Women can’t – surely – be the only ones curious to know how, after his well-documented career in sexual incontinence, Boris Johnson has managed to weave this dismal tale into Unleashed, a memoir largely about his parallel preoccupation, politics, and which his publishers describe as “unvarnished”.
Will it feature some tribute, however glancing, to the young women he persuaded, when in one important job or another, to share the burden of his narcissism with the second Mrs Johnson and their children? Some of these women also became pregnant by Johnson, a father of at least eight, whose personal dedication to population growth remains, given the book’s rudimentary allusions to family life, a mystery. The only girlfriend to feature is, it turns out, “Carrie”, the third Mrs Johnson, a person who, in a memoir otherwise bloated with irrelevant detail (Damian Lewis’s “brother was in my rugby team at school”) unexpectedly appears as successor to “Marina”, herself identified by way of disambiguation as “my wife in 2016”.
Two years on, after resigning over Brexit, the great inseminator, also MP for Uxbridge and South Ruislip, was to be found enjoying a “wilderness” period with someone who, you intuit, now holds the key to his heart. “I led a kind of hillbilly existence,” he writes, “by the pool in Thame, having barbecues with Carrie and sitting around in my shorts, drinking beer and shooting champagne bottles with my airguns.” (Future generations, unfamiliar with that intra-party romance, may benefit from more hints that Carrie is not, like James Middleton’s spaniel, a valued companion animal.)
Not for the first time Johnson, inviting us to picture him in shorts, suggests that sufferers from body dysmorphia do not invariably see themselves as suboptimal. It can be the opposite. From the perspective of his unusual, triangular eyes, he offers this analysis of Theresa May’s nostrils: “Immensely long and pointy black tadpole shapes, like a Gerald Scarfe cartoon.” To this most ravishing of prime ministers, his scientific advisers are, first and foremost, “balding and etiolated”. Though straightforward insults are no less a source of authorial pride. Maybe it’s some sort of Oxford classics thing? Starmer is a bullock, bollard, traffic cone; Lady Hale “Spiderwoman”; May, “old grumpy knickers”.
I guess Johnson’s supporters could argue that their hero shows courage in thus practically urging people to insult him, in return, as a status-eating fatberg whose complete removal remains the only way to safeguard the political system he recently polluted from permanent ethical destruction.
The challenge, for anyone wanting to protect the UK from a Johnson comeback, is the considerable one of stopping this colossally sanitised self-hagiography from contributing to a relaunch. Jesse Norman, who supplied the FT’s review, is only the latest writer to assume his old friend’s plan is borrowed from Churchill’s: “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.”
Long before Johnson released his promotional epic, the Institute for Government’s Hannah White predicted, with almost total accuracy, what would be critical to Johnson’s Churchill-style, “rose-tinted” account: his 80-seat majority, vaccination triumph, saviour work for Ukraine. Likewise, she indicated some of the key omissions likely to render his version of history strictly useless, from his ethical vacuity and purging of talent, to his love of chaos and contempt for expert institutions, including the supreme court and the Commons privileges committee that in 2023 concluded he had lied to the house. Treasurably, the habitual liar (as Mumsnet once welcomed him) complains in Unleashed about being lied to by others. “I was too trusting.”
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Which is not to say every single page is deliberately misleading. Some are just recycled columns. If readers could easily, what with all the self-serving omissions, come away with a false impression, that is probably, like everything ever said against Johnson, someone else’s fault. And his boyhood triumphs may well loom larger than, say, his devaluing of honours or his lengthy relationships with Petronella Wyatt and Jennifer Arcuri. On his Eton years, his authority is beyond doubt: “I am what they call a Colleger, because I live in a special super-swot hothouse called College.” Similarly, there is no doubting the gluttony that made Johnson’s promotion to foreign secretary so special. Along with the status and borrowed grandeur (the agonising loss of which is what surely guarantees an attempted comeback), Johnson fell upon the grub: “Lavish and ruminative feasts, one hard upon the other: full English breakfasts, lunch and dinner with beer and wine, late-night canapés and great teas – fruit cake, scones with jam and cream, and always three types of freshly cut sandwiches (ham, cheese, cucumber)….”
Prominent among various attempts to represent himself as something finer than a wine-soaked Bunter, is the chapter “Teach her to Read”. From this, future readers with no background knowledge of Johnson and women (eg, his “totty” and “wet otter” pleasantries, his denying a respected journalist’s recollection of his hand on her thigh) could easily conclude that the claimed seriousness about girls’ education reflects a genuine wish for female advancement.
No matter that, in the same book, Johnson ridicules older women, trivialises Saudi Arabia’s misogyny and so far forgets his sexism detox as to call a young EU official, “fragrant”: his “messianic” hopes for girls’ literacy are to be understood as vital to the great levelling up thingy he is now retrofitting to his lifelong ambition. “Level up the sexes,” he writes. “Level up the world.”
Only thanks to Lady Hallett’s Covid inquiry do we know that Johnson’s passion for female empowerment was compatible, in 2020, with the misogyny encapsulated in a message from his former protege, Dominic Cummings. “That woman must be out of our hair,” Cummings wrote about a senior female civil servant. “We cannot keep dealing with this horrific meltdown of the British state while dodging stilettos from that cunt.” If Boris Johnson has changed since he received that without protest, there’s zero evidence to be found in Unleashed.
Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
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