Strange though it might seem now, at the beginning of 2020 Boris Johnson came close to achieving his childhood ambition of being ‘World King’. Johnson had led the Conservative party to its first decent majority since 1987 the previous month, was in the process of ‘getting Brexit done’ with an ‘oven-ready deal’ and was airily dismissing rumours about the ‘Wu-Flu’ with the indomitable air of a winner who will not have his victory lap interrupted by anyone or anything. Yet what the prime minister had not bargained on was Megxit: the decision of Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle to upstage him, and everyone else, with their quasi-abdication and subsequent flight to California.
The first major story to appear in Johnson’s eagerly anticipated (in some quarters) memoir Unleashed is about how he was sent to bring the errant prince into line in a one-to-one at a UK-Africa investment summit in January 2020.
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