Unleashed is the title of this memoir, with a picture of Boris looking sexily tousled on the front. So what are we to think except that the author intends us to see him as an animal – one of those apex predators - who’s been let loose finally to tell the world how it was and how he is. Well no, silly us. Boris is talking about post-Brexit Britain – “We are unleashed and we’ll never be leashed again” – so it’s not about him. But if that’s how the reader wants to take it, that’s just fine.
This is of course the former PM’s opportunity to get things off his chest, and where others pay for their therapy, the reader pays for Boris’s. He’s got a lot to say about where things have gone wrong for the Tories in the last election – see chapter 59. He is right to point out that he got a full ten points more in votes in his last election than Keir Starmer did in July. Boris, running on the “Get Brexit Done” ticket was one of the great populist vote winners of modern politics. Where he’s less good is in analysing how he failed to live up to his own very real promise.
But let’s cut to the reveals. The “manly pep talk” with Prince Harry in a doomed and belated attempt to prevent his departure for the US is already well rehearsed. But it comes as a surprise to find that when the Israeli PM used the Foreign Office lavatories during his trip to London – a well appointed gentleman’s club affair – it was found to be bugged when it was next swept. Bear it in mind if Bibi comes to stay.
More interesting is his conviction that Rishi, as Chancellor, did not even try to come up with any ideas for post-Brexit growth, though it does seem a bit lame for Boris simply to exhort him to, and then leave him alone. Rather limply he observes, “It now occurs to me he was saving his growth strategy, and his new fiscal approach, for the moment he took over. Oh well!” Boris is wounded by his betrayal – Rishi being Brutus to his Caesar – given he had gone out of his way to defend Mrs Sunak when there was controversy over her tax affairs. Rishi does not come well out of Unleashed, though Boris does pay tribute to his pluck in taking exception as a Hindu to Boris’s exhortation to slaughter sacred cows.
This is a political memoir so we don’t get the personal stuff, though it’s dedicated to Carrie as well as his late mother. If you were hoping for any insight into the stories about Carrie trying to run the show at Downing Street, you must look elsewhere; here the rumours are attributed to Dominic Cummings and his press officer, Lee Cain. He talks rather more about them briefing against Dilyn the dog. I for one, should love to read a review of this book by Dom, whose animus Boris attributes to being exposed to the press after the Barnard Castle trip during Covid. There are polite references to his second wife, Marina, and none at all to his first and prettiest wife, Allegra Mostyn-Owen.
Not many people are banging the drum for Boris’s achievements just now, so it’s fair enough for him to bang his own. He regards the vaccine rollout in Britain as his great accomplishment, though he is more sober about the second lockdown (pointing out that Michael Gove was keen). He makes a spirited case for Brexit and is especially withering about the contempt felt by stuck-up Remainers for “Brexity places”.
Interestingly, he looks back fondly at his time as London Mayor, when he had real achievements to his credit: schools reform and housebuilding, and I’d add the modern Routemaster to the list. His contention that one reason for the Tories losing the last election was their failure to champion HS2 is debatable. Even brainbox Boris seems not to have grasped that what was needed was not so much higher speed north-south rail as greater capacity, plus better west-east connections. Money squandered on HS2 could have been spent upgrading the existing rail infrastructure and cross-Pennine lines. But he is genuinely eloquent about his levelling-up agenda; at the outset he recalls his schooldays affectionately and expresses the aspiration that every child should have Eton benefits: a Shakespeare in every village. It’s a pity that very Tory agenda was never realised, or even begun.
One area where he bangs his drum especially loudly is in his wholehearted support for Ukraine against Russian aggression; we get an awful lot about him providing anti-aircraft missiles to Kyiv and drumming up support for his friend Zelensky and an interesting account of his pre-war conversation with Putin (Boris didn’t buy his fears about Nato encroachment). But it’s hard to avoid the feeling that although he really does think this is a war of “good versus evil”, a foreign conflict was simply easier to engage with than the complexities of politics back home. Mind you it gives him the chance to repeat his joke of progress in Ukraine, “steppe by steppe”.
Where he really did lose the plot as PM was on immigration, which rose to 762,000 net in 2022, the year he left office. That failure lost him the Red Wall and it’s characteristic of Boris that he tries to conflate this entirely avoidable phenomenon with the separate issue of small boat crossings on the Channel, to be solved by the Rwanda scheme. It won’t do.
As for Partygate, it didn’t happen; it seems it was just the traditional thing of civil servants having a glass of “warm white wine” at the end of Fridays; as for the parties and the vomiting, they were malicious exaggerations; as for cake, he never saw any. But even those warm white wine gatherings were more than the rest of the population was allowed at the time; he won’t see it though. He only regrets that he didn’t remind his staff of the importance of being seen to obey the rules.
As a mea culpa, then, it’s selective, but not bitter. He blames himself for complacency but doesn’t blame others, “I don’t blame any of them really for wanting to turf me out”. There’s melancholy here: “So much had been done; but so much had been only half done”.
What of the future? More memoirs, more easy journalism, more lucrative speech-giving? Would that really satisfy him? He says “you should only get involved [in politics] if you really think you can be useful”. So, Hasta la Vista, baby. We may yet see more of him.
Boris Johnson, Unleashed, Collins, £30
