Unreliable narrator
Boris Johnson
, Issue 1634
The first day's revelation was that Johnson had a "manly chat" with Prince Harry, urging him to stay in Britain and remain part of the royal family. Apart from being a wildly underwhelming anecdote, this non-revelation was the first clue that the extracts from Unleashed would be primarily about things that didn't happen.
Near misses
Johnson didn't order a commando raid on the Netherlands when the beastly EU held millions of doses of the Covid vaccine hostage, because "the whole thing was nuts". He didn't drown at sea when he went too far out in his kayak, although the incident did provide him with a vivid metaphor for the pointlessness of lockdowns. (Lockdowns that he ordered.)
He also didn't, by this account, have any parties during Covid; instead there were only "about 15 occasions when officials in Downing Street briefly slackened the tempo of their work and raised a glass to a departing colleague, or held a quiz, or marked a birthday – in the way that all offices do". But didn't, during the pandemic.
He also didn't screw up on the biggest domestic policy issue in today's Britain, housing, despite what you might remember from living through his premiership. Today, Johnson thinks the Tories lost the 2024 election because they had no housing offer for young people, "only a cowardly capitulation to the alleged prejudices of their Nimby grandparents".
Yet this was the man who ditched the Jenrick planning reforms and promised, absurdly, that he could build 300,000 homes a year on brownfield sites alone.
Hero to zero
In fiction, the iron rule of writing a protagonist is that they must have agency. Heroes are doers. Johnson undoubtedly sees himself as the hero of this story, yet he is often a passive figure. The French defy him, the Dutch deny him, and his own closest allies betray him.
The extracts tell the story of the world's unluckiest man, swept through the tides of history, guilty only of trusting too much.
In his telling, Johnson fails to win the Tory leadership in 2016 because Michael Gove knifes him at the last minute. (And which pillock appointed the notoriously slippery Gove as his campaign manager?)
Then he gets in trouble over parties because his former aide Dominic Cummings leaked against him. (And which pillock appointed the notoriously uncontrollable Cummings as his top aide?)
And finally his MPs call for a vote of no confidence because... the BBC ran some footage where people could be heard booing him outside St Paul's Cathedral.
"They churned and churned the story, as you can with 24-hour news," he observes, sadly. So it's off to see the queen, who congratulates him on his lack of bitterness – and, it is heavily implied, confides that he was an absolute scorcher of a PM and that Brexit was a bally good idea.
Non-exclusive relationship
Is the relationship between the Mail and its biggest beast a happy one? It took the paper several hours to realise that Johnson had given them one genuine scoop amid all the franglais and filigree – that the late queen died of bone cancer, which her closest aides had known about for some time.
Then, after a week of so-so revelations in the Mail, Johnson gave an interview to his old paper, the Telegraph, with a splashable news line: he is now calling for a referendum on Britain's membership of the European Convention on Human Rights.
Perhaps the Mail subs had their sneaky revenge on 30 September. Above the front-page headline boasting about "the political memoir of the century," the Mail ran a puff for an unrelated features piece: "Here's why I left my wife for my mistress."
Next issue on sale: 20th November 2024
More top stories in the latest issue:
PHARAOH'S FRIEND
The Guardian was happy to tell old tales of Mohamed Fayed's misdeeds – but it is more reticent of its own use of him as a source for scoops back in the day.
BLOODY SUNDAY
Fury has not abated at the Observer over Guardian bosses' half-baked plan to offload the Sunday paper on to Tortoise media, the loss-making digital outfit.
STAR LOG
Why a mocked-up Daily Star front page – poking fun at Boris Johnson's story of a listening device in a Foreign Office toilet – never made it into print.
IN CON-TEXT
Telegraph defence and foreign affairs editor Con Coughlin is also a valued correspondent at a Saudi-owned magazine – and it shows in his writing…
VANISHING TRACT
Jack Lefley, who as managing editor oversaw the culling of half of the Evening Standard's staff as it junked its daily editions, has left for a job with PA.
PARTY POOPERS
The Tories and other parties barred some journalists from their respective party conferences without offering any reason at all.
GULF WAR
Mystery surrounds the apparent dismissal of the Guardian's award-winning Middle East correspondent.
