Good King Boris tells the story of his fall and clearly hopes for a return

Unchained by Boris Johnson

Boris Johnson presents himself in these memoirs as a deposed monarch. On page 77 he describes how he came to become Mayor of London:

“I liked the sound of the work. It was fundamentally monarchical. You didn't have to worry about Cabinet mutinies or backbench unrest. There was no need to understand the difference between the second and third reading of a bill. You had your powers and your budgets, and you got things done.

Here we find the seeds of Johnson's downfall. Parliament is a tedious institution. He does not want to understand the difference between the second and third reading of a bill.

On page 680, his backbenchers attack him, and Johnson is left to reflect:

“Looking back, I am absolutely sure that with enough love and care, I could have repaired relations with the party in Parliament.

“But I was just complacent. I bitterly regret it. I used to be mayor, with supreme monarchical power and no worries of backbenchers. I also thought they wouldn't be stupid enough to get rid of me.

When seeking support from parliamentarians, it's best not to let them know that you think they're idiots, but Johnson was never able to do that for more than a short time.

After his election in 2001, he spent the bare minimum of time in the House. Real parliamentarians enjoy being there, waiting hour after hour to be called, taking a keen interest in obscure subjects and procedures, learning by trial and error to read the violently fluctuating moods of the House and to win its ear.

The curious, almost conversational style of conversation required in the Commons, the courtesy necessary to treat each MP as an honorable and therefore a worthy interlocutor, was mastered by Sir Robert Walpole, Prime Minister from 1721 to 1742, of whom Lord Chesterfield wrote:

“He was both the most able man in Parliament and the most able manager of a Parliament that I believe ever lived. An orator more astute than eloquent, he perceived by intuition the disposition of the Chamber and pressed or retreated accordingly. So clear in the statement of the most complex questions, especially in financial matters, that while he spoke, the most ignorant people thought they understood what they did not really understand.

Johnson was never a man of Parliament. His greatest successes were those of an insurgent who mocked received ideas. Max Hastings, as editor of The Daily Telegraphdetected in him a kindred spirit and sent Johnson at the age of 24 to Brussels.

Here Johnson had great fun ridiculing the European Union and was soon able to wallpaper his office with Hastings herograms.

But as Johnson recounts in this book, by the summer of 2000, Hastings had become editor ofThe evening standardand his “first pride in my reporting from Brussels had turned into Dr. Frankenstein-like horror at the monster he had created.”

When Johnson was chosen in July 2000 to succeed Michael Heseltine as MP for Henley, he “detected the hand of Max Hastings” in a Evening standardThe leader deplores “the Conservative Party's growing weakness for famous people” and describes the new candidate as “a vocal Eurosceptic who, for all his gifts, is unlikely to feature in a future Conservative cabinet”.

Hastings may have become Johnson's most outspoken critic (a title for which competition is stiff), but it is characteristic of this memoir that not a single word of subsequent criticism is cited. Johnson has long been prone to teasing his opponents by barely mentioning them, if not excluding them altogether.

In 2008, Johnson was the insurgent who toppled Ken Livingstone by inciting London's outer boroughs to expel the metropolitan socialist from City Hall. The new mayor then showed that he would defend the citizens of London against central government whenever necessary, which was at least once a month, and in 2012 he was rewarded with a second mandate.

There are some useful chapters in this book on how to improve the city you are mayor of. You have to 'hustle', get out and make things happen, new buses and trains, new houses, new investors.

Good King Boris did this in London. No one needed to point out to him that royalty is a performance. At the London Olympics, he surpassed David Cameron.

During the 2016 EU referendum he placed himself at the head of the rebels, angry people who were angry with both London and Brussels and who did not believe that Whitehall, Parliament and The Financial Times had done a lot for Bolton or Sunderland over the last 50 years.

Referendums are an unparliamentary device. Johnson, brandishing a Cornish Pasty, led the rebels to victory against the majority of MPs, including Tory MPs, who wanted to remain in the EU.

He was not immediately obliged to keep his promise to leave the EU, because as he says in the summary account he gives here, Michael Gove “decided to blow me up on the launch pad”.

