Fifteen things we learned from Boris Johnson’s memoir

Boris Johnson’s new memoir Unleashed is to be published next week, and with the highly-anticipated account promising to be the “political memoir of the century,” Cockburn was rather interested in what exactly it contains within its pages. Cockburn has put together a list of the top 15 things we learned from the former Prime Minister’s lengthy memoir…

Partygate stories “grossly exaggerated“

First to one of the most prominent scandals of Boris Johnson’s career: the matter of Partygate. In his 800-page tome, the former PM insists that he was told by his adviser that the pandemic parties broke no lockdown rules. Johnson admits he put it down as “desperate nonsense being peddled by embittered former advisers” and “forgot about it.” On his Covid fine — received after the ex-PM was said to have been “ambushed by cake” — Johnson fumed: “I saw no cake. I ate no blooming cake. If this was a party, it was the feeblest event in the history of human festivity.” Crikey.

Not that the ex-Tory leader was able to hide from the pile-up of stories for long, of course. “There were about 15 occasions when officials in Downing Street briefly slackened the tempo of their work and raised a glass to a departing colleague,” Johnson revealed — before pinning blame for the press’s Partygate obsession on his one-time chief adviser, Dominic Cummings:

I should have realized that my old amigo Dom Cummings — still scorched by Barnard Castle — was behind it all, and that he had a “grid” of grossly exaggerated stories that he and his sidekick Lee Cain were feeding to the media.

No love lost there, eh? 

Brexit helped UK win “the vaccine race“

Johnson’s popular prime ministerial campaign slogan of “Get Brexit Done” won him the 2019 general election — and Brexit, the ex-PM claims, won him “the vaccine race.” Despite skepticism in some quarters at the former Tory leader’s claim that his Brexit deal resulted in the UK’s vaccine rollout being faster than elsewhere, Johnson is adamant: 

Under my deal, we came out. We took back control. That meant that when it came to the approval of vaccines, we no longer had to go at the pace of the rest of the European Union. We had our own agency — the ­Medicines & Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency — and we could do our own thing.

Not that the ex-Prime Minister had been all that relaxed about vaccines at the time. In another curious revelation, Johnson reveals that during the rush for Covid jabs, he “had commissioned some work on whether it might be technically feasible to launch an aquatic raid on a warehouse in Leiden, in the Netherlands, and to take that which was legally ours and which the UK desperately needed.” It came at the same time that pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca was “trying, in vain” to bring more vaccines from the Netherlands to Britain. Desperate times call for desperate measures…

Frustration at Covid measures

Despite being the man in charge, Johnson has confessed that the Covid taskforce’s tier system made him “want to scream.” While the ex-PM said he had “hoped it would work” — comparing it to, er, whack-a-mole — Boris fumed about the whole idea: “I can hardly believe the gall, the audacity of the government in trying to micromanage humanity.”

And despite presiding over the many lockdowns that, for a time, brought the UK to a halt, Johnson now claims he is “no longer sure” that shutting down the country was a decisive move in the fight against Covid. And on the forced lockdown in December 2020, the ex-premier notes ruefully: “Here I was, this supposed libertarian and lover of freedom — the first prime minister in history to cancel Christmas.”

Covid “man-made,” despite earlier claims

Talk about a turnaround. In 2021, Johnson was adamant that Covid was a result of “demented” traditional Chinese medical practices, suggesting the disease had originated in bats or even pangolins. His new memoir, however, rows back on this theory. “The awful thing about the whole Covid catastrophe is that it appears to have been entirely man-made, in all its aspects,” he writes, going on: 

It now looks overwhelmingly likely that the mutation was a result of some botched experiment in a Chinese lab. Some scientists were clearly splicing bits of virus together like the witches in Macbeth — eye of bat and toe of frog — and oops, the frisky little critter jumped out of the test tube and started replication all over the world.

It’s quite the thought…

Trump sent him unlicensed drugs to “revive” him during Covid

And it wasn’t like Boris wasn’t personally impacted by the wrath of the virus himself. The ex-PM was hospitalized during the pandemic after becoming infected by Covid, revealing that one Donald Trump had even sent over pharmaceutical reps “to revive me with drugs not licensed or approved in the UK.” He didn’t take the full thing seriously at first, he revealed, writing: “Oh well, I thought. It was a nuisance. It might slow me up. But, as I kept telling everyone in those early days of the pandemic, it was generally a mild disease.” Not for him, though. He was admitted to intensive care just days after being taken to hospital — and now says he “could hardly think” and “found it exhausting to even walk” before his care was escalated. “This virus was new, and deadly, and we did not know which way the pandemic would turn,” the ex-PM notes somberly. Harrowing stuff. 

Found Nicola Sturgeon “deeply frustrating” during pandemic

As transpired at the UK Covid Inquiry, Johnson didn’t just have an issue with his former chief adviser Cummings during the pandemic — he didn’t particularly see eye-to-eye with his Scottish counterpart north of the border either, with his memoir extracts on the former FM more than a little, um, disparaging:

[Nicola Sturgeon] had a strategy of gratuitous differentiation. It was deeply frustrating partly because it was confusing for the public, partly because it made me look like a brutal English Tory while she was an unco guid Princess Twinkletoes. As it turned out, her Scotland-only measures were probably useless.

Ouch. Was there effort made to try and keep the countries on the same page? None that was overly successful, it seems. Johnson fumed:

We made a huge effort to involve her in the committees and to try to move forward in identical steps — but it was never quite enough. If we decided, after agonizing debate, that it was time for people to go back to work, she would immediately appear on TV, lips pursed, brow furrowed, to say that Scotland wasn’t ready for this yet; and some Scottish people seemed only too happy to spend a little longer at home at the general expense.

