Boris Johnson looks back on his career in his autobiography

When we think of Boris Johnson, we inevitably think of Brexit. In 2016, he led the vote to leave the EU, then, as prime minister, he broke the domestic political blockade and implemented Brexit. The London establishment has never forgiven him. In Brussels, he is still considered a charlatan who broke his contract. But for Brexit supporters, he is a hero, without whom leaving the EU would probably never have become a reality.

The doubting Brexiteer

Although Johnson's career is closely linked to leaving the EU, he seems to have slipped into the role of Brexit hero by chance. His detractors have always accused him of only supporting the referendum in the perspective of his ambitions to become Prime Minister. What is clear is that Johnson was not a strong supporter of Brexit in early 2016. In his autobiography Unleashed, he describes in detail how he fought against the decision while still mayor from London.

Johnson struggled, doubted and received calls from companions who tried to influence him. While he was playing tennis, David Cameron offered him a senior ministerial post if he took a stand in favor of remaining in the EU. On the other hand, if he supports Brexit he will screw you over forever.

It seemed risky for Johnson to play with Dave. He was also unsympathetic to the xenophobic overtones of the emerging Brexit campaign. But his heart showed him a different path, which is why he wrote a newspaper column in which he argued for Brexit. The second pro-remain column, written that evening, remained a half-baked draft that Johnson's future defense secretary, Ben Wallace, passed to the press, much to my embarrassment.

The autobiography, light despite its nearly 800 pages, is full of such anecdotes. She describes his meetings with prime ministers and presidents like Volodymyr Zelensky, whom he invited to form a government in exile in London in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. When Zelenskiy responded that he did not want help to escape, but rather for national defense, Johnson made Britain one of kyiv's most important allies and arms suppliers.

Johnson emerges in his memoir as a man who looked beyond the depths of everyday politics and believed in the power of grand gestures, ideas and building projects. He recognized the strategic need to support Ukraine much earlier than other heads of government. Even today he believes in an ambitious climate policy and his historic plan to reduce the income gap between the neglected north and the wealthy south of England. Thanks to his unrivaled charisma and commitment to leveling up, he won over many voters in the post-industrial North who voted Tory for the first time in 2019. However, in the July general election many people turned away. again diverted from the conservatives.

Company apartment as crack den

Johnson finds the reasons for the problems associated with the implementation of his projects less in himself than in others. Theresa May is doing badly, comparing them to cranky old underpants. May lets Brussels dictate a sequence of negotiations, which he blames for subsequent Brexit problems. And she sought a pseudo-Brexit in which Britain, like Switzerland, would remain chained to the gravitational field of Brussels. But Johnson believed that only a fully liberated Britain could develop its potential.

With his resignation as Foreign Secretary, Johnson brought down May and succeeded her. He compares the company apartment he took over to a crack den. In doing so, he justified the much-criticized purchase of expensive wallpaper at the expense of a party donor. May's former chief of staff told Politico that it no longer surprises anyone that Johnson sometimes says things that have little in common with the truth.

What is certain is that Johnson, like so many politicians, has a tendency to pretend. He writes that he never imagined that Britain would experience a no-deal Brexit. But he deliberately kept the EU in the dark on this matter and thus managed to conduct successful negotiations. However, the breakthrough only came when Johnson agreed to the Northern Ireland Protocol. In the book, he is upset that the EU has implemented customs checks between Northern Ireland and the British Isles, as required by the protocol.

Covid as an unexpected catastrophe

Johnson writes with as much humor and grandiloquence as he speaks. Sometimes he resembles the protagonist of an adventure novel. Covid appears as an unexpected catastrophe which thwarts the hero's plans. In the spring of 2020, Johnson contracted the virus and required treatment in the intensive care unit. He describes agonizing hours during which he struggled to sleep, find oxygen, fearing he would never wake up.

Johnson describes the vaccination program as one of his greatest successes. Britain approved the Covid vaccine three weeks earlier than the EU, contributing to Britain's lead in vaccinating the population. Johnson does not mention that the rapid approval took place before Brexit was implemented under European law.

But he is indignant at the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, who wanted to prohibit him from presenting his successes in vaccination as successes of Brexit. Johnson also attests that Michel Barnier, then the EU's chief negotiator and current French prime minister, made an almost obsessive effort to make Brexit look like a failure at all costs.

At the height of the conflict, the EU blocked the delivery of 5 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine to Britain. Johnson recounts how, after a night of searching on Google Earth, he was informed, like in an action movie, of the possibility of having the cans in a warehouse in the Netherlands confiscated by British special forces and bringing them clandestinely in London.

In retrospect, he sees the somewhat late but harsh lockdown of 2020 as inevitable. At the same time, Johnson describes, almost incredulously, the set of rules and bans that he and his officials imposed on the country during the pandemic and which would lead to its downfall.

Johnson deals in just a few pages with the affair of the parties organized in his official residence during confinement. He speaks of a massive exaggeration and a witch hunt by the media and the opposition. The anger over the double standards that the case has triggered in view of the strict Corona rules for the ordinary population is barely mentioned. Or that Johnson's office had to apologize to Queen Elizabeth II because her staff drank and danced until the early hours the night before Prince Philip's funeral.

Johnson sees the main reason for his fall in conservative MPs, who brought him scandals and panicked over falling poll results. If Caesar had twenty-three stab wounds, I had sixty-two, he writes. This is the number of young ministers and cabinet members who followed Chancellor Rishi (Brutus) Sunak in the summer of 2022 and forced Johnson to resign with their mass resignation.

His prestigious leveling up project remained a dead letter. To this day, it is unclear what unleashed Britain wants to do with its Brexit freedoms. Johnson failed in part because of himself and his approach. He admits that he has not paid enough attention to nurturing relationships and the subtle mechanisms of power at Westminster. At the same time, the pandemic and the war in Ukraine absorbed almost all of his resources until his resignation. And his successors were in no way more convincing than Johnson.

Nevertheless, the sixty-year-old does not look back with anger, but rather with his typical self-irony. And a touch of melancholy about the fact that after three years as Prime Minister, he ran out of time too quickly.