It’s a bad week of theatre for Boris Johnson. He would be unlikely to endorse the warty portrait of his political idol in Howard Brenton’s Churchill in Moscow. And now, in The Autobiography of a Cad, an egotistical, Shakespeare-quoting, wildly reproductive Old Etonian and Oxonian Tory looks back on a public life in memoirs that prove to be unreliable and self-serving.
Some relief for the former prime minister is that Edward Fox-Ingleby becomes a broader portrait of privileged chancers in English public life. He gives a Sunak-like oration in a downpour, lounges on a Commons bench in the Rees-Mogg manner, suffers David Cameron and Liz Truss’s overconfidence about their political nous, leans towards the biographical inaccuracy of Jeffrey Archer and shares Prince Andrew’s appetite for shooting weekends (though not pizza).
