Your support helps us to tell the storyFind out moreCloseOur mission is to deliver unbiased, fact-based reporting that holds power to account and exposes the truth.Whether $5 or $50, every contribution counts.Support us to deliver journalism without an agenda.Louise ThomasEditorHaving once said that Boris was the life and soul of the party, but not safe in taxis, I have to say that having read his memoir he is not safe behind a keyboard either. That is, if you are looking for truth, integrity, seriousness and profundity in a politician, let alone a prime minister.His new memoir, Unleashed, is Billy Bunter let loose in Westminster with its endless whooses and biffs and sockeroos. Is Boris a serious writer, a chronicler of the Covid years, an eye-witness to some of the most challenging and troubled times in our island’s history? No, he’s more Beano or Dandy than Gladstone or even Rory Stewart. Farcical rather than factual seems to be his preferred mode of travel. This is a book of two voices – the caricature bombastic Boris, and the calm, quiet and calculating Boris. Some would say this perfectly reflects the two-faced nature of Boris Johnson the Janus – a classical allusion he will understand better than most, even if he doesn’t appreciate it.But then Boris was always a split personality. He did after all write two essays, one that argued for Britain leaving the EU and the other with us remaining. He was split, pulled in opposite directions, but not for the reasons you might expect. He was agonising over what would best serve him. And was always thus.Sitting opposite Boris in cabinet, I wanted to hold a mirror up to him. Did he realise the appalling faces he pulled when Theresa May, the then prime minister, was speaking? That face he adopts of amused determination – shoulders hunched, brow scowled, mouth pursed as though bracing for an assault or a charge? Nobody maintains that pose for long and when he forgot to hold it his look would settle into the innocent picture covering the front of Unleashed… But it was never long before the classic Boris face returned.The first version is that caricature of himself, the exaggerated performance that makes him almost un-satirisable. You’ll remember it from speeches filled with explosive language and absurdist imagery – it’s what makes him such a memorable orator and, for a while, such an unstoppable force. The second voice is a much more calm, emotionally involved tone, whose gentle concern almost makes you believe his desire to do good. Almost being the key word here.What’s most interesting is when he chooses to use both versions throughout the book and at the end, you’re left wondering which is the real one, and which is the performance. Fame or infamy? Family man or unfaithful rogue? Courageous or calamitous? Always we are left wondering who is the real Boris. And if a real Boris exists at all. We discover a man whose mission never gets quite beyond “boostering” – not the economy, for which the term was coined, but boostering Boris himself.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.”Amber Rudd served in Boris Johnson’s cabinet for two months More
