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Louise Thomas
Editor
Lacking the benefit of Boris Johnson’s fine classical education – which is shown off liberally, once again, in his unreliable memoir Unleashed – I’m unable to quote with any sense of confidence whatever the antonym of mea culpa might be in Latin. So we’ll have to stick to English instead, and suggest that this book should best be subtitled “Not me, guv”. No opportunity to deflect blame is passed up: no scapegoat permitted to escape the tether; and no inconvenient truths intrude on what has been portrayed, by his old comrade Nadine Dorries, as a tragic fall from grace of Shakespearean proportions.
In this text, as he has done throughout his career, Johnson continually compares himself to Julius Caesar, Pericles and Cincinnatus, among others. Of his fall from power and his administration collapsing beneath him, he says that when he read his chancellor Rishi Sunak’s resignation letter with its “leaden prose” – a letter that, for Johnson, signalled the end – “I murmured, at least internally, ‘Kai su, teknon.’ If Caesar had 23 stab wounds I ended up with 62, in the sense that a grand total of 60 ministers decided to follow Saj [Sajid Javid, the then health secretary] and Rishi out of the door...” Tragic, no?
In reality, as we all surely realise, he is more like the kind of genteel faux-aristocratic con merchant that might appear in something by Dickens, Wilde or Rattigan. At best, he comes across as an amusing rogue – as the “Say what you like about Boris, but...” character his fans still adore; at worst, which is all too often, he is a man who prefers not to face up to the damage Brexit has done to the country, the lives needlessly lost by his catastrophic dithering over Covid, or the fact that he was fined for breaking the law, and lied, repeatedly, to parliament.
Unleashed is shameless, sour, predictable, self-exculpatory stuff. Now, of course, the primary purpose of any prime ministerial chronicle is to protect the reputation of the author. Or to rehabilitate it, in the case of most of them. Sometimes the choice is made to get your version out there early, which is what Winston Churchill did when he rushed out his monumental six-volume history of the Second World War, with the first volume published in 1948 and the final arriving in 1953 (when he was prime minister again).
Possibly apocryphally, Churchill declared that history would be kind to him because he intended to write it. His concerns were unfounded, but his successor has had good cause to worry about how he will go down in history. He still has. His book is an almost unrelievedly tedious rehash of his already well-rehearsed case that, despite all evidence and collective memory to the contrary, he did nothing wrong, and even if he did, Prince Andrew-style, he was only ever guilty of being – if anything – too honourable, too trusting, too kindly and indulgent to the likes of Owen Paterson (also censured by the Commons for repeatedly breaking lobbying rules).
Yes, Johnson does write: “Was it a plot? You bet it was a plot, in the sense that a lot of them were at it for ages, some of them from the very moment I took over. Was the plot enough, on its own, to bring me down? Well, I don’t think you should underestimate the number of goofs I made. I made too many duff appointments, some of which turned out to be homicidal maniacs. I badly mishandled our response to some of the crises.” (You would never imagine that “Big Dog” had spent much of his journalistic and political career joyfully shafting anyone who got in his way – David Cameron, Theresa May, even the Queen.)
The admission of “goofs” is about as near as Johnson gets to self-discovery – but it turns out that the “mishandling” he admits to was all about presentation: not making the argument well enough, failing to persuade his panicky bovine MPs that he was right. He would have won the general election of 2023 or 2024, despite everything. The problem with Michael Gove, Sunak (especially), Sue Gray, Dominic Cummings and the others, therefore – according to Johnson – was simply that they couldn’t understand why they had to support this man of destiny, too good for his own good; he was an innocent taken in by their inexplicable subterfuge and betrayals.
This is very much the twisted, conspiratorial version of recent history road-tested by Dorries (the echoes are unmistakeable); it is almost as ludicrous as the equally unconvincing exercise in parallel history currently being propagated by Liz Truss (whose short, nasty and brutal spell in power passes without comment, which is perhaps just as well given that Johnson encouraged his followers to vote for her in the first 2022 leadership contest).
At 772 pages, including plates, notes and index, this a hefty volume – but also rather slight in substance. It’s not much more than a series of mostly entertaining anecdotes, reheated stories, gossip and knockabout told in the typical style of a Johnson column, his natural metier. You can tell from the idiosyncratic tone that it is his authentic voice – who else might call Greta Thunberg “a whey-faced teenage Joan of Arc”? Would anyone other than Johnson childishly ridicule President Macron’s ’Allo ’Allo accent on a trip to Chequers – “Is zat your deurg?” None of it would matter – the truth can be found elsewhere – except that the Tory party will continue to struggle under the weight of Johnson’s (and Truss’s) legacy for many years to come.
