Boris Johnson’s Unleashed is an important historical document, but not necessarily a valuable one. Any historian who approaches it is likely to at least partially remember the bit from GCSE history about the reliability of sources. The reason Johnson, a biographer of notoriously dubious merit, has turned to autobiography significantly earlier than he would have liked is because his party correctly calculated that the country could no longer believe a word he had to say.
Unleashed is an appropriate title. Johnson comes roaring out in chapter one like Scrappy-Doo, fists flying everywhere. He’s taking shots at the Supreme Court, at John Bercow, at everyone who stood in his way in the early months of his premiership, which was a lot of people because he had no parliamentary majority (it became a lot more people, shortly after, when he kicked Kenneth Clarke, among others, out of the Conservative Party). He also immediately starts laying the groundwork for later punches he will throw at the police and others over Partygate.
To someone who has read many transcripts of Johnson car crash interviews, the book has an immediately familiar feel. He is doing his usual thing, beating his opponents down in his usual bombastic way, which a great many people enjoy. Yes, this trademark Johnson shtick wears very thin very quickly indeed, but we’ve had a few welcome years off from it. As such, it is on many occasions authentically amusing. Childishly amusing, of course, but childish humor more than has its place.
Some of his quips land. The electoral slogan of Dominic Grieve, a backbench Conservative critic, should be “Grieve for Beaconsfield”. He describes the chief whip Mark Spencer, “a Nottinghamshire farmer with enormous pheasant-strangling hands”, just after he had stripped the whip from 21 Tory MPs, as looking pale, “even for a man who was well used to scenes from the abattoir”.
It’s no surprise that it was Johnson’s choice to release in the book’s first serialization the supposed plot to invade the Netherlands to recover blockaded Covid vaccines. It was never, ever going to happen, but is nevertheless just about, plausibly, superficially true, which is more than enough for him.
It’s well known that Johnson made his name as the Brussels correspondent for The Daily Telegraph through stories of spectacular exaggeration, like the ban on bendy bananas and the plans to detonate various EU buildings that, decades on, are very much still standing. The Dutch invasion story reveals nothing about what was going on in government at a time of high tension, but plenty about the prime minister at the time — that he has not changed.
To someone who has read many transcripts of Johnson car crash interviews, the book has an immediately familiar feel.
What you don’t get from Unleashed is any kind of change of bowling. Subjects that might require introspection are avoided. Anyone who knows Johnson personally knows how formed, how colored he is by an unusual and quite difficult childhood. The entire subject of his early years is avoided.
The tale of Michael Gove’s betrayal during the 2016 leadership election is retold, but only with a fresh coat of bile and bitterness, and none of the self-examination that might be possible eight years hence. That’s Johnson’s right, of course, but the first and most essential quality of the writer is the courage to bare one’s own soul. There’s none of that in here, just the usual stylized, chaotic fight to conceal it.
He claims elsewhere in the book that Queen Elizabeth II commended him for his “general lack of bitterness”. It is remarkable that Her Majesty could rise yet further in the nation’s esteem even from beyond the grave. Whoever knew her capable of such deathly dry humor?
The worst of Johnson’s many detractors are unable even to acknowledge his significant intellect. He knows several languages, including ancient Greek. His love of the classics is abundantly real. In private he is more than capable of applying the same intellectual analysis to himself as he is to the writings of Aeschylus or the speeches of Pericles. And yet, in public, insofar as this book is a public document, the tone is set by the book’s epigram — “Hasta la vista, baby” from Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
The mask of cartoon Boris is never truly permitted to slip for a second. No idea or event is ever elucidated on without a Kapow! of some kind suddenly emerging. For example, the vaccine task force’s bets pay off, so it’s “kerchingeroo!” The book is highly readable because it is so very generously seasoned with juvenile gags, some of more than acceptable quality. But it does not read like the work of a man worthy of a rumored $655,000 fee for a biography of Shakespeare, which may partly explain why that book is still eight years late and counting.
Still, he writes with energy and originality: he describes how during lockdown his team at No 10 micromanaged human behavior. How many people should be allowed to a funeral? Did a scotch egg served in a pub count as a meal? Pork scratchings? His government, he writes, “against all my previous instincts, promulgated these weird restrictions on human contact, like something out of Leviticus”, adding that “we auto-napalmed our own economy like a suicidal Buddhist monk”.
The tone is set by the book’s epigram — “Hasta la vista, baby” from Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
There are small amounts of contrition to be found, particularly in his brief forays into the world of climate change denial in the early 2000s, seduced, as he was, by a weather expert he had discovered by the name of Piers Corbyn. He admits he was wrong about all that stuff, way back when it was still early enough to do something about it. But it’s an entirely strategic mea culpa, made only to create the necessary space to claim that he’s absolutely in the right on the subject now, and that Rishi Sunak and others have betrayed him by “sneering at net zero and rowing back on environmental commitments I had made”.
There is a whole subchapter devoted to how to win at prime minister’s questions, something I can’t recall ever having seen him do. He was rarely less than magnificent at Conservative Party conference. In the House of Commons he was not.
It is a book of many unintended revelations. Johnson writes with moving affection for Queen Elizabeth II, who, he said, “seemed to know things even before I had been briefed”. He cites an example of an expensive RAF fighter jet that was effectively destroyed because someone left a plastic tray over the air intake. “Doubly embarrassing to hear it from the Queen,” he writes. Yes, and triply embarrassing to then write it in an autobiography, and so reveal the long suspected fact that maybe she simply read her briefings and the prime minister of the time did not.
He also confirms what has already been widely reported, that the Queen had bone cancer at the time of her death. But it has also been widely reported that she wished for that information to be concealed from her death certificate (on which “old age” was listed instead). She may therefore not have relished the prospect of its inclusion in his autobiography.
That Johnson’s world fell apart suddenly is well known, but how that happened is still not fully out there. Those hoping to understand more about how, for example, Carrie Symonds arrived on the scene (and how Marina Wheeler left) will be disappointed. The Downing Street turf wars between Symonds and Dominic Cummings were significant in shaping a nation’s response to a deadly pandemic. Johnson could have made a contribution of importance to explain those Whitehall wranglings, but he has chosen not to.
You never know, with Boris Johnson, which Boris Johnson is going to turn up. His first party conference speech as prime minister, for example, was significantly below par. His next, after the pandemic, was a true barnstormer. From the outside it has never been easy to understand why on some occasions phone-it-in Boris turns up and on others he is all-conquering. Why does he sometimes arrive to give a speech armed only with an anecdote about Peppa Pig? He describes that notorious incident, as it happens, at a breakfast meeting at the CBI. “I stared down at my text and found that the pages had been irretrievably jumbled. I looked up and tried to extemporise … I corpsed, and corpsed.”
The question of whether Unleashed is itself a typical Johnson phoned-in effort is rather more nuanced. He is not lazy. His biographer Andrew Gimson is a fan of the term “lazy workaholic”. But Unleashed does appear to be a work that has failed fully to sustain the interest of its author. Johnson, probably, was never happier than when he was simultaneously an MP, mayor of London and the editor of The Spectator. There was always something more interesting to switch to. What shines through Unleashed, above all, is that the would-be World King believes there should be rather more subject matter, rather more years in office to chew on. That the autobiography stage should have come hereafter.
Tom Peck is a parliamentary sketch writer and TV columnist for The Times of London
