Stop all the clocks: Boris Johnson’s memoir Unleashed is out and available in all good bookshops (and bad ones too). In the 784-page doorstop, Johnson charts his journey from mayor to prime minister to member of the public, with a liberal peppering of buffoonery throughout.
All the peak Johnsonian hi-jinks have been drip-fed through a Daily Mail serialisation, including a time Johnson was swept out to sea on an inflatable kayak in Scotland, and his plot to raid the Netherlands for AstraZeneca vaccines during the pandemic. But some of the most bizarre interactions in the book are with celebrities.
The ex premier seems to have a knack for alienating A-listers. When he was Mayor of London in 2008, Johnson and his team at City Hall were struggling against a knife crime epidemic. “We would literally lie awake at night, worrying about what might be happening in Haringey or Ealing or Croydon,” he wrote. Perhaps there was a perception that this Eton and Oxford educated mayor was lacking in streetsmart, as “people started to flock to City Hall and offer solutions.”
Among the visitors was LDN singer Lily Allen, who tabled an unorthodox idea. “The pop star Lily Allen came and said we should pay to have special knife blunters on street corners. Perhaps they could put corks on the end, she suggested.”
At the time, Johnson was full of praise for Allen. “I welcome any constructive suggestions on combating knife crime and Lily Allen has already proved her commitment to help address this problem,” he told NME in 2018. He is less forthcoming in his book: “Lily Allen is a brilliant creative mind, but I wasn’t sure I could make sense of a knife-blunting strategy.”
When he was foreign secretary, Johnson claims that he became “pretty messianic about female education” after meeting Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai and hearing about how the Taliban banned girls from going to school.
In 2017 he staged a “big event” at the UN General Assembly in New York to discuss the matter, and invited Harry Potter star and women’s rights campaigner Emma Watson on the advice of his officials. “For some reason she turned me down,” Johnson wrote. Never one to take rejection on the chin, he adds: “She later turned her wrath on J.K Rowling herself, over the ridiculous issue of whether women can have penises, so I felt I was in good company.” In 2021, Emma Watson was one of 450 signatories on an open letter to Boris Johnson, calling for more women on the UK’s COP26 leadership team.
While he was at the climate summit in Glasgow, Johnson had a toe-clenching run in with Leonardo DiCaprio. The star was there in his capacity as a climate campaigner and apparently asked to use the bathroom in Johnson’s Presidency Suite.
Johnson wrote that DiCaprio “seemed to be detained for some time,” and tried to make a hasty exit once he emerged. In an effort to detain him, Johnson started quoting DiCaprio’s lines from the film Blood Diamond “in a thick South African accent”. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this did not have the intended effect. “I will see you later, my friend,” was DiCaprio’s curt response, before he “stalked off”. Johnson and his team promptly rechristened him “Leonardo DiCrapio”.
The only celebrity in Unleashed who Johnson does not appear to burn bridges with is Arnold Schwarzenegger. During the London Olympics in 2012, Johnson (then mayor), took Schwarzenegger for a ride in the new cable cars he had built across the Thames in East London.
“Very naaice,” was Schwarzenegger’s response, as they “surveyed the glories of Canning Town”. Johnson clearly has a soft spot for the bodybuilder turned California governor. The epigraph of Unleashed is “Hasta la vista, baby,” Schwarzenegger’s catchphrase in Terminator 2, which Johnson also quoted in his final PMQs as leader.
In the final chapters of the book, Johnson writes that he has “no idea” whether he’ll return to frontline politics. But if his predilection for Terminator quotes is anything to go by, it’s worth remembering the most famous line: “I’ll be back”.
