This ‘excellent’ new work is an ‘unsparing’ account of Boris Johnson’s time as prime minister
Many people realise that Boris Johnson is a dishonest chancer who lacks any real convictions, said David Gauke in The New Statesman. Less obvious – at least to those outside Whitehall – is “quite how extraordinarily inept he was at performing some of the basic functions of being prime minister”. In their account of Johnson’s time at No. 10, Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell “have done a service to us all in setting out this reality in unsparing detail”. Based on more than 200 interviews, the book exposes “again and again” Johnson’s lack of fitness for high office. He chaired meetings chaotically, had a minuscule attention span, and would say different things to different people, often several times in a single day. Grasping that he could achieve little on his own, he depended heavily on Dominic Cummings – to the extent that his adviser was “able to remove both the chancellor (Sajid Javid) and the cabinet secretary (Mark Sedwill) and choose their successors”. “I am meant to be in control. I am the führer. I’m the king,” the authors report Johnson saying after being sidelined by Cummings.
