Hanging on Every Word

By no means an entirely convincing apologia, Boris Johnson’s political memoirs are nonetheless immensely readable, writes IPA Communications Manager Michael Barrett.

In early 2008 I visited Richard Nixon’s birthplace, and the extensive presidential library and museum that adjoin it, at Yorba Linda, in south-eastern Los Angeles. I was struck by the sweep and variety of Nixon’s achievements; first as a congressman who helped uncover the extent of communist infiltration of American institutions, then as a Vice President regularly required to perform the duties of an incapacitated President Eisenhower and, finally, as an historically significant President who won and held office in two landslide elections.

My visit should have ended with the Watergate exhibit, but this was closed for renovation. No matter; whatever the exhibit’s tone, however Nixon’s involvement in the scandal might have been portrayed, one could not leave Yorba Linda without thinking a great political career was defined, and forever tarnished, by the manner of its conclusion.

I experienced much the same feeling as I read Unleashed, Boris Johnson’s political memoirs.

Do not be misled by the vast army of Boris haters. His achievements—first, as Mayor of London, then as Foreign Secretary in the government of Theresa May, and finally as Prime Minister from July 2019 to September 2022—were formidable.

These are detailed more or less chronologically, though he opens with Britain’s exit from the European Union, achieved in the face of concerted opposition from those who somehow questioned the validity of the June 2016 referendum and, predictably, saw Johnson’s thumping victory in the December 2019 general election as in no way a mandate to “Get Brexit Done”.

RUNNING LONDON

As Mayor of London, from 2008 to 2016, Johnson was determined to raise the fortunes of what he clearly believes is the greatest city on earth.

With an acuity that too many politicians in Australia lack, Johnson recognised that the new housing developments London needed could only proceed if the necessary transport connections were in place. He therefore championed the underground Crossrail project (now the Elizabeth Line), and rejected the proposition that this could only be achieved at the expense of £20 billion worth of Tube upgrades (“My approach to cake, as noted elsewhere, is pro having it and pro eating it”).

“By the end of my eight years the whole city was richer.”

Significant housing projects included the redevelopment of the iconic but derelict Battersea power station, around which 30,000 new homes have been built, and the former Olympic Park site.

He devotes much enthusiastic attention to the 2012 Summer Olympic Games and, in particular, his determination that the games prove of lasting value to the city. He claims this was achieved “on a scale that far exceeded even my own expectations”. The old Olympic site in East London is now a flourishing cultural centre and tech hub, and: “Property values rose faster in those Olympic boroughs—Hackney, Newham, Waltham Forest—than anywhere else in London. Even as I write, more than ten years later, this project continues to accrete thousands more jobs and thousands more homes.”

He oversaw a steep decline in the incidence of knife crime, thanks to a stop and search policy that took 10,000 knives off the streets. The overall murder rate also fell by 50 per cent, to about one hundred a year, “an astonishingly low number for a city as huge and diverse as London”.

A famously keen cyclist, who believes cycling is good for the environment, for traffic flow, and for human vitality, Johnson takes credit for what he calls “The Cycling Revolution”. By putting in place the necessary infrastructure, and insisting all road users—cyclists included—obeyed the law, he ensured London’s roads could be safely shared. Despite the adverse publicity generated by a rise in cycling related fatalities—when a lot more people take to bikes, more are going to die—by 2016, 20 per cent of all vehicles in central London were bicycles.

“By the end of my eight years, the population of London had grown by about a million, but the whole city was richer. We started with four of the six poorest boroughs in the whole of the UK. We ended up with none of the bottom twenty.”

Johnson loves a good segue, and there’s perhaps none better than the two paragraphs with which he closes his account of his time as Mayor of London and prepares the reader for his “Confessions of a Eurosceptic”:

At any rate, there was a time when I could have gone to a north London dinner party and not have been pelted with focaccia. I wouldn’t say that polite metropolitan opinion loved me, but they thought on the whole that I wasn’t too bad.

What they had not been reading, of course, was my vast twenty-year back catalogue of articles about the European Union.

