Before he resigned from the House of Commons in 2023, Boris Johnson updated his register of parliamentary interests to reveal that he had received an advance of £510,000 (a shade over A$1 million) for a memoir to be published by HarperCollins. Now released with the bold title Unleashed, the book appears not to be performing as well as intended in retail terms. But it has done one thing: it has assured its author a new round of publicity, to which he has taken keenly. In fact, Johnson was dismissed from Channel 4’s live coverage of the US presidential election last month for plugging his book too heavily during the broadcast.
Unleashed is a large book but a highly readable one. It tells us relatively little about Johnson’s childhood and upbringing, it has to be said, and gives only a few selective glimpses of the boozy lunches and quickfire op-eds he produced as a journalist. There are references to his time as editor of the Spectator magazine, but little reflection on his media career more broadly, and nothing about his tenure with the Times, from which he was sacked for fabricating a quote.
The lack of reflection on his early life leaves the reader guessing at how his upbringing shaped his politics and behaviour. Johnson says little about his late mother, by all accounts an intelligent, kind and long-suffering woman, although the book is dedicated to her memory. (Johnson’s lamentation concerning the Christmas 2020 lockdown is accompanied by the melancholy reflection that he’d recently seen little of his mother, and this was likely to be her last Christmas.)
Nor is much said about his father Stanley’s distant, somewhat tyrannical place in Johnson’s childhood. A recent Channel 4 documentary subtly implies that Boris’s longstanding antagonism toward the European political project owed more to an internal rebellion against Stanley (himself a Europhile and Tory member of the European Parliament) than to any genuine conviction about the merits or otherwise of the European project. Johnson’s siblings, especially his sister Rachel, pop up fleetingly, usually on the other side of the Brexit divide. But given how prominent those familial psychodramas have been in the Johnson/Brexit story, it’s a pity they are so muted here.
Part of the book offers a rather triumphalist account of his tenure as mayor of London from 2008 to 2016 that leaves the distinct impression that it was in this “monarchical” role that he truly found his mojo, although he certainly doesn’t make such an admission himself. That said, he does eventually admit to having been guilty of arrogance in failing to realise how different being prime minister was from being the mayor of the English capital “in that you serve not just at the pleasure of the people but of your colleagues.” It’s the kind of lesson some recent Australian prime ministers have also learned the hard way.
The balance of the book is taken up by Johnson’s account of the Brexit referendum and its aftermath, a time in which he served as foreign secretary and, later, in the prime ministership. Unleashed offers a particularly spirited defence of the worth of the latter. Its case rests primarily on “getting Brexit done” but also takes in the soundness, as Johnson sees it, of the big calls made during the pandemic, the success of Britain’s vaccine rollout, his global leadership on climate change, and his country’s conspicuous and generous support for Ukraine following its invasion by Russia in February 2022. The latter provides plenty of opportunities for stirring rhetoric of a neo-Churchillian kind.
There’s also “levelling up,” by which Johnson means “spreading opportunity,” helping “kids with energy and talent” to thrive, bringing an “infrastructure revolution” to the country beyond London and closing the “gap between the least productive and most productive regions” (read: North and South, respectively) of Britain. After a decade of austerity, Johnson was unafraid of using public funds for developmental purposes. (He is no free market purist). “That’s how we were levelling up,” he writes, “using the billions of our budgets to trigger the trillions of global investment.”
The mantra is used ambiguously to cover a range of quite different problems, and the rhetoric becomes rather tedious. “Levelling up” gives a veneer of philosophical sophistication to a program that was, in practice, rather more improvised than Johnson would like to let on. By working as a reassurance to those already “up” that they won’t be dragged down, it resembles the “opportunity state” of 1950s Toryism (and, for that matter, the “ladder of opportunity” of early 2000s Australian Lathamism).
