'Unleashed' review: Boris Johnson’s excuses wear thin for George Parker

April 2022: Dominic Raab, Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak following the then-PM’s partygate statement | Image by: Gavin Rodgers / Alamy Stock Photo

Boris Johnson’s hero Winston Churchill is famously supposed to have said: “History will judge me kindly, for I intend to write it.” And so it is that Johnson, over more than 700 pages, attempts the same feat: “If you want your laurels burnished these days, you’d better do it yourself.”

It is only just over two years since he was ousted from Downing Street but it feels like longer. Johnson, so closely associated with the scarring episodes of Brexit and Covid, is a part of the country’s history many would rather forget.

With Unleashed, Johnson gives his side of the story, covering his time as mayor of London, foreign secretary and prime minister, a self-serving account which is nevertheless more readable than most political memoirs. Perhaps he should have stuck to writing.

When I ran the FT’s Brussels office I urged colleagues to read Johnson’s journalism from his time covering the EU. Not – I hasten to add – to learn lessons from his forensic respect for detail and truth, but because of the sheer vim and wit with which he told his story.

The same goes for Unleashed, a partial account which contains self-deprecation but little in the way of genuine self-examination of some of the episodes that scarred faith in Britain’s public life and ultimately saw him ousted after being condemned for lying to Parliament.

Johnson’s excuses run pretty thin, pretty quickly. He continues to cling to the idea that the “partygate” scandal was not really a scandal at all, rather that it was whipped up by a vengeful Dominic Cummings, out for revenge after his sacking a year earlier.

He blames himself for being too “naive and trusting” in believing Cummings and his ludicrous eyesight-testing excuse for breaking Covid rules, rather than question why he put such great power in the aide in the first place.

He blames himself for being too ‘naive and trusting’ in believing Cummings

As his premiership collapsed and his reputation for probity disintegrated, Johnson says his “failing” was that “too often I would go back to the No 10 flat, tired out, and work in the evening” when he should have been back-slapping Tory MPs.

He blames David Cameron for failing to come up with a plan for delivering Brexit – Johnson did not seem to think he had some responsibility for thinking it through. “It was not our job,” he protests.

As for Covid, he reveals that he was warned that “only” two per cent of those infected could die, but didn’t bother to do some basic maths to work out that meant hundreds of thousands might perish.

Johnson dwells on the positives, including his handsome majority in 2019, his successful promotion of Britain’s green energy transition and his early support for Ukraine after Russia’s invasion.

His commitment to levelling up comes through and it is possible that, if Covid had not blown a £400bn hole in the public finances, it could have turned out to be more than just a slogan. Johnson was a “good time” prime minister, ill-suited to leading a country in very dark times.

He concludes that he has “no idea” whether he will try to return to the Commons. You would be daft to write him off, but Unleashed already feels like a memoir to a very different political time. Is it possible that the country has moved on?

George Parker is political editor of the Financial Times

Unleashed
By: Boris Johnson
Publisher: William Collins

PoliticsHome Newsletters

Get the inside track on what MPs and Peers are talking about. Sign up to The House's morning email for the latest insight and reaction from Parliamentarians, policy-makers and organisations.