Shots fired…

Brexit controversies

It wasn’t just the former SNP leader Johnson reserved strong remarks for. The ex-PM writes of how his predecessor David Cameron told Boris he would “f*** you up forever” if he backed Brexit — and, Johnson claims, even offered him a “top-five job” in his Cabinet if he threw his weight behind Remain instead. How very interesting.

On the subject of Brexit controversy, Boris also believes it was former defense secretary Ben Wallace responsible for the famous leak that Johnson had penned two columns — one backing Remain, one backing Leave — during discussions on leaving the EU. Confessing he did in fact write both pieces, the ex-PM brushed off his Remainer essay as a “really hasty and half-baked pastiche of a column,” adding: “I was red-teaming my thinking. I was being devil’s advocate.” How curious.

Sunak’s betrayal

And yet more Tories were slammed by their former leader as Boris tore into his one-time chancellor Rishi Sunak. Lamenting his successor’s betrayal when Sunak resigned from his Cabinet, Johnson said he had trusted the current Tory leader as a “friend and a partner” — expecting him to stay loyal after Boris’s own “full-throated” defense of his chancellor’s family over the non-dom row. Sunak, Johnson wrote, had assured him of his “complete support for as long as you want.” More like as long as Sunak wanted, eh? 

He appointed “homicidal maniacs“

On the incidents that led to his own resignation from the top job, Johnson lamented his appointment of Chris Pincher — before offering up the excuse that: “The tragic reality is that if you excluded everyone from governmental office, just because they had at one time faced allegations of unbecoming or embarrassing behavior, you would have precious few Tory MPs to choose from.” Hardly the, er, best indictment of the party, is it?

Blasting some of the people he had brought into his Cabinet, Johnson was pulling no punches: “Well, I don’t think you should underestimate the many goofs I made. I made too many duff appointments, some of which turned out to be homicidal maniacs.” Charming!

Trans argument not “most important issue of our times“

During the first Tory leadership race after Boris’s resignation, contender Penny Mordaunt was blasted for her views on trans rights — and it appears Johnson was among her critics. On a conversation about gender recognition for transgender people with Penny, the ex-PM writes: 

I didn’t catch all the details, but it seemed fairly harrowing stuff, and at one point I heard Penny claim: ‘This is the most ­important issue of our times.’ I didn’t always agree with Phil Hammond, but I happened at that moment to catch his eye and to see that he — like me — was ­struggling to contain his amusement.

I mean, I could see that this was an issue of huge importance to some people (though, surely not that many?) and I could see that it needed to be handled with tact and sensitivity. But ‘the most important issue of our times’? Really?

Quite.

Royal relations

On the royals, there are two stand-out incidents from the former premier’s memoir. First, the ex-PM claims that officials from No. 10 and Buckingham Palace conspired together in a bid to convince Prince Harry to stay in the UK. The former Tory leader writes in his tome that it was requested he give the renegade royal a 20-minute chat in an eleventh-hour attempt to stop the Prince from relocating. Johnson described the January 2020 meeting as “a ridiculous business…when they made me try to persuade Harry to stay,” adding it was a “kind of manly pep talk. Totally hopeless.” He might have got Brexit done, but Megxit was a whole different matter…

The second incident relates to the Queen — who Boris claims had bone cancer. Visiting her as he stepped down from the top job, just two days before he died, Johnson said he had been aware for about 12 months that she had been diagnosed with a form of the disease. On his final visit to meet the late monarch, Johnson added that despite appearing “pale and more stooped” — yet her mind was “completely unimpaired.”

Did Netanyahu bug his bathroom?

In a rather bizarre revelation, the former Tory leader let slip a rather intriguing detail about Benjamin Netanyahu. After letting the Israeli prime minister use the Foreign Secretary’s bathroom, Johnson remarked: “It may or may not be a coincidence but I am told that later, when they were doing a regular sweep for bugs, they found a listening device in the thunderbox.” He’s never one to miss an opportunity, eh?

Putin’s nuclear strike threat

To other foreign leaders, like Vladimir Putin. Johnson discusses how he tried to talk the Russian autocrat down from invading Ukraine — and, Boris claims, during the exchange Putin made a rather concerning thinly-veiled threat:

No one was proposing Nato missiles on Ukrainian soil. But Putin kept going back to it. It would take hardly any time, he said, for a missile launched from Ukraine to hit Moscow.

At one point he made a kind of spooky-jocular remark about the risk of miscalculation — an unintended nuclear exchange between Russia and Nato. ‘I would not want to hurt you, Boris,’ he said (a remark the Kremlin later denied. Never believe anything Moscow says until it has been officially denied).

Good heavens…

Biden’s Afghanistan warning 

Reminiscing on more foreign policy tales, Johnson recounted a warning from US President Joe Biden — who, at a G7 conference in Carbis Bay, told of his experience visiting Afghanistan. One tribe, Biden told his audience, offered to, er, shoot their enemy to honor his arrival — which he rather hastily objected to. But, Boris wrote, the President concluded from his experience:

Afghanistan was basically ungovernable, that it was not a proper country but a collection of warring tribes, and that the US was wasting its time, blood and treasure in trying to keep order. He told that story twice, and yet somehow we failed to twig.

Will he return to the Commons?

And on his own political future, Johnson won’t rule out a return to Westminster. Writing that he has “no idea” whether he will ever stand again, the ex-PM reflected rather humbly about his own previous rise to power. 

I used to claim that my chances of becoming PM were about the same as my being reincarnated as an olive or decapitated by a frisbee. The longer I spend away from Westminster, the stronger my belief that you should only get involved if you really think you can be useful.

How cryptic. So will there be a Boris return to the Commons at some stage? Stay tuned…

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.