Few regard his calamity-studded stint as foreign secretary as his finest hour. Yet his myriad gaffes and blunders are excused on the grounds that he had been “set up” to fail by May and was then let down by “recalcitrant Foreign Office mandarins”. The author blames civil servants for thwarting a Johnsonian wheeze to buy an island in the Arctic Ocean from Norway to turn it into a spy base. Others may think it never happened because it was one of Johnson’s many fantasy projects. Charles Moore, his former boss at the Daily Telegraph and briefly his candidate to be the next chairman of the BBC, sometimes refers to Johnson as “the greased albino piglet”. A biography of this length needs to get a grip on the slippery porcine and answer the question: who is the authentic Boris Johnson? Is it the mayor Johnson who was broadly aligned with a liberal, cosmopolitan idea of Toryism during his eight years as the political face of the capital? Is it the Brexiter Johnson who fanned xenophobia to win the referendum? Is it the “ Brexity Hezza” he told the cabinet he’d be after he won the 2019 election? I put down this biography with a better idea of the inner demons that drive the prime minister, but little the wiser about whether he has any convictions, other than the many for traffic offences. Even an admiring biographer can find no serious answer to the charge that Borisology amounts to nothing more than his narrow-eyed, ever-fluxing, always-cynical calculations about what he thinks will serve his interests and satisfy his appetites from one day to the next. Who is to blame for that? In the Bower version, it won’t be Boris. And yet, isn’t that what leadership is about? Bower’s recitation of the failures of, for example, Public Health England is certainly damning of that body, but surely the task of leaders is to get a grip when something is not working. Johnson’s hero, Winston Churchill, did that with the entire war effort, from the manufacture of armaments to military strategy. It would be hard to imagine Churchill pleading that he could do no more than follow the guidance of his subordinates. The Guardian review sums it up for me….yes he might be a womanizing liar but he did have a difficult childhood. I struggled with parts of the book, was the author expressing his opinion or was he writing what he thought Boris was thinking…if the latter, he needs a different approach.

Apart from the first chapters, this is a tedious book - chapter after chapter of excusing the failings, chapter after chapter with no constructive analysis or ability to recognise Johnson for what he is, lazy, a man with no vision or insight, an English Nationalist, privileged, seeing himself as naturally part of England's social elite yet ... for all that, looked down on by them as an arriviste, someone who has only just recently bought himself into the club but who really doesn't have the pedigree. At every stage, when something goes right it proves Johnson is great, and when something goes wrong (a frequent occurrence), it is the fault of someone else. Whilst there is no doubt that some of the people Johnson trusted let him down, many of the mistakes are clearly of his making, even if he refused to take responsibility (at a minimum, he hired most of his inner circle, and therefore is at least partly to blame for their incompetence). This gets worse as the book goes on, and culminates in the last few chapters where the author says of the Supreme Court judges ‘the bias was obvious’ (p.411) and Lady Hale is dismissed as ‘a family lawyer and administrator without any specialist knowledge of constitutional law’ (p.410) - an assertion that is hard to square with her 16 years of experience in the highest court in the land, which routinely hears cases around administrative and constitutional law. As divisive as he is beguiling, as misunderstood as he is scrutinised, Boris Johnson is a singular figure. The book is written in a breathless OK! manner and yes, the father Stanley is a dissolute wastrel and wife abuser, which Boris too has embraced gleefully, but many other people came out of dysfunctional families to do something relevant and useful.If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. An unauthorised biography by Bower of Richard Desmond, provisionally entitled Rough Trader, awaits publication. Bowers's biography of Simon Cowell, written with Cowell's co-operation, was published on 20 April, 2012. Bower spends far too much time making declarative statements about matters he cannot possibly know about. His chief contribution to the sum of knowledge about Boris Johnson lies in allegations about Johnson’s father, Stanley, here depicted as a philanderer and an abusive husband who frequently hit Johnson’s mother Charlotte. It is Stanley who is cast as the architect of Johnson’s vices and shortcomings. “Stanley’s violence has forever haunted Boris,” Bower writes, describing a later conversation between Johnson and a girlfriend in which Johnson, talking of his parents’ split, said: “My father promised me that they wouldn’t divorce, and I could never forgive him for that.” “Divorce,” Bower asserts, is “code for Stanley’s rage towards Charlotte.” Bower is even less of a child psychologist than he is a prose stylist and it feels somewhat distasteful to read his speculations about the consequences of Stanley’s behaviour and what Johnson “meant” in referring to it. Tom Bower (born 28 September 1946) is a British writer, noted for his investigative journalism and for his unauthorized biographies. A former Panorama reporter, his books include unauthorised biographies of Tiny Rowland, Robert Maxwell, Mohamed Al-Fayed, Geoffrey Robinson, Gordon Brown and Richard Branson.

This approach has two downsides. The first is that it is wearying: one almost expects Bower to start weaving in invectives against Johnson’s local corner shop. The second problem is that the overall effect is incoherent. He writes of an interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg in which Johnson “reeled defensively, unable to articulate a focused message of even limited success”, which, he claims, had the effect of “making it easier for the final edit to be chopped up to suit the BBC’s agenda”. If Johnson’s answers were defensive, inarticulate and unfocused, no editing was required: if he was the victim of a put-up job, then his answers are immaterial. The problem from the beginning is Bower like the rest of the UK's 4th estate seems enamoured with BJ - from his messianic scrabble game at the age of 10 beating all takers to the bewildering acceptance of BJ's disregard for acceptable journalist practice. Bower highlights and no doubt supports the British notion of being superior in every way to other member states of the EU albeit through Johnson's skewed lens. (Bower is a Daily Mail journalist - so that's like Pravda writing about Putin)I was given this book for Christmas as I do like a political biography. I have not read this author before but he has written a lot of unofficial biographies where he can dig up the dirt on lots of famous people. This one is a detailed account of Boris Johnson's life, focusing on his career as a politician, as an MP, as Mayor of London, in the Brexit referendum, and ultimately as Prime Minister with even some bits covering the pandemic.