Boris Johnson’s former cabinet colleague Amber Rudd has attacked him as “two-faced” and “untruthful” ahead of his memoir’s release on Thursday.
Ex-home secretary Rudd, who once said Johnson is the “life and soul of the party but not the man you want driving you home at the end of the evening”, wrote in The Independent that his new book Unleashed shows his “split personality” and reads like “Billy Bunter let loose in Westminster”.
Johnson’s memoir has been long-awaited: in January last year, his register of interests revealed he had received a £510,000 advance, well above the £7,674 his successor Liz Truss received for her book 10 Years To Save The West.
And perhaps unsurprisingly, given Johnson is one of the most polarising figures in UK politics, Unleashed has received both positive and negative reviews from critics.
Read the reviews of the book from our media partners below and click the links to skip ahead.
> Boris Johnson bangs his own drum in his memoir, Unleashed, and fair enough
> Boris Johnson’s Unleashed: A memoir that’s twisted, sour and full of yet more lies
> Boris Johnson writes better than any other politician – his memoir is proof
> Unleashed by Boris Johnson review – memoirs of a clown
Boris Johnson bangs his own drum in his memoir, Unleashed, and fair enough
This is of course the former PM’s opportunity to get things off his chest, and where others pay for their therapy, the reader pays for Boris’s.
He’s got a lot to say about where things have gone wrong for the Tories in the last election – see chapter 59. He is right to point out that he got a full ten points more in votes in his last election than Keir Starmer did in July. Boris, running on the “Get Brexit Done” ticket was one of the great populist vote winners of modern politics.
Where he’s less good is in analysing how he failed to live up to his own very real promise.
Boris Johnson’s Unleashed: A memoir that’s twisted, sour and full of yet more lies
Lacking the benefit of Boris Johnson’s fine classical education – which is shown off liberally, once again, in his unreliable memoir Unleashed – I’m unable to quote with any sense of confidence whatever the antonym of mea culpa might be in Latin.
So we’ll have to stick to English instead, and suggest that this book should best be subtitled “Not me, guv”.
No opportunity to deflect blame is passed up: no scapegoat permitted to escape the tether; and no inconvenient truths intrude on what has been portrayed, by his old comrade Nadine Dorries, as a tragic fall from grace of Shakespearean proportions.
Boris Johnson writes better than any other politician – his memoir is proof
Unleashed is incomparably more readable than a standard political memoir. Yet I felt a little locked out of Johnson’s inner life.
He revels in daft wheezes: venturing out to sea in an inflatable kayak, planning to invade Holland, signing the Northern Ireland Protocol, proposing a bridge over the Channel. Some are reminiscent of Churchill, in whose siren suit Johnson sees himself. The best in this vein was his defence of Ukraine, which looked principled.
A breezy Wodehousian persona wafts the reader along, past corners where awkward events lurk.
Unleashed by Boris Johnson review – memoirs of a clown
Written once their authors have lost power, most prime ministerial memoirs try at some level to be reflective. David Cameron’s begins by confessing that he still has daily anxieties about having called the Brexit referendum. John Major’s starts even more disarmingly, by wondering why he went into politics at all.
But Boris Johnson does not do reflective. He never has and he never will. And nor does his new memoir, with its unnerving title, Unleashed. It covers his time as London mayor, Brexit campaigner, foreign secretary and prime minister. But if it is heart-searching and confessions you seek from the pen of Britain’s most iconoclastic prime minister, you can stop now.
This is not “the political memoir of the century” as the Daily Mail has been billing it for the past week. Or, if it is, an unrewarding 76 years lie ahead for the publishing industry.
