A master of prose that is both rich and terribly cheap

Boris Johnson has written a memoir - and there is no doubt, writes Robert McCrum, that the former PM's account of his political career will be 'self-centred to an astounding degree'

Lenin once said, according to rumour, that there are decades where nothing happens, and weeks where decades happen. Soon after the millennium, the British Isles experienced a rush of history: a financial emergency, six general elections, five new prime ministers, a constitutional crisis, a pandemic – and then the death of the Queen.

Some have said that these were the nation’s worst years since the Napoleonic wars, and there is one politician who has blazed a meteoric trail across almost every page of this teeming history: Boris Johnson. But only now is he telling his story, for no less than a reported half a million pounds and counting.

At that price, never mind setting the record straight, he’ll have to deliver. But what is in the offing from such a maverick pen? As he might put it, a macédoine of regret, maybe mortification, and dismay? As the first parts of Unleashed are published, we finally get a hint of what might be to come.

Johnson’s predecessors have had their say. Cameron’s apologia, For the Record, was a stodgy anthology of special pleading, a mea culpa on stilts. Theresa May’s The Abuse of Power was not just deadly but dead on arrival, and sank without a trace.

Who else? There is, incorrigibly, the ludicrous lettuce queen herself. Liz Truss, in power for 49 days, wrote Ten Years to Save West, a mad volume of 320 pages (or 6.5 pages per day) that was at once semi-literate, comically self-deluded, and weirdly confessional (aka self-serving). A shockingly low bar had been set.

Johnson, an accomplished journalist, had already begun to rehearse his lines before he was even prime minister. While Cameron et al were strutting across the stage, Boris was alleged to be writing – or not writing – a book about Shakespeare.