Unruly Brexiteer Boris Johnson’s "Unleashed" memoir slammed by critics

Famously disheveled former UK prime Minister Boris Johnson has just published his memoir, “Unleashed”, selling over 40,000 copies on home turf in the first week.

In an interview with CNN, Johnson defends the 772-page tome as “a gentle, uplifting, optimistic book.” And, “There are some big issues that I try to expand – Brexit, the Middle East, Ukraine. I try to take people into the room.”

Photo: screenshot from CNN interview.

It is a view that contrasts sharply with that of critics writing in the UK’s heavyweight news sites, who have had little positive to say about Johnson’s literary endeavor.

“How not to write a political memoir,” said the Economist; “Twisted and sour,” observed The Independent while a reviewer writing in the Times concluded that the man who ‘got Brexit done’ was a “gossipy b***h.” The Guardian's verdict? "Memoirs of a clown."

Photo: screenshot from CNN interview.

Despite Johnson’s efforts to promote the book as history, the takeaways have leaned towards his colorful and at times brutal language in describing his colleagues in Westminster.

A chaotic character himself, he compares the current UK prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer’s face to that of “a b u l l o c k having a thermometer unexpectedly shoved in its rectum.”

Johnson’s predecessor in Number 10 Downing Street, Theresa May, doesn’t fare much better, being alluded to as “old grumpy-knickers”.

And though Johnson appears to favor a second Trump term in his CNN interview, the presidential candidate is described in his book as “like an orange-hued dirigible exuberantly buoyed aloft by the inexhaustible Primus stove of his own ego.”

Boris’ own ego is not to be underestimated. The book “is full of angry self-righteousness,” writes one Guardian critic. “Though Johnson likes to parade the outward signs of his intellect, there is not a philosophical sentence in the entire book.”

The nail in the coffin of Johnson’s political career was Partygate, a scandal that involved wine-drenched gatherings in Downing Street in the midst of the Covid pandemic when the British public was prohibited from meeting or bidding sick loved ones a final farewell.

To the British public, Johnson’s hypocrisy was unforgivable. More unforgivable still was the former prime minister’s failure to take responsibility for it and offer the country a heartfelt apology.

In "Unleashed", he refers to the scandal as “the whole Partygate hoo-ha” and casts blame on malicious leaks by his hand-picked entourage.

A “miserable and wildly inflated affair,” Boris writes, explaining that it warped what happened when hardworking colleagues “briefly slackened the tempo of their work and raised a glass.”

Asked on LBC Radio by presenter Nick Ferrari: “Which was your greater lie? Lying about proroguing Parliament to the queen, or lying to Parliament about the parties?”

Johnson mulls this over for a bit before replying, “Neither. Since neither of them were a lie, there was no lie.”

This, however, contradicts the results of an investigation by lawmakers which concluded last year that Johnson deliberately misled parliament about the drinking and socializing that went on behind closed doors at Number 10 at the height of the covid lockdown.

In a delicious twist, ‘Unleashed’ failed to reach bookshelves over in Europe due to the red tape on imports and exports between Britain and the EU block conjured by Brexit which is Johnson’s principal legacy.

“It didn’t arrive and it’s because of Brexit. It’s ironic,” said an assistant manager at British book retailer Waterstones in central Brussels told Politico.

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