“To this day, I don’t know exactly why he attacked me,” Johnson wrote a few paragraphs later. “He had all kinds of voices in his ear. George Osborne was certainly urging him to run. With such allusions we must do what we can.

Three years later, in the summer of 2019, when Parliament had failed to deliver Brexit, but had also failed to find a way to defy the will of the people and Nigel Farage had pushed the Party conservative towards extinction in the European elections, along came Johnson to save the party and break the deadlock, which he did through a series of astonishing provocations.

He recounts in this book that after removing the Whip from the 21 Conservative MPs, including Oliver Letwin, Ken Clarke and Nicholas Soames, in September 2019, “I felt like Octave – that cold and subtle tyrant – ordering the proscription of the names of the greatest senatorial families. “.

Octavian became better known as Emperor Augustus. He retained the forms of the Roman Republic while transforming it into the Roman Empire.

InGreat Caesars and Lesser Caesars: how they rise and how they fall – from Julius Caesar to Boris Johnson,published last year, Ferdinand Mount explores the comparison with ancient Rome and notes:

“For Caesar, Parliament is a rival for public attention, a place that must be bypassed, neutered, extended or even closed. »

Johnson fought against Parliament in the December 2019 general election and won a decisive victory. But at that moment he ceased to be an insurrectionist and found himself obliged to become the main defender of the establishment.

Almost immediately, Covid arrived, and it did, reluctantly, what the establishment and much of the public wanted it to do: it locked us down.

He could no longer be the Merry Monarch: life was real and serious. He describes entering St Thomas and discovering a view across the river to the Palace of Westminster:

“This sight made me think of something and I realized that I was in the same room – maybe the same room – where my father-in-law Nick Wahl had died in 1996. I had been with him until the end. »

No more words on Wahl, who was a remarkable man. Death passes by and Johnson recovers. He can't put everything in his book, otherwise it would be 50 times longer.

Like his detractors, his supporters do not benefit from much media coverage, even if he thanks by name, on pages 736 and 737, the 118 conservative deputies who remained “more or less faithful until the end”.

The book is dedicated to his wife, Carrie, “and to the memory of my mother, Charlotte”, but of the latter we read almost nothing. This may be a book Johnson is not yet capable of writing.

Charlotte was a very good painter – I just looked throughBeing too carefulthe catalog produced by Nell Butler for the 2015 retrospective exhibition – and she never shied away from emotion.

She helped develop her eldest son's visual sense. He too is a passionate painter and, as an activist, has always understood the need to provide good images.

On the back cover of this book is a pleasant photo of Johnson, without a helmet, riding his motorcycle across a field in Checkers, chased by Dilyn the dog.

After his mother's death in September 2021, Johnson's judgment became worse than normal: so I at least suggested in my own account of his tenure.

In November 2021, he, the Chief Whip, Mark Spencer, and the Leader of the House, Jacob Rees-Mogg, gave a full hash of the Owen Paterson affair. Johnson admits in this book that there was “a clear risk that this whole thing would drag on and hang around our necks like a rotting albatross.”

A U-turn was the only possible solution, but as Johnson admits, “if there's one thing colleagues hate, it's going up the hill and back down.”

His response to Partygate was even clumsier. He now writes:

“I should have been a lot more robust at the start. I tried to defuse the public anger with a series of rather pathetic apologies, even though I knew nothing of the events for which I was apologizing. My groveling attitude made people even angrier – and made it seem like we were much more guilty than we were.

The tribe lost patience with their leader and began to find him embarrassing. He could no longer change the subject or take refuge in jokes.

Often, while reading this book, I burst out laughing. Johnson may not be as amusing as Disraeli, a character he seems to know little about, but he is the funniest and most learned prime minister since Macmillan.

He proved Ukraine right and continues to remind us that he got the vaccines right, but these serious controversies were in vain and, in the summer of 2022, he is gone.

Johnson is sometimes a frivolous man who pretends to be serious, and sometimes a serious man who pretends to be frivolous. No one, including himself, has fully understood it yet.

In the rural isolation of Brightwell cum Sotwell, the Colombey-les-Deux-glises of Oxfordshire, he awaits that rare but not impossible event in British politics: a restoration.