A political memoir is ego and gossip shrouded with a glossy headshot, and Boris Johnson’s new memoir Unleashed is a perfect example. Over its nearly 800 pages, it often repeats its mantra that, yes, the former prime minister made a few “blunders”, but actually he was right all along.
There is name-calling: Keir Starmer is a “pointless traffic cone”; Theresa May is “old grumpy knickers”; Donald Trump is “like an orange-hued dirigible exuberantly buoyed aloft by the inexhaustible Primus stove of his own ego”.
And there is gossip. Boris recalls, for example, that during his tenure as foreign secretary, after a visit from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu they “found a listening device in the thunderbox”. And Queen Elizabeth II, Johnson dares to share, was suffering from bone cancer — a controversial admission given the health of the monarch was kept private throughout her reign.
Johnson’s milestones and his interpretation of them are, of course, prominent: he devotes a mere two pages to the “partygate” scandal, elsewhere discusses his manifesto for the Conservatives under the chapter “Some Pointers for the Future”, and details his experience running a gauntlet to “Get Brexit Done” despite the influence of Remainers, the European Union, a fear of the IRA, and his own MPs.
But what does Boris say about Australia? In the chapter “Triumph at Carbis Bay”, the G7 Summit at which AUKUS was born, Johnson sets the scene where, in the idyllic British landscape in Cornwall, Scott Morrison throws himself at the mercy of Johnson.
As Johnson writes, Morrison — who was “in a quandary” and “needed UK help” — presented the AUKUS submarine deal to Johnson, despite Australia’s preexisting submarine contract with France. Morrison was reportedly struggling with French production “taking longer, and proving more expensive”, and the French diesel engines were allegedly too “noisy”.
Johnson reportedly started organising a proposal to get the United States on board, the United Kingdom already being a “junior partner” in that military relationship, before launching into a lengthy tangent on exactly why he proceeded without the slightest concern for the French government:
There was … a host of issues where, given the chance, [Emmanuel Macron] would not hesitate to put his Cuban-heeled bootee into Brexit Britain.
Johnson casts himself as a “kind of matchmaker” in setting up AUKUS, with his “most important job” at the summit being a discreet meeting between himself, Morrison and US President Joe Biden — all “without being rumbled by the French”.
On the deal itself, Johnson says it was never meant to be directly anti-Chinese (he is a self-proclaimed Sinophile) nor “anti-anyone”. It is more than building submarines together; it is “strengthening the West,” he says. “It is about collaboration in hypersonics, AI, quantum”. (For reference, Morrison, in his memoir, frames it as Australia’s great stand against China’s bullying.)
Despite the deal sending the French government into a “raucous squawkus from the anti-Aukus caucus”, Johnson leaves the whole affair with the sentiment he was in “a pretty good mood” after his meeting in a “sultry plywood hutch, looking out over the sea”. He asserts the deal could not have happened without Brexit.
AUKUS is, to Boris, a prime example of why he is right. He says most people welcomed it, including “traffic cone” Keir Starmer. Never mind the furore in Australia over the astronomical $368 billion estimated cost, nor the polls that fewer Australians believe AUKUS will improve security. Nor heavy-weight Australian politicians having denounced the deal, such as former prime minister Paul Keating, who said the British must have seen us as “suckers”, and former Labor foreign minister Gareth Evans, who called it “a joke in bad taste”.
However, history is written by the victors, and in Unleashed, AUKUS is written in Boris Johnson’s great epic as a victory for Brexit. It’s a dig at the French, a uniting moment for the “Anglosphere” and a flash of politicking and diplomatic skill.
Australia was never going to have its issues with AUKUS included in the memoir when it didn’t suit the former prime minister’s narrative. But as Johnson said in his final address to Parliament, them’s the brakes.