THE LEAVE CAMPAIGN

Boris Johnson is by no means anti-European. He revels in the diversity of nations; born in, and a lover of, the United States, he celebrates an Ottoman great grandfather—the liberal journalist and politician Ali Kemal (1869-1922)— as well as distant Jewish forebears. He claims to be both a Sinophile and a Russophile. His chapter on the UK’s relationship with India is genuinely heartfelt. Having spent some of his childhood and several years as a journalist in Brussels, he speaks good French.

But he is a realist, who recognised in the European Union’s push for ever closer unification of its member states a requirement for them to cede ever more national sovereignty.

In a much earlier book, The Dream of Rome, he had examined how the Roman Empire had achieved political and cultural unity across most of the European continent and contrasted this with the EU’s failing attempt to do something similar. In Unleashed, he briefly revisits this comparison: “Rome’s success depended, among other things, on the use of systematic military violence, common taxation, common languages and a cult of emperor worship.”

Denied recourse to brute force, the elites in Brussels and Strasbourg have instead sought to create and enforce European homogeneity by way of the gradual erosion of national differences, sending recalcitrant nations back to the polls if their people dare to reject the latest EU treaty.

So it was, after much anguished soul searching we are assured, Johnson joined the Leave campaign, soon becoming one of its two most prominent personalities (the other being Nigel Farage).

He was surprised by the result of the referendum, and even more so by David Cameron’s abrupt resignation as Prime Minister, freely admitting the Leave leaders were wrong footed by the turn of events.

David Cameron was expected to speak to the nation; yes, there he was, with Sam Cam by his side, and my God, he was actually stepping down. Forthwith.

He wasn’t going to oversee the implementation of the people’s will—even though he had asked them to decide. He was off.

He was walking back inside the black door and whistling some jaunty air, as though to say to us, the victors—right, you tossers, you’ve made this mess. Now you sort it out.

I thought it was the wrong thing to do, and a bit petulant. Plenty of other European leaders sustain referendum defeats and carry on with their duties.

Now what the hell were we supposed to do?

Perversely, the Tories chose another Remainer, Theresa May, to become Prime Minister and lead the UK out of Europe. Earlier, Johnson had announced his candidacy for the party’s leadership, with another Leaver, Michael Gove, as his running mate. At the last minute, however, Gove announced his own candidacy for the top job, and an aggrieved Johnson withdrew from the race.

FOREIGN AFFAIRS

In 2016 Theresa May surprised Johnson by offering him the job of Foreign Secretary. As with the chapters on his mayoralty, Johnson’s account of his time in charge of the UK’s foreign policy is a potted history of what he considers his most important successes (along with the odd failure).

And to his credit, he never wavers in his commitment to Brexit. Just a couple of months into his time as Foreign Secretary, he found himself on a yacht on Boston Harbour, along with US Secretary of State John Kerry and a bevy of European foreign ministers. Touching upon the subject of the Brexit referendum result, Kerry turned to Johnson and said, “Can’t you walk that thing back?” Suspecting that this might in fact have been the purpose of the gathering, Johnson’s reaction was pure Boris.

I saw what I had to do. I had to make it absolutely clear to John Kerry that he was deluded if he thought we were going to reverse the decision, and to get that point across in a way that made sense to an American.

“See that over there,” I said, and all eyes swivelled as I gestured in the direction of Boston harbourfront. “Remember what happened on that quayside in 1776,” I said (actually it was 1773, but the point was still good). “You guys threw our tea into the sea.” It was the Boston Tea Party, and the beginning of the American Revolution, I said, because you guys—I meant the Americans—decided that you did not want to be ruled from overseas by a government over which you had no control.

“That’s what it was all about, and that’s what Brexit is all about,” I said; and I thought it was a pretty sizzling return of serve.

As Foreign Secretary, Johnson was a level-headed realist, acknowledging the limits of Britain’s hard power, while insisting that the UK could still serve a useful global purpose. He was ever mindful of earlier British military interventions, notably in Iraq and Libya, which had ended ignominiously. In 2016 he inherited an appalling situation in Syria, caused in large part, he believes, by the West’s feebleness in the face of atrocities committed by Bashar al-Assad against his own people, with the active connivance of Putin’s Russia.

