative MP, who was given responsibility for spending $37 billion on Moonshot's totally ineffective test and trace (much of it, it seems) he, because Johnson saw the potential in a schoolboy). jokes in the classic allusion to her Christian name).

Sometimes he stumbles upon the truth. At one point he mentions an article written 20 years ago, which predicted that the Tories would never recover until Boris Johnson left the scene. One need only take a look at the current quartet of Conservative leadership candidates to see that his legacy, the weakening of the principles and character of the party he led, is alive and well. And in this sense, we read this book with the growing nausea that its author still, despite everything, inevitably envisages a heroic sequel.