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Boris Johnson

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• Published: 31 August 2021
• ISBN: 9780753554920
• Imprint: WH Allen
• Format: Paperback
• RRP: $22.99

Boris Johnson

The Gambler

With his trademark access, insight and candour, Britain’s leading investigative biographer tackles his most fascinating subject yet: Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, the UK’s Prime Minister.

Guardian 'literary highlights of 2020' Sunday Times 'books to watch out for in 2020' New Statesman 'books to read in 2020' Evening Standard 'thirteen titles to look for in 2020'

As divisive as he is beguiling, as misunderstood as he is scrutinised, Boris Johnson is a singular figure.

Many of us think we know his story well. His ruthless ambition was evident from his insistence, as a three-year-old, that he would one day be 'world king'. Eton and Oxford prepared him well for a frantic career straddling the dog-eat-dog worlds of journalism and politics. His transformation from bumbling stooge on Have I Got New for You to a triumphant Mayor of London was overshadowed only by his colourful personal life, brimming with affairs, scandals and transgressions. His ascent to Number 10 in the wake of the acrimonious, era-defining Brexit referendum would prove to be only the first act in an epic drama that saw him play both hero and villain - from proroguing parliament to his controversial leadership of the Covid-19 Crisis, all against the backdrop of divorce, marriage, the birth of his sixth child, revolts among Tory MPs and the countdown to Brexit.

Yet despite his celebrity, decades of media scrutiny, the endless vitriol of his critics and the enduring adoration of his supporters, there is so much we've never understood about Boris - until now. Previous biographies have either dismissed him as a lazy, deceitful opportunist or been transfixed by his charm, wit and drive. Both approaches fall short, and so many questions about Boris remain unanswered.

What seismic events of his childhood have evaded scrutiny? How has he so consistently defied the odds, proved his critics wrong, and got away with increasingly reckless gambles? What were his real achievements and failures as Mayor of London, what was really going on during his time as Foreign Secretary, and why did he write two articles for the Telegraph , one in favour of Leave and the other for Remain? How have the women in his life exerted more influence than any of us realise, and why is his story ultimately one overshadowed by family secrets?

Based on a wealth of new interviews and research, this is the deepest, most rounded and most comprehensive portrait to date of the man, the mind, the politics, the affairs, the family - of a loner, a lover, a leader.

Revelatory, unsettling and compulsively readable, it is the most timely and indispensable book yet from Britain's leading investigative biographer.

About the author

Tom Bower is acknowledged as Britain’s leading investigative writer. His 24 bestselling books encompass a remarkably wide range of subjects. His most recent books include the most authoritative and best-selling account of Tony Blair’s decade as prime minister and the definitive biographies of Gordon Brown and Geoffrey Robinson MP. His previous book published in 2018, The Rebel Prince, the story of Prince Charles’s scandal-ridden bid to rehabilitate himself after Princess Diana’s death, was a number one best-seller. Bower is probably is best known for his unvarnished and unauthorised biographies of Britain’s most controversial tycoons including Robert Maxwell, Richard Branson, Mohamed Fayed, Tiny Rowland, Bernie Ecclestone and Simon Cowell. However, his previous books won great acclaim.

Praise for Boris Johnson

Tom Bower made his name as a writer of acid-pen biographies and his latest is no exception ... It's all there : the affairs, the lies, the broken promises, the unpaid debts. Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian BOOK OF THE WEEK

EXPLOSIVE... Contains a string of startling revelations about Mr Johnson's public and personal life, and goes farther than any previous biography towards solving the enigma of his true personality ... The political book of 2020. Daily Mail

Staggering ... Tom Bower [is] the master of the unauthorised biography Tatler

Another brilliant book by the master biographer Piers Morgan

A colourful and often catty read... full of zingers... Bower insists Boris Johnson should not be underestimated The Telegraph

Bower is merciless in his dissection of the prime minister's character weaknesses... a fast and furious ride through personal infidelities and political betrayals' Times BOOK OF THE WEEK

He must know all the dirt on Boris... A very well-researched biography The Spectator

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Boris Johnson by Tom Bower, review — he just wants to be loved

Entertaining and dementedly priapic, but also needy and deeply unhappy — the prime minister emerges as a complex figure in this mammoth biography.

T om Bower’s biography of Boris Johnson opens with exactly the kind of scene you expect. It is August 2019 and our hero has been prime minister for less than a month. To celebrate the birthday of his father, Stanley, he throws a party at Chequers. But the mood is dreadful. Boris’s four children with his estranged wife, Marina Wheeler, are no longer speaking to him and refuse to come. “He’s a shit,” one of the Johnson clan remarks of the new prime minister. “He’s utterly selfish. He’s destroyed the family.” And this is just the first page.

Who is Boris Johnson, really? This book’s subtitle calls him The Gambler , the kind of swashbuckling nickname he might choose for himself. Yet over 500 dense pages

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Boris Johnson: The Gambler Paperback – June 10, 2021