It is mainly fiction, of course. British Conservative or Conservative-led governments have since 2010 enthusiastically pursued policies that have worsened inequality, a state of affairs preserved by and on behalf of a tight-knit elite educated in posh private schools and at Oxbridge. Even that most successful of Olympic Games, of which Johnson is immensely proud, cannot mask the country’s torn social fabric, economic decay and crumbling infrastructure.
Johnson rejects the accusation commonly levelled against him that his leadership of the Vote Leave campaign in 2016 was determined by cynical opportunism. He emphasises his longstanding Euroscepticism and dislike of the restraints that EU membership imposed on Britain’s sovereignty and freedom. His argument against the European Union is not entirely consistent because in key respects, many of the major problems with Britain are, even by his own diagnosis, homegrown.
In fact, many aspects of Brexit are left unaddressed here, and plenty of old platitudes restated. The controversial red bus, with its slogan about redirecting £350 million pounds per week from the EU to the National Health Service, was perfectly true he tells us, because all of the “essential facts” were “on our side.” This kind of thing is characteristic of the way Johnson has tidied up the recent history of his country in an account of Brexit that also barely mentions the role played by anti-immigrant sentiment.
Amid Brexit, there was Covid-19. Indeed, that pandemic was such a devastating event that Johnson believes it took a great deal of the heat out of Brexit. His account of Covid is animated by a mixture of earnest recollections and sensational revelations. There are portrayals of meetings where ministers and officials debated lockdown decisions of enormous importance. There is the gripping account of Johnson’s own life-threatening dalliance with the disease. There is the controversial claim that he seriously considered amphibious military operations in the Netherlands to requisition hoarded AstraZeneca vaccines that belonged to Britain. Little wonder that Johnson can seem like a bit of a buffoon and his leadership of the country a travesty for those disinclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Britain suffered enormously in the pandemic, and by January 2022 the death toll had exceeded 175,000 people. Johnson has tried to convey the sense of panic, the speed at which leaders had to learn new ways of reading the world around them, the gravity of the choices on the table. He is understandably ebullient about the British vaccine rollout. Unlike Scott Morrison, he certainly understood that vaccination was very much a race. (Such an important race, apparently, that it might be worth invading the Netherlands to win.) Britain, rather like the United States, seems to have relied on a hedging process in contracting with the relevant companies, an approach recommended in the best economics on the subject.
But the pandemic is also the subject of Johnson’s most blatant dissembling. He provides little detail about the lucrative, and dubious, contracts for personal protective equipment under which the public paid vast sums that were pocketed by well-connected elites. He makes no attempt to answer the piercing questions raised by Britain’s Covid inquiry about the government’s sluggishness in taking infection-preventative measures, Johnson’s often lackadaisical approach to facts and evidence, the meddling of his chief adviser Dominic Cummings during the early part of the crisis, and the lack of advice informing chancellor Rishi Sunak’s expensive “eat out to help out” scheme — questions, in short, about the quality of Johnson’s leadership. In the hands of a Kevin Rudd or similar, such accusations would be obsessively rebutted over several chapters, but they are simply ignored in this book. That’s good for readability but less so for reliability.
As for that infamous partygate scandal, Unleashed’s account is risible. Rescinding all of his earlier apologies, Johnson now says that all those “completely untrue” stories of “drunkenness [and] dancing” were purveyed by “embittered former advisers” — again, Cummings is in view. What really happened, he says, was that there were just “fifteen events” throughout the whole pandemic where staff at Number 10 “briefly slackened the tempo of their work” and celebrated ordinary milestones, such as new jobs or birthdays, “in the way that all offices do.”
Reverting to his original lines of defence, Johnson says that everybody believed these events to be “in accordance with the rules” of lockdown; and for good measure he adds, “I still think they were.” The fact that a senior adviser, Allegra Stratton, had to resign after being caught laughing on camera about one such party belies these protestations, but her resignation is never mentioned here. Stratton does, however, appear in the book’s acknowledgements.
