Johnson’s book, Unleashed, has now been reviewed and I think it’s fair to say it has not been greeted as anything other than a sick joke. It perhaps should have been titled, Unhinged. I used to borrow autobiographies from our local library and the political ones were usually self-justificatory but contained serious reflections about the issues and crises faced during their terms of office. Most could be relied upon by historians trying to understand the human relationships behind the key decisions to have a few grains of truth. I don’t think this applies to his 772-page effort.
His much-trailed interview with Laura Kuenssberg to promote the book had to be cancelled after she accidentally sent him her briefing notes. ITV and Tom Bradby stepped in and he was probably far tougher on him than she would have been.
There are few revelations in the book. It’s mostly confirmation of what we already knew, particularly around Brexit. He apparently blames Cameron, Theresa May, and the EU for the problems which tells us that even he knows it hasn't been a success, otherwise he would be claiming all the credit. That is how these things work.
This little exchange with Bradby is fascinating:
On #Brexit.ITV: You told us that we should do this and you hadn't devoted any serious thought to what came next.BJ: I wanted to win an argument... What we expected was that the Cameron gov't would deliver it. ~AA pic.twitter.com/KGJa4X2Wm7— Best for Britain (@BestForBritain) October 4, 2024
He now says (for the first time as far as I know) that "we all expected" the Cameron government would "bring forward a White Paper" although it isn't clear if he thought this should have happened before or after the referendum. I assume before. There is surely no logical point in providing voters the wherewithal to make an informed choice after they've made that choice.
The problem with this is that firstly, we all knew there was no plan for Brexit because Cameron had vetoed any planning by Whitehall. Secondly, when The Treasury did publish documents pre-June 2016 forecasting (pretty accurately we now know) what would happen if we quit the EU, the Vote Leave campaign, which he headed, condemned it as all 'scaremongering.'
His support for the leave campaign was purely for personal gain and he (and Gove) went around the country spouting a lot of lies about Brexit, including the £350 million a week for the NHS which he now admits in the book was untrue.
Anyway, the 'memoir' has been reviewed by several media outlets, the best in my opinion is that by Amber Rudd, the former Conservative Home Secretary, in The Independent. She accuses him of being like Janus, two-faced, with no one ever being sure which face he had on at any given moment.
On Brexit she says:
"Unsurprisingly the first, almost parody, voice of Boris is most clear in his chapters on Brexit. Boris casts himself undoubtedly and inevitably as the hero of Brexit – he revels in his own dazzling genius, in the campaign’s simplicity, in its crude but effective language, and his own 'brilliant clarity of message'. And he ridicules the Remain campaign, which 'had everything except the one thing you really need: they lacked conviction'. What on earth does he think the rest of us were doing? Campaigning so hard it put political careers, let alone friendships, on the line. If he thinks we lacked conviction, I’ve got a bus with a slogan to sell him. And it would have a slogan which was not ridiculed for being full of fantasy facts.
"While this exuberant, provocative Boris recalls these years, as if they were a personal military triumph for his country, that jubilant joy at winning grinds to a shocking, screeching halt as the victory sinks in. Let me put it plainly: in a memoir designed to cement his legacy, it screams out that he had no plan apart from to get a medal for winning. The horror of his justification for having no clue how to proceed once he’d convinced the country to follow him out of Europe may test the patience of readers who were not Brexit supporters. 'Now what the hell were we supposed to do,' he whines. 'We had no plan for government ... negotiation ... it is utterly infuriating that we should be blamed'.”
The last sentence says it all. He is the epitome of the entitled Old Etonian, the boss who knows nothing about anything, refuses to take advice, and makes impossible commitments that he expects others to fulfill. If they, by a minor miracle, manage to do it or something close to it, he would take all the credit and bask in the glory. But failure is theirs alone. That's how that works, as we all know.
Dominic Cummings is mentioned only briefly and referred to as a “homicidal robot.”
And she has a perceptive take on his supposed liberal centrist beliefs:
"As a professed One Nation Tory, Boris turned Britain into two nations at war with Remain and Leave tribes, a civil war only this time without muskets. He also blew up the Tory party, twice. Once with the Brexit saga and secondly under his premiership in which he was threatened with a vote of no confidence to make him leave No 10."
Another review of Unleashed is by Ian Dunt (an ardent remainer by the way) in The i newspaper. He claims its 772 pages are "witless" and in fact, quite boring. He accuses Johnson of being thin-skinned and vindictive:
"He cultivated an image of being a bubbly, good-natured Brexity fun-time guy. But the text mostly reveals a very thin-skinned jealous personality, who never forgets a slight.
"He remembers Michael Portillo underestimating him in a Sunday Times column 20 years earlier. He quotes at length a mildly critical Evening Standard piece from the year 2000, a quarter of a century ago. Despite the theatrical bonhomie, he does not seem like a happy man. He nurses his grievances and seems to wither by repeated references to them."
In the book, he reveals that he "would walk the corridors [in No 10] shouting ‘Morale pump coming round! Morale pump coming round!’" and describes how he would “insert the nozzle of a patent morale pump into every orifice I could find”.
This apparently is what he thought prime ministers did. I wonder what Gladstone or Churchill or Macmillan would have thought?
No, I'm sorry. Unleashed is simply unhinged.
