The unleashed hysteria of the Boris-bashing classes

Boris Johnson’s just-released political memoir, Unleashed, has had a predictably triggering effect on Britain’s right-thinking classes. All that snobby resentment towards the largely working-class Brexit voters who dared to defy them eight years ago, so long concentrated and projected on to the figure of Boris, has come rushing back with a vengeance.

Like Margaret Thatcher before him, mere mention of the ex-PM causes something like an allergic reaction among our media and cultural elites. The Guardian has already come out in editorial hives in response to his new memoir, publishing seemingly endless responses over the past week. Other bastions of middle-class Remainerism have been similarly inflamed, while broadcasters have lined up to grill Johnson as if he was still a sitting minister.

One reviewer is outraged by what he sees as ‘the sheer dishonesty and the lies’ of Unleashed. Another condemns it as the work of ‘a man who prefers not to face up to the damage Brexit has done to the country’ and ‘the lives needlessly lost by his catastrophic dithering over Covid’. They didn’t want Johnson to write a memoir, it seems, they wanted him to pen a confession, preferably in his own blood.

The pejoratives have continued to rain down on it. ‘Shameless’, ‘tedious’, ‘unhinged’. During a promotional interview, one broadcaster even suggested that he might be ‘the worst prime minister in history’. As spiked editor Tom Slater pointed out at the time of Boris’s resignation as PM, the media reaction to him is never merely critical – it’s hysterical.

It hasn’t always been this way. As Johnson himself recounts during the first part of Unleashed, the right-thinking classes actually warmed to him early on in his political career.

He twice won mayoral elections in London in 2008 and again in 2012. And he did so by beating ‘Red’ Ken Livingstone, a Labour politician who had dominated London politics for several decades. In one of Unleashed’s many entertaining vignettes, Johnson recounts the time he lost his temper with Livingstone in early 2008. During a debate, Livingstone questioned the patriotism of Johnson’s Turkish great-grandfather, Ali Kemal. ‘I was sensitive about this because I am very proud of my ancestor, but he was (and remains) controversial in Turkey. I cornered Livingstone in the green room afterwards, got him in a Vulcan nerve pinch at the back of the neck. “You fucker”, I said. “Don’t ever say anything like that again.” He didn’t.’

Johnson’s tenure as mayor, featuring green-ish policies and his personal championing of gay marriage, was greeted relatively warmly by the capital’s right-on burghers. So much so that by the time he became MP for Uxbridge in 2015, ‘I could have gone to a north London dinner party and not have been pelted with focaccia. I wouldn’t say that polite metropolitan opinion loved me, but they thought on the whole that I wasn’t too bad.’

That, of course, was before Brexit. Before he came out in support of leaving the EU in 2016, and before he Got Brexit Done after the 2019 General Election. Unleashed captures well the enormity of the referendum result. ‘For the first time in living memory, the wishes of the ruling liberal establishment had been not just ignored but overwhelmed’, Johnson writes.

Brexit voters knew they were up against the political and cultural might of Britain’s ruling elites. Against the government, much of the media, big business and large parts of the legal profession. They had been told that voting Leave would have dire social and economic consequences for them and their families. Yet those living in what one columnist derided at the time as ‘Brexity places’ remained defiant. ‘They had gone right ahead and flicked the most colossal V-sign at all the experts of the Remain establishment’, writes Johnson, ‘and the ruling classes were utterly furious. They ran the country, not the Brexity places, and they would show it.’ And they did show it, as the hysterical demonisation of both Leave voters as gammony, far-right thickos and Johnson as their mendacious quasi-fascist demagogue was to prove.

Unleashed offers the counter-narrative, the rejoinder to those who have spent the past few years projecting their anger and loathing for Brexit on to Johnson. In this, it succeeds. Indeed, Johnson articulates the anti-democratic nature of the EU, and the fundamentally democratic ambition of the Brexit vote more passionately than arguably he did at any point during his time as PM. ‘In a democracy’, he writes, ‘the people in charge – the people who make the laws – must be able to answer the old Tony Benn question: Who elected you? Who put you in authority over me, and how can I remove you from office?’ That was never possible within the EU, which suffers fundamentally from a ‘lack of democracy’. He saw the referendum as ‘a moment of truth’: ‘The UK would never again have a chance to be free, to be truly democratic, to make its own laws.’

He also answers the critics of his ‘Levelling Up’ agenda. This was long derided as a vacuous slogan, a soundbite in want of actual policies. And with good reason. Still, in Unleashed, Johnson insists it was his long-standing ‘moral mission’, from his time as London mayor. It was his answer, he writes, to some of the blue-collar demands raised by Brexit.

He challenges the fatalism of successive governments, accusing them of viewing the nation beyond London and the university towns as economically doomed, worthy only of managed decline. He states that ‘it’s not good enough to wheeze elegiacally and say that things [can’t] change’. Levelling Up was and is Johnson’s answer to this economic and social fatalism, his belief that through large-scale infrastructural investment, new businesses and raised academic standards, it is possible to lift up people whose skills have long been devalued and allow ‘kids with energy and talent’ to shine.