Sue Gray’s report on these shindigs, which Johnson commissioned, turned out to be nothing but a “ridiculous and unfair witch-hunt led by a woman who was to become — unbelievably — chief of staff to Keir Starmer.” Johnson professes to be a proud Elizabethan, but there is no reference here to the party in Downing Street on the eve of the late Prince Philip’s funeral in April 2021, for which he allegedly apologised to Her Majesty. Indeed, Johnson’s only regret about the whole partygate saga is that he didn’t spend more time giving “love and attention” to those Tory MPs who, as the scandals multiplied in 2022, became “homicidal” and started to imagine political life without him. We can only wonder whether these impressions were written with straight face or mischievous smirk.
The whiff of scandal, impropriety and mayhem that so often seemed to infuse the political career of Boris Johnson is largely smothered in Unleashed. One of his final prime ministerial acts was to bestow in his resignation honours list a life peerage on a junior staffer, twenty-nine-year-old Charlotte Owen, whose main contribution — if this book’s acknowledgements are a guide — was “pacifying the Tory backbench.” For that achievement, she is now Baroness Owen of Alderley Edge, with a seat in the House of Lords (unless it is reformed) for the rest of her life.
Like his political style more generally, Johnson’s account is emboldened by his refusal to have the parameters of his storytelling shaped by those in the habit of sneering at this sort of thing. Supposedly carping critics are airily dismissed throughout as “lefties,” the “liberal establishment,” “defeatists,” “Brussels,” or merely the hypocritical Labour residents of “stuccoed Islington mansions.”
And what of the marital dramas? We are told nothing about Johnson’s resignation from the opposition frontbench in 2005, triggered not because he had carried out an extramarital affair with a colleague at the Spectator for which he still worked, but rather because he had lied about it. (This, we should note, was his second marriage.) His four children with wife Marina occasionally appear. At some point, around the middle of the book, we simply stop hearing about “Marina and the kids” and we start to hear about “Carrie,” whom Johnson marries and has a baby with during his time at Number 10.
Speaking of Number 10, Johnson is also evasive about the manoeuvres that put him there, other than that Tory MPs had “started to turn” his way because they “were pretty desperate, and they had run out of better ideas.” He writes in indignant generalisations about the Brexit plans that forced his resignation from Theresa May’s government in 2018, and we never really do learn why her withdrawal agreement was so much poorer than the one he secured, given that both documents ultimately left major questions about the European Union’s border with Northern Ireland unsolved.
We do learn that he is deeply proud to have won the “Red Wall” constituencies that comprised such a big portion of his large majority following the 2019 election, which — to be fair — surely secures his place in British history as a formidable political warrior. It gives him status as something much more than a middling Tory leader of the Major or Cameron variety. Rather, at least from Johnson’s perspective, he belongs in a lineage with Disraeli, Churchill and Thatcher as an embodiment of the national spirit.
Ironically, however, it is Labour’s Tony Blair who sets the standard of political performance for Johnson and his generation of leading Tory politicians. Thatcher provides the backbone and the blood, but Blair is the flesh. And with Dominic Cummings by his side (for a while), Johnson centralised executive power in Downing Street as hadn’t been attempted since Blair’s day. We all know how this ended. The acknowledgements of this book run to five pages but Cummings is a name you won’t read among that numerous cast.
It was on the light-hearted and amusing current affairs program Have I Got News for You that Johnson first rose to genuine celebrity. The same Johnson — learned, witty and irreverent — is often on display in Unleashed. He is gifted in his turn of phrase, and often funny. In his account of the 2011 London riots, he notes that the one shop they didn’t loot was Waterstones, the booksellers. When Johnson tells prime minister David Cameron that he just might support the campaign to leave the European Union, the PM tells him, “I will fuck you up forever,” which prompts him to muse, “Did I want to be fucked up? Forever?”
