Unleashed? No, it’s more like Boris: Unashamed (as well as smug and lazy)

Johnson doesn’t even seem prepared to meet the truth halfway, writes Sean O’Grady. Instead, the former PM’s so-called ‘explosive’ memoir seems to have pre-detonated in the hands of the author

Johnson only demonstrates how deeply unsuited he was to the post he occupied (PA)

If nothing else, and there really is very little else to be said for it, Boris Johnson’s memoir, Unleashed, proves that this man was really was, and indeed still is, the most shameless charlatan ever to flit across the British political scene.

Most political memoirs are an elaborate exercise in spin (because if they don’t defend their reputations, who will) but we’ve already seen enough in the published extracts and know sufficient about Johnson’s character to know that this is an inverted pyramid of piffle, to borrow a phrase.

To draw an illuminating contrast, in Tony Blair’s surprisingly candid and fluent look back at his decade at the top, he admits his failures and dilates on what he did and did not get right about the Iraq war, among other things. Yet Johnson’s only defence of his behaviour over Partygate is that he apologised too much, that he did nothing wrong and that Sue Gray was out to get him.

There is no sense at all that he was basically ejected from parliament for repeatedly lying to the Commons – and ditched by his own parliamentary colleagues, many hitherto slavishly loyal to him, because they weren’t prepared to cover up for him any longer. The attempt to do so threatened only to help lose them the next election (as indeed turned out to be the case).

Johnson doesn’t even seem prepared to meet the truth halfway, let alone set out a detailed account of where and why, say, the Sue Gray report was mistaken or the Standards Committee erred about his multiple misleading statements in the Commons. I’d imagine that’s because he can’t.

Unleashed is not, in other words, something that does much to rehabilitate either Johnson himself, his administration or his party (at least until the scale of his misdemeanours and their sense of self-preservation eventually compelled them to ditch him).

It seems (again, unsurprisingly, given his record), to be under-researched and is lazily written. It is much more a collection of self-satisfied and exaggerated anecdotes than any attempt at analysis of his time in power and where he went wrong. I strongly suspect that these will form the backbone of many a Johnson after-dinner speech and “lecture on leadership” at business conferences in the coming decades, until, like an old coin, they grow worn with use.

We are learning nothing about exactly what he wanted to actually achieve in office (perhaps because he didn’t know?) and why he failed to deliver anything – except, of course himself into the party leadership on the back of Brexit (an “achievement” that seems ever more diminished by the day).

We won’t learn anything further about who paid for his expensive wallpaper and lavish refurb of the family quarters, for his honeymoon, for his many holidays and much else. Nor the secret £800,000 loan allegedly brokered by Richard Sharp, who was later to be appointed chair of the BBC (and subsequently quit, doubtless, like so many, regretting he’d ever met Johnson).

We won’t find out where he thinks the Tory party goes from here, because (I expect) he neither knows nor cares. Mentions of Dominic Cummings, Carrie Symonds, Owen Paterson, Chris Pincher, the unlawful prorogation scandal and other sleazy episodes will no doubt be scant, circumspect, or both. And – absolutely guaranteed; nothing at all about his unstable private life and the lamentable impact this made on his work.

Long on funny stories, short on substance, you get the impression either that Johnson is keeping a lot of stuff back for subsequent volumes (as and when he needs the money); or that he just couldn’t be bothered to compose more than what amounts to a series of disconnected unserious newspaper columns. The “bombshells” released to the press seem anything but. Some aren’t even new.

I doubt anyone is exactly surprised that Johnson thinks he “might have carked it” from Covid in intensive care, though, given his ineffable arrogance he probably didn’t entertain the notion that seriously anyway. Buckingham Palace have denied they ever asked him to have that improbable “manly pep talk” with Prince Harry.

The admittedly entertaining story about how he suggested invading Holland during the pandemic to “rescue” our Covid jabs from the clutches of the European Union doesn’t prove anything except how idiotically puerile he could be; and in any case the tale first came to light last December, in reporting of the Covid inquiry.

Some sections of the “explosive” memoir seem to have pre-detonated in the hands of the author, and inadvertently blown more chunks out of the complacent edifice – confirming his catastrophic lack of judgment and carelessness about process while he was in No 10.

If the proposed aquatic raid on the vaccines in the Netherlands “kidnapped” by the EU was so ridiculous, why did he waste the time of our military chiefs creating a plan for it – and now make fun of them because they politely told him it would not be possible to do it undetected?

If he thinks today (naturally without any economic or epidemiological evidence) that the Covid lockdowns he himself ordered (albeit after much dithering) went on for too long and were too severe, what does that tell us about his capacity to make the right choices in the national interest? He claims now, again with nothing to back it up, that the coronavirus emerged from a Chinese lab – an accusation with serious geopolitical implications – but why did he think otherwise at the time?

Of course, hindsight is a wonderful thing, but we pay our leaders to get things right first time. Then again, it wouldn’t be the first time Johnson had adjusted his views to align with a useful (if pernicious) trend in Conservative party opinion. In short, in denouncing his own Covid decisions, he is still courting the Conservatives’ nutty squad for some potential future comeback. He is incorrigible.

Otherwise, it’s just a string of unworthy personal attacks on various people who had the temerity to get in his way. Each reflects most badly on Johnson himself. In the case of Theresa May, he goes on about her physical characteristics, and her nostrils, of all things, in a way that he doesn’t with any male politician, a nasty little stab of misogyny towards a woman who at least had a sense of duty.

You wouldn’t expect his nemesis, Keir Starmer, to go unscathed, but rather than eviscerate the Labour leader’s politics, Johnson, like some schoolyard bully, tries to ridicule his “irritable face” during a Commons debate – “like a bullock having a thermometer unexpectedly shoved in its rectum”. Pathetic Oxford Union stuff.

Starmer, like much of the rest of the country, was annoyed if not appalled by Johnson’s chaotic government; and it was his, yes, forensic unravelling of Johnson’s partygate alibis that led inexorably to Johnson’s eventual disgrace. It is Johnson wearing the irritable bovine face these days.

Perhaps most unworthy, even for him, is his treatment of the late Queen. So far from respecting the traditional confidentiality between monarch and premier, Johnson freely discloses details of their audiences for the sake of publicising his miserable book, safe in the knowledge she can no longer object.

Even here though, he only demonstrates how deeply unsuited he was to the post he occupied – because she seemed to actually read the same official papers as he was given, and had to tell him what was going on, and fill him in on the historical context.

The ailing Queen, who, he appears to hint, was determined to hang on long enough to make sure she saw the back of him, supposedly advised Johnson at their final meeting “There’s no point in bitterness”. He writes “amen to that. If everyone in politics – and life – could see that as clearly as she did, the world would be a much, much happier place.”

Indeed so, but in Unleashed, Johnson’s own bitterness seems to have overwhelmed any vestigial sense of self-awareness or dignity he might possess. For the rest of us, it is difficult now to be anything but bitter about the irreparable damage he did to the nation. Someone should have kept him on a tight leash.