Unleashed

It’s taken me a while to wade through Boris Johnson’s enormous valedictory tome, ‘Unleashed’ but having reviewed several harsh critiques of his Premiership (eg Anthony Seldon’s Boris at 10), I felt it right to hear his side of the story. ‘Hear’ is the right word, for his voice is eloquent and authentic. It is a hugely entertaining volume; if only he could govern as well as he can write! Typically, he is strong on vision but weak on inconvenient details. He is interesting and insightful when describing his swashbuckling tenure as Mayor of London, or globetrotting as a Foreign Secretary delighting in defending a Brexit that most international observers never really understood. Amid the torrent of trademark bombast, comes the occasional glimpse of rueful self-awareness, but he is generally unrepentant and suggests that his country may still need him one day. He is rightly proud of his record on Ukraine but on the issues that ultimately led to his downfall, there is still a massive blind spot. 710 pages in, he reflects on the injustice of it all, and catalogues his many achievements. He was building forty new hospitals; he’s tackled social care; he was building HS2 all the way … and much else. Except of course, he hadn’t, and his successors had to roll back on the unfunded rhetoric. In the end you can’t go through public life with such disregard for the truth. But as a writer, maybe you can!