His is a slightly cruel but nonetheless amusing description of Theresa May, whose nostrils (on which he admitted to being “fixated’) were “immensely long and pointy black tadpole shapes, like a Gerald Scarfe cartoon… she would twist her nose, as if to show them off.” One British woman diplomat “has a stylish dress sense, veering towards eccentricity, so that she sometimes looks a bit like a Quality Street wrapper.” Meanwhile, the permanent secretary in the Foreign Office “always looked, for some reason, as though he was wearing mascara.”
A slapstick account of the near disaster of a solo expedition in an inflatable kayak in Scotland becomes a rather forced metaphor for the unpalatable choices he faced as he led the country through the pandemic. To remain in the boat and risk ending up in the Atlantic, or to jump overboard and make for the shore? Then, in his account of the growing suspicion that Cummings was leaking against him from inside Downing Street, the smoking gun is an unflattering story about the behaviour of his dog Dilyn, told in such a rollicking style that it comes to resemble a children’s story calling out for coloured illustrations.
Later, when hosting COP26 in Glasgow, he encounters Leonardo DiCaprio, who desires the use of his loo. Johnson tries to persuade him also to visit the “overworked and brilliant young women” supporting the British hosting effort. Here, Johnson’s persuasive efforts fail, and he reflects that a similar request to any of Biden, Macron, Modi, Merkel and 120 other leaders would have worked. Such is modern celebrity. In any case, the team responds by renaming the star “Leonardo DiCrapio.” It’s all good, knockabout stuff.
Then there are the nicknames he bestows on colleagues and opponents. These aren’t of the same calibre as the ones Australian readers encountered in The Latham Diaries nearly twenty years ago, but they are punchy nonetheless. Baroness Brenda Hale of the UK Supreme Court is dubbed “Spiderwoman.” Chancellor Philip Hammond is “Spreadsheet Phil,” his successor Sajid Javid “The Saj” (a nickname, Johnson points out, that Javid had actually bestowed upon himself). Theresa May is “grumpyknickers,” and Labour leader Keir Starmer a bewildering range of epithets including “human weathervane,” “rapist-releasing Remoaner,” “human bollard” and the distinctly (Roald) Dahlian “Sir Crasheroonie Snoozefest.”
Not incidentally, the Starmer monikers appear in a chapter that is wholly about the political spectacle of Prime Minister’s Questions. Johnson fails to acknowledge, though, that such attacks caused genuine public disorder when he accused Starmer of “prosecuting journalists and failing to prosecute Jimmy Saville” during the future Labour leader’s tenure as director of public prosecutions.
Johnson’s vocabulary, and cultural and literary range — from the Greek classics to The Terminator — are formidably wide and rich. His is a worldview inhabited by the imperial adventurism of Flashman and the post-imperial irony of Yes, Minister. During a major speech to the Confederation of British Industry in 2021 designed “to explain the magic of British creativity” he extemporised on the merits of the children’s cartoon character, Peppa Pig. It is entirely to his credit that, in this instance, Johnson makes no effort to obscure the fact that he made a complete ass of himself. That said, it is of a piece with the somewhat self-deprecating, bumbling, shambling political style that Johnson cultivated, and which he again performs here, in print, for his readers.
Australia and its representatives rarely have much of a role in British prime ministerial memoirs, but they enjoy a distinct place in Boris Johnson’s political imagination. The strengthening of links with old Commonwealth family was integral to Johnson’s post-Brexit vision of “Global Britain,” another of his favourite catchphrases.
In 2020, he waved a family pack of Tim Tams before a camera to illustrate to friends down under the benefits of a free-trade agreement with Britain. “I want a world in which we send you Marmite, you send us Vegemite,” he explained to Australian viewers on social media. This move to defeat what amounted to an 80 per cent tariff on Tim Tams might have made Johnson a Cobden-style hero in his own mind, but in Unleashed he says absolutely nothing of the trade deal with Australia, which took effect in 2023.
