It is, perhaps, hard to imagine a collaboration between Virgil and Captain W.E. Johns, a fusion of the Aeneid and Biggles Pulls It Off, but that is how Boris Johnson’s memoir reads. Our intrepid hero travels round the world, wooing Gulf potentates, sticking it to Vladimir Putin, snatching submarine contracts from under Emmanuel Macron’s snooty Gallic nose and then makes it home in time for some uniting and levelling up before settling down to a well-deserved glass of Tignanello. He also, like Aeneas, endures a thousand ordeals and makes himself father of the world’s greatest city (while also making some truly dreadful puns: ‘Was it H.J. Eysenck who gave me that idea? Eysenck it was…’).
For Boris’s fans, this is a box of Turkish Delight as addictive as the White Witch’s in Narnia
There is a breezy, breathless, boosterish brio to this tale which could have come from no politician, or writer, other than Boris. It is politics as Ripping Yarns. For his fans, and I am still very firmly one of them, this is a box of Turkish Delight as addictive as the White Witch’s in Narnia. For his critics, it will be confirmation that he approached the leadership of a G7 nation as Mr Toad approached driving. But I defy anyone to finish the book without smiles constantly breaking out, and without having to acknowledge there is actually something heroic – often chaotic, but still heroic – about the man’s determination to champion Britain’s virtues.
It is the fate of all politicians to divide opinion. To govern is to choose. And Boris’s choices have won him at least as much enmity as admiration. Few more so than his decision to back Brexit and then, in his drive to deliver it, to take the whip away from 21 colleagues, prorogue parliament and provoke the Supreme Court into an unprecedented rebuke to the executive. For the metropolitan elites he was what Napoleon had been to the Bourbons – a beast, an abomination, a desecrator of all they held holy. What made the process all the more painful, for every side, is that Boris, as he recounts in his chapters on his time as London mayor, had once been the darling of many of those same elites when he was in charge of their metropolis. He was the cycle-lane-building, plane-tree-planting, Gay-Pride-marching progressive face of Toryism. And then he trampled on their European dream. They felt the man who brought back the Routemaster to the streets of London had taken them for a ride.
The first half of Boris’s book deals with both these episodes – the battle for Brexit and the mayoralty – with the same jaunty tone. As he watches Brenda Hale shred the case for prorogation he can’t help but compare her spider brooch to Shelob, the evil arachnid in Lord of the Rings. When he discusses the 2012 Olympics he makes a joke about the ArcelorMittal Orbit (a steel ziggurat towering over the site of the games) which would make even Jim Davidson blush. (It’s on page 193. Readers of a sensitive disposition may wish to avoid.) But behind the jokey, joshing manner there is also evidence of a seriousness of purpose, an ambition as steely as the Orbit tower, which cannot be suppressed.
The chapters on the mayoralty demonstrate how much Boris loved the job, and remind us of how much he achieved – crime down, housebuilding up, infrastructure delivered, investment secured. For a politician often accused of wilful neglect of detail, the evidence of his attention to the minutiae of knife crime statistics, bus design, Tube operation and Crossrail funding stands as a reminder of how seriously he took a role in which he was an undoubted success. The simple fact that he secured re-election in 2012 – when the Conservative-led government, of which I was then a part, was doing so poorly in the national polls – is testament to his achievement. When he left office, YouGov polling showed that 52 per cent of Londoners thought he had done a good job, only 29 per cent bad.
Fifty-two per cent. A pregnant figure.
Boris was still mayor of London when, in his final months in office, he joined the campaign to leave the European Union. The eventual victory of the Leave campaign – 52 to 48 per cent – could not have happened without him. His account of the campaign, and his efforts thereafter to honour the result, should, I hope, silence those critics who thought his decision was calculating and opportunistic, a power play within Tory politics rather than an affair of the heart and a decision born of conviction.
As Boris recalls in the book, I have known him for nearly 40 years. As he also recalls, our friendship has had its oscillations. But while his decision was not easy, it was simple. The two articles he wrote on the eve of his decision were a classic Johnsonian exercise in testing the strength of competing impulses to find out where his heart truly lay. As someone who chafes at restraints, whose conception of life is heroic, who believes it is better to dare greatly than retreat safely, who hates the dreary conformity of bureaucratic compromise, Brexit was always where his soul yearned to go.
In the second half of the book, the outworkings of that decision dominate. Boris as foreign secretary trying to establish a new destiny for Global Britain. Boris as leadership contender determined to rescue the country from compromises he thought betrayed the 17.4 million. Boris as prime minister, who takes us out at last, who finds our European neighbours determined to blight our future, who outmanoeuvres them, who delivers a vaccine rollout faster than the EU, secures defence pacts they would never have permitted us to enter and who pursues an economic vision that honours the feelings of all those who voted Leave.
I suspect Boris can never – and neither can I – convince many of the sincerity of the last mission. The drive to ensure a better life for those in overlooked and undervalued communities who voted Leave – levelling-up – was dismissed as a slogan, a soundbite in search of a meaning, a vague nod to working-class disaffection without a programme to match.
I’m biased, of course. It was Boris who appointed me to a government department charged with this mission. But, again, cynics who doubt the sincerity of his commitment to that crusade should be disarmed by this book. From its earliest pages to its conclusion, the principle that government should be active, not absent, in addressing inequality is the leitmotif. Whatever else Boris believed or believes, his determination to deploy public sector investment in infrastructure, greater devolution of power to local leaders, deregulation of barriers to private sector investment, aggressive action against crime and continued reform of education to overcome inequalities was the Nicene Creed of his premiership. And I still believe he was right.
I am not an uncritical admirer. No one can be. This book reminds us of both Boris’s virtues and his faults. He was a Sun King. He accords his dog Dilyn more mentions than either his deputy prime minister Dominic Raab or his chancellor Sajid Javid. He is generous towards many but often incurious about, or neglectful of, their real contribution. As in the Aeneid, the hero’s exploits blot out the roles of other characters. As with Biggles, the derring-do of the protagonist overlooks the work of the dreary ground crew who keep the crate afloat. But Boris, like Dilyn, is a creature happiest and most lovable when he is unleashed.
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