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On page 28 of Unleashed, Boris Johnson tries to pinpoint the moment he began his Brexit project. It’s May 2014, six years into his London mayorship, when he’s sitting in an armour-plated Jag with David Cameron, on his way back from campaigning in the Newark by-election. They are passing through “some East Midlands suburb, I can’t remember where” and he is stunned when “Dave taps the reinforced window of the Jag and gestures languidly outside. ‘The trouble with the UK economy,’ he says, ‘is that outside London and the south-east there really isn’t much’.”
Is this inevitable? Boris wonders. Is this the nation’s doom? No, he decides, it is not. And so, he sets out to change it, armed only with his founding political text, Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, the experience of misreporting an EU ban on prawn cocktail flavoured crisps, a desire to strengthen the ties that bind the United Kingdom and a hatred of socialists. And this book is the story of that victory and the wonders that followed.
There is of course an account of his long dark night of the soul when he wrestled with writing competing Remain and Leave columns for the Daily Telegraph. Here he lays out his problems with the EU – it had not produced growth and jobs, the euro was a bad idea, the Commission had given him £8 million for a cable car across the Thames, the Bible told him to love his brother and his brothers were the British taxpayers and EU laws could not be repealed by the UK parliament. And David Cameron had been rude to him.
Sadly, just as he wins his battle against the socialists and the supreme courts and the Surrender Act and is rolling up his sleeves to get started on unleashing the country, Covid arrives. He is, he informs us, an expert on zoonotic diseases. He knows his Sars from his Ebola. Unfortunately he is badly informed by the flip-flopping scientists and let down by Public Health England.
He personally pumped another £34 billion into the NHS. It should have been fine. It’s a shame he caught Covid himself – but then all the bad news had been lowering his resistance. He thinks the lockdowns may have been a mistake but acquiring PPE was a triumph of Brexit. And the vaccine was another triumph of Brexit. If we’d still have been in the EU, we wouldn’t have got any of it.
Although, true, he was at one point seriously considering launching a commando raid on a factory in the Netherlands to get his hands on some doses of vaccine that weren’t showing up in the UK thanks to Brexit. Leadership is like that.
Yes, he had faults, he admits. He was, if anything, too trusting. But things like Partygate? There were just 15 occasions when Downing Street officials had drinks, or quizzes, or birthday parties. He barely went to a handful of them. And anyway, it was all Dominic Cummings's fault. But this isn’t really the stuff of proper leadership which is why it only warrants two and half pages. His relief is palpable when Russia invades Ukraine.
On the day he resigned, he reminds us, he bellowed “hasta la vista baby”, a plump, fleshy and slightly breathless Terminator intent on leading his country again. And Unleashed represents the first steps in his escape from the Churchillian Wilderness Years of post-Covid shame.
He has the answers – FIX HOUSING, FIX IMMIGRATION, FIX SKILLS, FIX THE NHS, FIX INFRASTRUCTURE, FIX GOVERNMENT, FIX TAX, FIX CLIMATE CHANGE, and his penultimate intention, FIX CAPITALISM. Most of all he wants to FIX THE NATIONAL OBSESSION WITH RUNNING OURSELVES DOWN. Brexit has been a success. The nation has been unleashed.
This is a long book. It is 782 pages. It includes the kind of onomatopoeia that Thomas Gray could only dream of – “SOCKO!” he writes about the resignation of Anthony Meyer, and “THUDDEROO!” when he loses a colleague to an embezzlement scandal. This Beano
-flavoured lexicon clings to every page like a candy floss fungus and risks leading the reader to underestimate this most serious of politicians as he recounts how he ended knife crime in London, how he may have been wrong on the facts of EU banana regulations but he was right in spirit, and most of all, how much fun he had on the Leave campaign eating Cornish pasties and licking ice creams.
In the end, he says, he will be judged by people like the Queen. He can’t tell us anything about the Queen’s politics, of course, but it was pretty clear to him that she agreed with him on everything. And why not? Look at his achievements over his 15 years in politics. Bikes. Nuclear reactors. Bridges. New railways. Levelling up. And they’ll get round to building his giant airport in the Thames estuary one day. Because he unleashed the country. Unleashed it. Everyone else let him down and in the end it was just him and Thomas Gray.