When reading Johnson’s often stirring views on the meaning and significance of Brexit, and his account of the grand ambition of Levelling Up, it’s tempting to wonder where this Johnson was as prime minister.

But Unleashed also reminds us of his deep flaws. He may have taken on the liberal establishment over Brexit, but he shared many of its reactionary prejudices, too. Especially its greenism – writ large in his memoir in a long, self-celebratory chapter on COP26, the UN’s climate-change shindig hosted in Glasgow in 2021.

As Unleashed is keen to make clear, Johnson’s eco-sceptical posturing during the 2000s and early 2010s was merely a temporary blip, fuelled in part by a brief friendship with Jeremy Corbyn’s brother, Piers, a ‘Marxist conspiracist’ convinced that man-made global warming was a hoax. In fact, Johnson tells us, he is a long-standing ‘green conservative’. ‘I am and always have been a fervent environmentalist, and like many of my generation I have been filled since childhood with horror and dread about what humanity is doing to the natural world’, he writes. That Johnson’s Just Stop Oil-adjacent views might get in the way of the economic Levelling Up of Britain doesn’t seem to occur to him.

Of course, the biggest blow to Johnson’s government came from outside. Just weeks after the General Election in December 2019, the Covid pandemic reached Britain. Not even the staff at the New European have blamed the virus itself on Boris. But he certainly bears some responsibility for the calamitous, authoritarian lockdown response to Covid. As Johnson tells it here, he was a reluctant lockdowner, forced to make a decision because there was supposedly no alternative. ‘I knew that it was a disaster: for the UK economy, for the dreams of millions.’ He also knew that it would disproportionately ‘impact those very areas that had dared to turn out and vote Tory, for the first time, in 2019’, and that it would likely ‘derail the whole Levelling Up agenda, derail the government’.

And it did, with some help from Johnson’s capacity for self-destruction. The interminable Partygate scandal, in which ministers including Johnson, Downing Street staffers and others were found to have broken Covid rules they themselves had imposed, arguably felled Johnson himself. And the social and economic damage imposed on Britain by the lockdowns deepened the inequalities that Levelling Up was meant to address.

As he has been since his resignation, Johnson is unapologetic about Partygate in Unleashed, claiming that it was a politically motivated witch-hunt. Which it was, in many ways. The media hysteria, police investigations and committee reports it generated were out of all proportion to the scale of the actual rule-breaking. Still, as petty as the rules may have been, Johnson and his accomplices in Downing Street were the ones responsible for drawing them up.

At least Johnson is in a far more reflective mood now when it comes to the folly of lockdowns themselves. In a remarkable admission, he writes:

‘I am not saying that lockdowns achieved nothing; I am sure they had some effect. But were they completely decisive in beating back the disease, turning that wave down? All I can say is that I am less certain now than I was at the time.’

One thing he is certain about is the ‘catastrophic’ socioeconomic impact of lockdowns – ‘the very opposite of Levelling Up… a complete reversal of everything the government was supposed to be doing’. He is especially hard on the decision to shut schools – a decision he approved – which he says future governments must avoid doing at all costs. And he has a dig at ‘boxy-headed’ Labour leader Keir Starmer who, when challenged on Labour’s calls for longer and harder lockdowns, ‘would do his puzzled / irritable face, like a bullock having a thermometer unexpectedly shoved in its rectum’.

Johnson cannot resist these joyous digs at friends and foes alike. Unleashed is peppered with caricatures and comedic asides. There’s Donald Trump with ‘his inflatable personality’, the ‘dry as dust’ ex-chancellor Philip Hammond, and the ‘rheumy red-rimmed eyes’ of Trump adviser Steve Bannon. And then there’s poor Michael Gove, who famously sabotaged Johnson’s original run for the Tory leadership in 2016 – ‘blow[ing] me up on the launchpad’. While suffering from what turned out to be a near-fatal bout of Covid in 2020, Johnson reminds Gove that ‘Pericles died of the plague’. He notes that Gove’s ‘spectacles seemed to glitter at the thought’.

At times, Unleashed is more PG Wodehouse than Pericles. His description of his first chancellor, Sajid Javid, is gently scathing: ‘He was charmingly free from self-doubt. He referred to himself as “the Saj”. It was amazing to discover, as you listened to him, how many advances the human race apparently owed to the Saj, from privatising the Post Office to – who knows – non-stick frying pans.’

The irresistible humour of Unleashed certainly lightens the load of its near 800 pages. But it exposes Johnson’s limits, too. While he remorselessly ribs and ridicules others, he himself is unfailingly, almost pathologically self-deprecating. It’s wise for a public figure to avoid pomposity. But at times, Johnson can seem like someone unable to take even his own convictions seriously. What makes him personally beguiling, surely contributed to his weakness as a leader. It made him too susceptible to external pressure – whether that was to lockdown and shut schools during Covid, or to give in to ‘progressive’ sentiment in the culture war. Brexit and Ukraine apart, he struggles to stand up for what if anything he believes.

Unleashed then does capture something of the truth of Boris Johnson. He emerges at points as a far better politician than his haters can ever allow. But he remains far more flawed than his supporters will ever admit.

Tim Black is a spiked columnist.

Unleashed, by Boris Johnson, is published by William Collins.