Jo Johnson

David Cameron’s For the Record ends where the sorriest three years in modern British history begin

The referendum disaster overshadows an otherwise positive prime ministerial career

issue 12 October 2019

It’s fun to look for what’s missing in a memoir; the forgotten egos, the policy howlers buried for posterity. Some omissions are accidental. When Tony Blair published his autobiography in 2010, he raised eyebrows by neglecting to mention his celebrated blue-skies thinker, John Birt. Over more than 700 pages, For the Record is punctilious and dutiful in name-checking the many fallen Cameroonian foot-soldiers who sacrificed themselves in the cause of Conservative modernisation.

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Written by
Jo Johnson
Jo Johnson is a former universities minister, chairman of Tes Global and president’s professorial fellow at King’s College London

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