If the reign of Bad King Boris looked dreadful from the outside, it was even more diabolical viewed from the inside. This is an authoritative, gripping and often jaw-dropping account of the bedlam behind the black door of Number 10 and it confirms that we did not really have a government during his trashy reign. It was an anarchy presided over by a fervently frivolous, frantically floundering and deeply decadent lord of misrule.
As Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell relate it, never in modern times has the premiership been occupied by someone so fundamentally unfit to hold the office. That may not be a wholly original observation, but the great merit of their account is the weight of evidence they marshal to support the contention that Johnson was an utterly incapable prime minister. The authors say they have gathered testimony from more than 200 witnesses, a lot of them officials and aides, “the silent voices of those who will never publish memoirs and diaries”. While this necessarily means that a lot of the sourcing is anonymous, it all rings horribly true.
During one of many episodes of derangement in Downing Street, Johnson is to be found raving: “I am meant to be in control. I am the führer. I’m the king who takes the decisions.” The would-be great dictator was never in control because he was incapable of performing even some of the most basic functions of a leader.
He had no clue how to be an effective prime minister and no idea what he wanted to do with the role other than satisfy his lust for its status and perks. One of his cabinet ministers, who was also a friend, is quoted saying: “Boris absolutely loved being prime minister, its prestige and the trappings. He revelled in it… His philosophy on the way up had been to do, pledge, say anything to get over the line because I’m the best, I deserve it. Now I’m here in No 10 without any core beliefs, I can do and say whatever I need to remain here.”
He was as woeful at applying himself to official papers as he was hopeless at assembling a stable and productive team at Number 10. He was almost pathologically incapable of making and sticking to decisions, especially when confronted with choices that were in any way difficult. “Dodge, duck, dip, dive and dodge” was his motto for governing, aping a line from one of his favourite films, the sports comedy Dodgeball. Most of the time, he was just making stuff up as he went along. “Wow, where the hell did that come from?” was the reaction from his staff when he suddenly announced that he had a plan to fix social care. No such plan existed. “Put down in 3,000 words what you think my foreign policy should be,” he told startled officials at Number 10 soon after becoming prime minister. He did not form a serious relationship with any of his international peer group. Calls with Emmanuel Macron would regularly feature the French president saying: “Boris, you’re just not being serious.”
Appointing capable senior ministers might have compensated for some of his weaknesses. Johnson deliberately stuffed his cabinets with mediocrities who knew they were expected to be “nodding dogs” and whom he disdained as “the stooges”. “We don’t want young, hungry lions”, an aide recalls him saying when Rishi Sunak proved to be a less pliable and more popular chancellor than Johnson had anticipated.
The authors explore whether he believed in anything except the satisfaction of his own appetites and come back from their search for a Johnsonian philosophy as empty-handed as all the other people who have pursued this vain quest. There may have been a sliver of sincerity in the rhetoric about levelling up, but his ideas for realising it were inchoate and he wasn’t prepared to put in the requisite thought and application to turn idle boosterism into action. Johnson and Brexit are “inextricably intertwined in history”. Brexit would not have happened without him; he would not have become prime minister without Brexit. Yet he never had any strategy for trying to make a success of it. He and the other architects of that misadventure were like bank robbers after they had pulled off a heist. “No sooner had they done so than they start turning on each other over whose genius had been responsible for the success, and what to do with the spoils.”
This mirthless farce had tragic real-world consequences. Utterly unsuited to handling a crisis as grave as the pandemic, his endless prevarications and about-turns cost lives. “He wildly oscillated in what he thought,” observes one official. “In one day he would have three meetings in which he would say three completely different things depending on who was present, and then deny that he had changed his position.” His personal brush with Covid encouraged some to think it might prompt a reform of his behaviour. They were disappointed. Even coming near to death couldn’t remedy character flaws that were so deeply ingrained.
Everyone he dealt with sooner or later found him dissembling, because he was only ever willing to commit to a position if he thought there was some immediate personal advantage or because his hand had been forced. One of his officials says he lied “morning, noon and night”. He lied not just to the public, but also and often to his closest associates.
Battles for the ear of this shallow and capricious monarch turned his court into the scene of constant internecine struggle between the ever-shifting factions within the building. After the fall of Dominic Cummings, we hear Johnson whingeing about his inability to find the personnel or the structures to make his government functional, but several inside accounts suggest that he relished being at the centre of the tornado of chaos. Rather than take any responsibility upon himself, he would deflect blame for decisions he feared might be unpopular – and did not hesitate to use even his wife for that pathetic purpose. In the words of one courtier: “He would tell us that she was impossible to deal with and he couldn’t control her and she would do whatever she wanted. Then he’d go upstairs and tell her that we were impossible and he couldn’t control us. He liked to pour petrol on both sides and see what happened to the fire.”
Partygate, the most important of the scandals that finished him, was an appropriate nemesis for such a lawless regime.
To the bitter end, he blamed everyone but himself for the implosion of his premiership. The authors are right to dismiss that as another of his fictions. Bad King Boris was dethroned because he was and always had been utterly unfit to wear the crown.
• Johnson at 10 by Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell is published by Atlantic (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