What Australia does offer, to Johnson’s mind, is a proclivity for politicking. The Australians who appear in Johnson’s memoir belong to a transnational network of conservative operatives. There’s Lynton Crosby, “the political strategist who had propelled John Howard to several victories.” Renowned for his “brutal Australian frankness,” Crosby was invited to join Johnson’s 2008 mayoral campaign and agreed to do so on the proviso that the candidate agreed to “focus.”
There’s also James McGrath, who worked on Johnson’s 2008 mayoral campaign. McGrath — “Poor James,” Johnson calls him — had to leave the team after some “crass” comments to a reporter about black Londoners, but it was all fine in the end for he “went on to great things in Australia” as a senator.
Australia first appears in Unleashed as an aside in Johnson’s 2019 election victory speech (reproduced in the text), in which he promises the people of Britain an “Australian-style points-based immigration system.” Later on, Johnson describes John Howard as “the great Australian former prime minister” who had solved the problem of “illegal immigrants landing in boats.” That solution, which we knew as the Pacific Solution, was “not perfect” according to Johnson, but it “was a massive deterrent.”
The Rwanda scheme, in which the British government proposed to send its growing number of refugees to the African republic for processing and resettlement, is the British version of Howard’s extraterritorial detention centres. Australia’s most profound recent export to Britain is not Tim Tams or Vegemite; it is the offshore processing of refugees.
At the heart of Johnson’s vision there is a quiet, often unspoken imperial nostalgia. Like the historian Niall Ferguson, Johnson thinks we’re often too harsh in our criticisms of the British Empire. Though he notes that there were “truly shocking things” done by the British “in the name of empire,” Britain “did some good things” too. Consequently, the world today wants “more Britain, not less.” Britain’s turn away from the Commonwealth and towards Europe in the 1960s and 1970s figures, for Johnson, as tragedy, as he believes it was for Australia, some of whose “farmers actually shot themselves in despair at the loss of access to UK markets.”
Scott Morrison was certainly thinking about reinvigorating the Anglosphere when he arrived at Carbis Bay in Cornwall to meet with Johnson and Joe Biden on the side of the G7 summit in 2021. As told in Unleashed, Morrison was “in a quandary” and seeking “UK help.” His predecessor, Malcolm Turnbull, had done a “deal” with the French for the provision of Australia’s new fleet of submarines, but now there was a fear that Australia was “buying an obsolete vessel” and its admirals were “in a state of some anxiety.”
The solution was AUKUS, a tripartite agreement for the sharing of defence capabilities between Britain, the United States and Australia, whose centrepiece would be the acquisition of a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines for Australia. In Johnson’s telling, it is he and Biden who do all the talking in the crucial, “discreet three-way meeting,” and if Morrison said anything at all it is not documented here. Morrison’s main contribution was to bring an imperative for secrecy, lest the French find out what these men were up to. (In fairness, Johnson said in an interview with 60 Minutes that it was Morrison who “conceived” AUKUS, and that he was merely the “midwife.” What that made Biden, exactly, is never specified.) Johnson dismisses French grievances about AUKUS as simply “the raucous squawkus from the anti-Aukus caucus.”
Unleashed doesn’t conclude with a printed copy of Johnson’s nomination form for the next election, but it nonetheless sets out a rationale for any future comeback he might make on the British and global stages. Ever the Churchill enthusiast, Johnson would know how Britain’s wartime leader used his own war memoirs to write himself back into office in 1951, as David Reynolds has shown.
This aspect of the book has perhaps been overstated in some of the publicity, but clearly Johnson’s political aspirations are far from finished. When his successor Liz Truss announced her resignation in October 2022, he immediately cancelled his Caribbean holiday and returned to see if he could perform a resurrection that would only have fallen short of Jesus’s original by a mere six weeks. He says nothing of that episode here, but he is seemingly keen to leave his options open. “You should only get involved if you really think you can be useful,” he writes enigmatically. •
