Book Review, ‘Unleashed’ by Boris Johnson

Always Worth Saying, Going Postal
Boris and books.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson carrying first editions of Winston Churchill’s books,
Number 10
Licence CC BY-SA 2.0

The second-ever greatest Johnson of words, Samuel, the 18th-century lexicographer, informs us, “When a man is tired of London he is tired of life”. Three centuries later, no matter what we think of life we’re all bored rigid with the London-based media-political-legal elite droning on about London, London, London and London with a bit of extra London thrown in, just in case.

In ‘Unleashed’, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson begins his ‘unmissable, unvarnished memoirs’ with the Brexit parliamentary log-jam of Autumn 2019. Following a brief visit to that December’s general election, he flashes back to his time as mayor of London, the part of his political career he enjoyed the most.

For the non-metropolitan, beginning this sequence of chapters with one entitled ‘The Greatest City on Earth’ rankles. As does, despite the author’s inimitable light-hearted delivery, endless talk of the London Olympics, Boris bikes, race riots that dare not be called race riots and London busses.

No matter what the topic, Johnson tries too hard to entertain. Over-abundant stylistic flourishes become tiresome as the 60-year-old shows off rather than tells a good story, as if the cheekiest little boy in the class breaking a leg to outdo the other boys in making the girls giggle.

Little insight into Johnson the man is offered. Only an intermittent and selective light is shone upon Boris the politician. Significant chunks of his career are missing, including the 2019 Get Brexit Done election campaign. The narrative jumps to an election night which secured the 80 majority surprise that further triggered and dismayed the out-of-touch Remainer elite in the aforementioned self-obsessed village of London.

In passing, we learn the former prime minister and mayor was born in New York where parents Stanley and Charlotte were students. Stanley was to become important in something global and now has a farm in Exmoor. When small, Boris lived in Brussels, which is where he first met his long-suffering second ex-wife Marina. The tale is told as an aside when referencing the ways of the EU with no mention of courtship or a wedding day, nor of his first wife.

Poor Marina (nee Wheeler), the mother of four of his children, doesn’t even appear in the index, despite space being made in the ‘M’s for Andrew Marr and Meghan Markle. If you want to find out more, reach for wiki. There you will discover Marina to be the daughter of Charles Wheeler, the husky-voiced former foreign correspondent and, when in the programme’s heydey, BBC Panorama anchor. Born in West Berlin, she first met Boris when they were pupils at the International School of Brussels. Ominously, present wife Carrie (nee Simmonds) also fails to appear in the index.

Put-downs aimed at political rivals are pithy but tell us no more than we already know. Johnson’s former chancellor, Sajid Javid, is ‘refreshingly free from self-doubt’, refers to himself as ‘the Saj’ and takes credit for too many advances for the human race. From privatising the Post Office to – the author speculates – the invention of the non-stick pan. Mrs May is a self-righteous school ma’am. A political cross-dressing vicar’s daughter, her demeanour is likened to a Gerald Scarfe cartoon capable of rolling its eyes.

In contrast and perhaps with an eye for some discreet, well-paid PR lobbying in a column (or even a memoir), Boris is more enthusiastic about Mohammed Bin Salman, de facto ruler of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. He who gives the orders for the bone saw dismembering of inconvenient journalists.

Boris announces MBS, via a Tony Blair quote, as ‘the hope of the region’. Mr Johnson, himself a journalist via the Telegraph and Spectator and now with the Daily Mail, lauds the Saudi crown prince for allowing women to drive and for making it safe to walk the streets of Jeddah and Riyadh. Unless, perhaps, you’re Jamal Khashoggi of the Washington Post en route to a chopping up.

The disingenuity turns to error when Johnson confuses zoonotic (his word not mine) catastrophes, attributing the ‘tallow-fuelled plumes of black smoke’ rising from ‘hecatombs’ to mad cow disease rather than to foot and mouth disease. Remaining with mad cow disease, rather than turn the brain to mush, it causes ‘Gruyere-like cavities’. Gruyere being an alpine cheese from the North London dinner parties that Boris professes never to attend when challenged by a civil servant that a particular policy will appeal only to the frequeners of such.

Beyond being mistaken or skipping over the actualités, one point where the book is wrong to the point of being dishonest is in the re-telling of the story of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe.

Puffins are already aware Ratcliffe was part of a ham-fisted attempt to overthrow the Iranian regime via citizen journalists embedded in the country using local social media to disseminate anti-regime propaganda fed from London to kick off a ‘coloured’ revolution. See a previous G-P article, ‘Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe & The Propaganda War Against Iran’ for further details.

Foreign secretary at the time of Mrs Ratcliffe’s incarceration cum house arrest in Iran, Johnson gave the game away by telling a select committee Ratcliffe was in Iran ‘training journalists’. In fact, her cover was of being on a family holiday to show her daughter to her Iranian parents. In the book, Johnson backpedals from his initial comments to claiming Ratcliffe once worked for the news agency Thomson Reuters. We know better.

Similar gaffes, errors and dishonesties are justified not as being mistakes but as unavoidable mistakes born of contradicting his otherwise impeccable instincts. Political rival rotters such as Cameron and May, and those dreadful things called events, oft leading the former MP for Uxbridge and for South Ruislip astray.

Far from being what the Daily Mail straplines as ‘The Political Memoir of the Century’ (surprise, surprise the DM is where Johnson is now washed up), ‘Unleased’ is a good enough read but a surprisingly lightweight series of selective political vignettes.

At eight hundred pages of biggish print and smallish chapters, it is recommended reading as being well-written – albeit in that grating style – and the author does entertain in small doses.

Finishing it off in one sitting for, say, a review, is too much to expect. You will give up at about page 433 and rely upon the subsequent chapter titles to get the jist of the second half of the book. Judging by those headings, the rest of the work covers the vaccine, Partygate and 2022’s intensification of the war between Ukraine and Russia.

Rather than being truly Unleashed, Johnson appears constrained — perhaps saving weightier revelations for a second volume looking behind the clownish facade.

No matter, Johnson thrashes the Marquis de Sade and ‘120 Days of Sodom’ by being the 42nd most popular book on Amazon. A parody is available, given the shallowness of Johnson’s effort, perhaps best thought of as a parody of a parody. Ian Martin’s ‘Unhinged’ sits a respectable 3,795th in the best sellers, somehow rising to be 54th in the Religious History of Christianity chart.

Returning to the real thing, a £30 cover price is a bit steep, check out the discount sellers. Unlikely to be coffee table fodder or worth of a second read, no doubt charity shops and bargain basement bookshop bins will soon allow for further discounts.
 

© Always Worth Saying 2024