However, on 7 April 2017, the UK joined the US and France in missile strikes against strategic Syrian sites in response to the Assad government’s poisoning of civilians in the town of Khan Shaykhun. Johnson makes this observation: “It was Barack Obama, the moralising liberal internationalist, who had let Assad get away with using chemical weapons. It was Trump, the cynic and dealmaker, who did the principled thing and retaliated in the name of humanity. I only point it out.”

Among his achievements as Foreign Secretary, Johnson numbers the unexpectedly decisive and unified response of the civilised world to Putin’s poisoning of Russian exiles living in the UK. This coordinated response (which included the expulsion of an unprecedented 60 Russian ‘diplomats’ by the United States) was the result of vigorous lobbying by the Foreign Office.

He was also a passionate ambassador for the right of girls to an education, noting the absurdity of less developed countries hobbling themselves by denying half their population the opportunity to become informed and productive citizens. He concludes: “There are too many (male-dominated) governments that are either actively conniving in or indifferent to female illiteracy; and the entire development industry, from top to bottom, is too drenched in political correctness to tell them so.”

Significantly, Johnson was and remains a huge supporter of Ukrainian resistance to Russian aggression, and chastises the West for appeasing Putin at the time of the initial invasion of Crimea in 2014. He fears that any weakening of such support will only encourage the great tyrannies and kleptocracies of the world.

As Foreign Secretary, Johnson appreciated Britain’s historic impact on the globe— much of it for the good—and, by implication, the potential for good that British soft power still has.

He never wavers in his commitment to Brexit.

On more than one occasion, Johnson pointedly refers to a lack of support from the Prime Minister on particular issues, intimating that Theresa May was at times driven less by principle than a wariness of her ambitious Foreign Secretary.

Their greatest disagreement was, inevitably, over the sort of Brexit the Tories would deliver. Johnson recognised the folly of those ‘BRINO’ models (Brexit In Name Only) which would have entailed Britain remaining subject to EU laws and trade rules, while having no say in their development and ratification. This, he knew, was not what Britons had voted for in 2016.

For some reason he makes no mention of the circumstances of May’s downfall, which came about after her disastrous decision to go to the polls early, in June 2017, and her subsequent failure to persuade the Commons (including many of her own MPs) to approve several versions of Brexit. Rather, in Part Five, he jumps straight to his time at 10 Downing Street.

DOWNING STREET

And it is a significant premiership. Within a few months of the 2019 general election, Johnson was confronted by the spectre of pandemic and all the bleak decision making that entailed. As the number of deaths from Covid rose sharply in March 2020, the new Prime Minister was obliged to choose between two mutually exclusive courses of action: attempt to contain the pandemic by means of lockdown or preserve the “ancient and hallowed liberties” of the British people and let the pandemic take its human toll.

Johnson’s handling of the pandemic was famously interrupted by his personal experience of the virus, which saw him hospitalised and in intensive care. But by any metric, the UK’s management of the pandemic was superior to that of comparable countries. Vaccines were ordered, secured and administered at a much faster rate than in EU countries, something Johnson attributes to the room for movement bestowed by Brexit.

But great damage had been done by the perceived need for lockdown: “When we went into lockdown, we had been frankly so scared about loss of life that we had barely had time to think of the social and economic consequences. It was only now, as the virus began to ebb, that the damage was becoming clear.”

Describing Covid as “the very opposite of levelling up” —the notion that people can be raised out of disadvantage by such things as a fair wage, home ownership, efficient public transport, better education and access to broadband—Johnson sought to undo the damage done by the closure of schools by implementing an ambitious tutoring program.

But Covid also had political consequences, and Johnson sensed that the hard times ahead would endanger the unprecedented support he had won from aspirational voters in the UK’s north and Midlands at the 2019 general election. On a brighter note, however, Johnson decided that Covid could empower the UK in its protracted negotiations over the terms of Brexit: “The only way to get a good deal was to be ready for no-deal, and Covid had showed that we could sustain immense logistical disruption and survive. It was time to play hardball.”

