Johnson memoir is twisted, sour and full of yet more lies

‘Unleashed’ should be subtitled ‘Not me, guv’ as former PM uses the opportunity to deflect blame, writes Sean O’Grady

- Sean O’Grady

Lacking the benefit of Boris Johnson’s fine classical education – which is shown off liberally, once again, in his unreliable memoir Unleashed – I’m unable to quote with any sense of confidence whatever the antonym of mea culpa might be in Latin. So we’ll have to stick to English instead, and suggest that this book should best be subtitled “Not me, guv”. No opportunity to deflect blame is passed up: no scapegoat permitted to escape the tether; and no inconvenient truths intrude on what has been portrayed, by his old comrade Nadine Dorries, as a tragic fall from grace of Shakespearean proportions.

In this text, as he has done throughout his career, Johnson continually compares himself to Julius Caesar, Pericles and Cincinnatus, among others. Of his fall from power and his administration collapsing beneath him, he says that when he read his chancellor Rishi Sunak’s resignation letter with its “leaden prose” – a letter that, for Johnson, signalled the end – “I murmured, at least internally, ‘Kai su, teknon.’ If Caesar had 23 stab wounds I ended up with 62, in the sense that a grand total of 60 ministers decided to follow Saj [Sajid Javid, the then health secretary] and Rishi out of the door...” Tragic, no?