Unleashed by Boris Johnson, is about people, policies, mistakes and triumphs from the man who would be world of the world claims many triumphs and also his mortal failings in this political memoir of Westminster power politics. Johnson a biographer of notoriously dubious merit, has turned to autobiography significantly  earlier than he would have liked, as the country could no longer believe  word he has to say. He used his bantering wit like a magician you almost forget that he isn’t revealing anything.

Born on June 19,, 1964, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is a British politician and writer who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Conservative Party from 2019 to 2022. He was previously Foreign Secretary from 2016 to 2018 and Mayor of London from 2008 to 2016. Controversial, untrammelled by the normal rules of politics, his route to becoming Britain’s Prime Minister included a landmark career as a journalist, two terms as London’s mayor, leading the Vote Leave Brexit campaign  and acting as foreign secretary. He won the largest Tory majority since 1987 when he went to the polls in December 2019 for a mandate to “Get Brexit Done” only to have his administration hit by the global Covid pandemic and toppled in a Tory putsch. Unleashed is the story of the fifteen years since he trounced Ken Livingstone at the polls to become mayor of London. Riots tackling knife crime, bikes, buses, the London Olympics, water cannon, and so much more. He writes about his role in Brexit, takes readers through all the big decisions and his reasons for taking them and describes how he nearly died from Covid.

In Unleashed he is taking the shots at the Supreme Court, at John Bercow, at everyone who stood in his way in the early months of his premiership, which was lot of people because he had no parliament majority, even kicked Kenneth Clarke out of the Conservative Party. He also starts laying groundwork for later punches he will throw at the police and others over Partygate.

He is doing his usual thing beating his opponents down in his usual trademark bombastic manner which wears very thin very quickly. Many occasion his childish humour is amazing.The electoral slogan of Dominic Grieve, a backbench Conservative critic, should be “Grieve for Beaconsfield”. He describes the chief whip, Mark Spencer, “ a Nottinghamshire farmer with enormous pheasant-strangling hands”, just after he stripped the whip from 21 Tory MPs as looking pale.

Johnson’s choice to release in the book’s first serialisation the supposed plot to invade the Netherlands to recover blockaded Covid vaccines. It was never ever going to happen but is nevertheless just about, plausibly, superficially true which is more than enough for him.

Johnson was the Brussels correspondent for The Daily Telegraph through stories of spectacular exaggeration, like the ban on bendy bananas and the plans to detonate various EU buildings that, decades on , are very much still standing. The Dutch invasion story reveals nothing about what was going on in government at a time of high tension.

The entire subject of his early years is totally avoided.

The tale of Michael Gove’s betrayal during the 2016 leadership election is retold, but only with a fresh coat of bile and bitterness.

His claims elsewhere in the book that Queen Elizabeth II commended him for his “general lack of bitterness”.

His love of the classics is abundantly real. Unleashed is adequately seasoned with juvenile gags , some of more than acceptable quality.

Unleashed by Boris Johnson, William Collins £30, 772 pages.