Unleashed is the title of this memoir, with a picture of Boris looking sexily tousled on the front. So what are we to think except that the author intends us to see him as an animal – one of those apex predators - who’s been let loose finally to tell the world how it was and how he is. Well no, silly us. Boris is talking about post-Brexit Britain – “We are unleashed and we’ll never be leashed again” – so it’s not about him. But if that’s how the reader wants to take it, that’s just fine.
This is of course the former PM’s opportunity to get things off his chest, and where others pay for their therapy, the reader pays for Boris’s. He’s got a lot to say about where things have gone wrong for the Tories in the last election – see chapter 59. He is right to point out that he got a full ten points more in votes in his last election than Keir Starmer did in July. Boris, running on the “Get Brexit Done” ticket was one of the great populist vote winners of modern politics. Where he’s less good is in analysing how he failed to live up to his own very real promise.