Boris has notable blind spots.

In the face of German and French intransigence, and their attempts to weaponise the border between the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland, the Tories passed the UK Internal Market Bill, which Johnson believes “checkmated the EU”. It was massively controversial legislation but Johnson remains unapologetic, as he views it as a key step towards a Brexit deal of which he remains proud.

As a man whose eyes are always squarely on the prize, Boris has notable blind spots. His Damascene-like conversion to all things “renewable” at the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009 is a case in point. As he carefully avoids the detail of what actually won him over, implicit in his conversion is the belief that the science is settled. Those of us who have read Climate Change: The Facts know this to be a fallacy.

Johnson’s chapter headed “Saving the Planet” is an enthusiastic catalogue of the technologies he championed as PM to replace coal fired power stations. Not once however, does he acknowledge the fact that the immense risks and expense involved in such a transition will not change the temperature of the planet one jot.

DOWNFALL

And so, to the Watergate exhibit. Johnson is clearly exasperated by the circumstances of his downfall, blaming in turn embittered former advisers, ambitious Cabinet colleagues, and hostile media. But in the end it was the Tory party room which showed him the door. I always assumed that given what an electoral asset he had proven in 2019, this was not a decision taken lightly. But Johnson is of another view. He believes that at least half the backbench had always disliked him, envying his seemingly effortless political success or blaming him for their own failure to rise through the ranks. When the cabinet deserted him, with 62 of his ministerial colleagues resigning, it was all over (“If Caesar had 23 stab wounds from his assassins, I ended up with 62 … ”).

On the subject of ‘Partygate’—“This miserable and wildly inflated affair” —Johnson insists there were no parties, just colleagues in a highly charged workplace enjoying a drink at their desks or gathering in small numbers to farewell a colleague. He does concede, however, that if there were office parties of which he was unaware, he should have prevented these early on by emphasising to his staff the need to live and work strictly by the rules.

He is entirely dismissive of civil servant Sue Gray’s report into the affair, noting that some of its allegations had to be subsequently withdrawn, that Gray had previously been approached to be chief of staff to former Labour Leader Ed Miliband, and that she would eventually serve as chief of staff to Labour PM Sir Keir Starmer.

Johnson concludes that his backbench was spooked by the wave of anti-Tory abuse that Partygate triggered, and they blamed him for it: “It was the handling of the crisis that enraged them more than the substance of the issue.” For all his protestations, however sincere they may be, Johnson’s situation was clearly untenable. The optics were so bad, it had long ceased to matter if they were fair. The image of Queen Elizabeth II sitting alone at her consort’s funeral, at a time when Downing Street staff allegedly partied, was enough to sink him.

Ever the optimist, Johnson is convinced that if allowed to lead the Tories to the next general election, he would have won that contest. He points to public polling which, before his loss of the leadership, had him only a few points behind Starmer’s Labour Party—certainly much closer to the Opposition than David Cameron was at the same time before the 2015 general election, which he went on to win comfortably. It is another of the “what ifs” of political history, and begs the question would Farage have split the right-wing vote in 2024 if Boris had still been in charge?

And he certainly had a compelling story to tell voters. He had fought for Brexit, which in turn “helped to deliver not just the fastest vaccine roll-out of any comparable country—and thereby save many lives—but also the fastest exit from lockdown, and thus the fastest economic recovery in the G7.” Extraordinarily, the UK emerged from the pandemic with unemployment at or near a 50-year low, and youth unemployment at a 45-year low.

Those familiar with Boris Johnson’s writing will be unsurprised that his tone is conversational and his turn of phrase often highly amusing; while he is obviously intent on defending a formidable but hotly contested legacy, there is nothing remotely solemn in the way he goes about this. It is therefore an immensely readable book, its lightness of style more reflective of the man than his substantial achievements in office.

This article from the Winter 2025 edition of the IPA Review is written by IPA Communications Manager Michael Barrett.