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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Martin Kettle

Unleashed by Boris Johnson review – memoirs of a clown

Boris Johnson walking away from a lectern
The then prime minister Boris Johnson at a Downing Street press conference, April 2021. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/AFP/Getty Images

Written once their authors have lost power, most prime ministerial memoirs try at some level to be reflective. David Cameron’s begins by confessing that he still has daily anxieties about having called the Brexit referendum. John Major’s starts even more disarmingly, by wondering why he went into politics at all.

But Boris Johnson does not do reflective. He never has and he never will. And nor does his new memoir, with its unnerving title, Unleashed. It covers his time as London mayor, Brexit campaigner, foreign secretary and prime minister. But if it is heart-searching and confessions you seek from the pen of Britain’s most iconoclastic prime minister, you can stop now.

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