Voters don’t believe Boris Johnson’s most controversial claims in new book, poll finds

Passages in the former Tory PM’s memoir ‘Unleashed’ have been disputed since it was released – including his claim he was asked to give Prince Harry a ‘manly pep talk’

Voters do not believe a raft of key claims in Boris Johnson’s new memoir, covering everything from Prince Harry to Covid, according to a new poll.

Mr Johnson was found to have lied to parliament over “Partygate” late-night bashes in Downing Street while the rest of the country was under Covid restrictions.

And since the release of his new book Unleashed key passages have been disputed.

Now a new poll by YouGov has found that Britons struggle to believe the claims.

Just 35 per cent said they believed that former prime minister David Cameron had warned Mr Johnson he would “f*** you up forever” if he did not support Remain during the Brexit referendum, with the rest saying they did not believe him or did not know.

Boris Johnson (The Diary of a CEO)

Lord Cameron has hit back at the claim himself, saying he finds it “hard to believe” adding that “recollections differ” after Mr Johnson had claimed those were his “exact words”.

Speaking out for the first time since Mr Johnson made the explosive claim, Lord Cameron said: “What I do remember saying is, Boris, you’ve never backed Britain leaving the EU before, you’ve always said, let’s reform it, let’s change it. I said, why back it now when we got a better deal?”

When it came to Covid, the poll found only 34 per cent believed his claim that Donald Trump had sent representatives with unlicensed drugs to offer to “revive” the then PM while he was struggling in intensive care.

And again, just one in three, 33 per cent, believe one of the most eye-catching passages in the book – that he considered a military “raid” on the Netherlands to seize Covid vaccines. Only the same number, 33 per cent, said they believed the part of the memoir where he wrote that the Queen had bone cancer for a year before her death.

Johnson said he had been urged to give the Duke of Sussex a ‘manly pep talk’ (AP)

Even fewer believed another claim about the royal family, that Buckingham Palace had asked him to try to convince Prince Harry to stay in the UK.

And only 43 per cent believed that he was not aware a UK fighter jet fell off an aircraft carrier until he was told by the Queen.

In the book, he said he was urged to give the Duke of Sussex a “manly pep talk” to persuade him not to leave.

The two men met behind closed doors on the margins of a UK-Africa investment summit in London’s Docklands in January 2020, for around 20 minutes.

After Mr Johnson made the claim public, sources with knowledge of the meeting insisted the palace did not ask him to intervene.

The poll also found that just 30 per cent also believed Israel’s leader Benjamin Netanyahu bugged Mr Johnson’s private bathroom.

The poll also found, however, that the public did think Mr Johnson was telling the truth about a number of things he himself claimed to believe in the book, including that the Tories would have won the last general election if he had remained PM (63 per cent) and, by a tiny margin, that he believed Partygate did not breach Covid rules (51 per cent).