As a “chastened” Tory Party convened for its conference this week, and the wider country remained mired in the gloom that has enveloped it since Keir Starmer’s “loveless victory”, excerpts from Boris Johnson’s soon-to-be-released memoir provided a “much-needed tonic”, said the Daily Mail (which had acquired the serialisation rights).
In them, the former PM gives a vivid account of his leadership during the Covid crisis: he describes how close he came to “carking it” when he was hospitalised with the virus in April 2020; he describes his elation (“kerchingeroo”) at the success of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine; he recalls how – when the EU impounded millions of doses in a Dutch warehouse – he asked if British Special Forces could be deployed to retrieve them (before dismissing the idea as “nuts”); and he insists that the reports of wild parties and other breaches of Covid rules at Downing Street were absurdly overblown by his political foes and embittered former advisers. “I saw no cake,” he says. “I ate no blooming cake. If this was a party, it was the feeblest event in the history of human festivity.”
‘Spiffing anecdotes’ don’t ring quite true
Cripes! Big Dog is back, said Alice Thomson in The Times, with a memoir that is packed with “derring-do, jolly japes” and “alluring alliteration”. Unleashed is clearly great fun: much more so than anything produced by David Cameron or the “wilting lettuce”. But then you remember: this “clown” was PM during a global pandemic; and he produces this – a book with little serious analysis, it seems, but lots of “spiffing anecdotes” that don’t ring quite true. Did he really plan to invade a Nato ally? Was he really swept out to sea in an Argos inflatable kayak in Scotland, in 2020? Did he really see no cake? I know three people who were there and say that he was definitely “ambushed” by one.
Amusing stories mixed with ‘personal attacks’
Most political memoirs are exercises in spin, said Sean O’Grady in The Independent; but they usually make some effort to “meet the truth halfway”. Johnson, by contrast, continues to insist that he was unfairly drummed out of office – but gives no detailed account of where and how Sue Gray, or the Standards Committee, erred in their judgements. Similarly, he asserts that he now thinks the Covid virus was created in a Chinese lab, yet doesn’t say what has led him to that conclusion, or why he thought otherwise at the time.
This lazy book seems to amount to a string of amusing, if self-mythologising, stories mixed with “personal attacks” on people who got in his way. Some of them – such as his “misogynistic” stab at Theresa May, whose nostrils he dwells on – are unworthy even of him.