Unleashed by Boris Johnson review – regrets? Not even a few

Billed as offering the unfiltered truth about Brexit, Covid, partygate and more, the former prime minister’s brazen memoir is in fact little more than the latest chapter in his bid to present himself as a Churchillian hero

Spare a thought for the factcheckers at the publisher HarperCollins. For a regular political memoir, those guardians of textual accuracy might, you imagine, raise a query perhaps half a dozen times in each chapter. In the 750-plus pages of Boris Johnson’s Unleashed, however, I’d calculate they were probably working at a rate of nearly one red-inked alarm bell per sentence. No phrase that Johnson writes in this book comes entirely unlaced with hyperbole or self-serving spin. You’d hope the copy editors were being paid by the marginal note and had access to physiotherapy for RSI.

Take just the headline acts of the book (for which Johnson may expect to earn £3m) – those stories splashed earlier this week across the Daily Mail. The claim, for example, that the former prime minister had to be restrained from having British special forces invade the Netherlands in order to secure a batch of Covid vaccines impounded by the EU; or that after a game of tennis with David Cameron at Chequers the then prime minister reportedly vowed to “fuck him up for ever” if he supported the Leave campaign; or that Emmanuel Macron told him that Britain deserved a “punishment beating” for Brexit; or that the queen’s last words to him, two days before she died, were an expression of approval for his insouciance over the manner of his defenestration.