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Guardian 'literary highlights of 2020' Sunday Times 'books to watch out for in 2020' New Statesman 'books to read in 2020' Evening Standard 'thirteen titles to look for in 2020' As divisive as he is beguiling, as misunderstood as he is scrutinised, Boris Johnson is a singular figure. Many of us think we know his story well. His ruthless ambition was evident from his insistence, as a three-year-old, that he would one day be 'world king'. Eton and Oxford prepared him well for a frantic career straddling the dog-eat-dog worlds of journalism and politics. His transformation from bumbling stooge on Have I Got New for You to a triumphant Mayor of London was overshadowed only by his colourful personal life, brimming with affairs, scandals and transgressions. His ascent to Number 10 in the wake of the acrimonious, era-defining Brexit referendum would prove to be only the first act in an epic drama that saw him play both hero and villain - from proroguing parliament to his controversial leadership of the Covid-19 Crisis, all against the backdrop of divorce, marriage, the birth of his sixth child, revolts among Tory MPs and the countdown to Brexit. Yet despite his celebrity, decades of media scrutiny, the endless vitriol of his critics and the enduring adoration of his supporters, there is so much we've never understood about Boris - until now. Previous biographies have either dismissed him as a lazy, deceitful opportunist or been transfixed by his charm, wit and drive. Both approaches fall short, and so many questions about Boris remain unanswered. What seismic events of his childhood have evaded scrutiny? How has he so consistently defied the odds, proved his critics wrong, and got away with increasingly reckless gambles? What were his real achievements and failures as Mayor of London, what was really going on during his time as Foreign Secretary, and why did he write two articles for the Telegraph , one in favour of Leave and the other for Remain? How have the women in his life exerted more influence than any of us realise, and why is his story ultimately one overshadowed by family secrets? Based on a wealth of new interviews and research, this is the deepest, most rounded and most comprehensive portrait to date of the man, the mind, the politics, the affairs, the family - of a loner, a lover, a leader. Revelatory, unsettling and compulsively readable, it is the most timely and indispensable book yet from Britain's leading investigative biographer.

• Print length 320 pages
• Language English
• Publisher WH Allen
• Publication date June 10, 2021
• Dimensions 5.04 x 1.26 x 7.8 inches
• ISBN-10 0753554925
• ISBN-13 978-0753554920
• See all details

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ WH Allen (June 10, 2021)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0753554925
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0753554920
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.02 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.04 x 1.26 x 7.8 inches
• #3,335 in Royalty Biographies
• #11,288 in Political Leader Biographies
• #17,728 in Military Leader Biographies

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Boris Johnson: The Gambler Kindle Edition

Guardian 'literary highlights of 2020' Sunday Times 'books to watch out for in 2020' New Statesman 'books to read in 2020' Evening Standard 'thirteen titles to look for in 2020' As divisive as he is beguiling, as misunderstood as he is scrutinised, Boris Johnson is a singular figure. Many of us think we know his story well. His ruthless ambition was evident from his insistence, as a three-year-old, that he would one day be 'world king'. Eton and Oxford prepared him well for a frantic career straddling the dog-eat-dog worlds of journalism and politics. His transformation from bumbling stooge on Have I Got New for You to a triumphant Mayor of London was overshadowed only by his colourful personal life, brimming with affairs, scandals and transgressions. His ascent to Number 10 in the wake of the acrimonious, era-defining Brexit referendum would prove to be only the first act in an epic drama that saw him play both hero and villain - from proroguing parliament to his controversial leadership of the Covid-19 Crisis, all against the backdrop of divorce, marriage, the birth of his sixth child, revolts among Tory MPs and the countdown to Brexit. Yet despite his celebrity, decades of media scrutiny, the endless vitriol of his critics and the enduring adoration of his supporters, there is so much we've never understood about Boris - until now. Previous biographies have either dismissed him as a lazy, deceitful opportunist or been transfixed by his charm, wit and drive. Both approaches fall short, and so many questions about Boris remain unanswered. What seismic events of his childhood have evaded scrutiny? How has he so consistently defied the odds, proved his critics wrong, and got away with increasingly reckless gambles? What were his real achievements and failures as Mayor of London, what was really going on during his time as Foreign Secretary, and why did he write two articles for the Telegraph , one in favour of Leave and the other for Remain? How have the women in his life exerted more influence than any of us realise, and why is his story ultimately one overshadowed by family secrets? Based on a wealth of new interviews and research, this is the deepest, most rounded and most comprehensive portrait to date of the man, the mind, the politics, the affairs, the family - of a loner, a lover, a leader. Revelatory, unsettling and compulsively readable, it is the most timely and indispensable book yet from Britain's leading investigative biographer.

• Print length 578 pages
• Language English
• Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
• Publisher Virgin Digital
• Publication date 15 Oct. 2020
• File size 36825 KB
• Page Flip Enabled
• Word Wise Enabled
• Enhanced typesetting Enabled
• See all details

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From the Publisher

Just who is Boris Johnson?

As divisive as he is beguiling, as misunderstood as he is scrutinised, Boris Johnson is a singular figure.

Based on a wealth of new interviews and research, this is the deepest, most rounded and most comprehensive portrait to date of the man, the mind, the politics, the affairs, the family - of a loner, a lover, a leader.

Revelatory, unsettling and compulsively readable, it is the most timely and indispensable book yet from Britain's leading investigative biographer.

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About the author, product details.

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B085H91J9C
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Virgin Digital (15 Oct. 2020)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 36825 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 578 pages
• Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ B08L3NYBK1
• 270 in Biographies of Political Leaders
• 1,493 in Political Biographies
• 2,206 in Memoirs

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Tom Bower’s Boris Johnson biography is thin, imprecise and poorly written

The Gambler brings to mind that old cliché: it is both good and original, but what is good is not original, and what is original is not good.

By Stephen Bush

Shortly after my review of Tom Bower’s biography of Jeremy Corbyn had been published, I bumped into a former aide to Tony Blair, who commiserated with me on the painful task of making one’s way through Bower’s uneven and error-marked prose. Still, they said, I should consider myself lucky: when Bower’s Blair book came out, they had to read it twice.

I have read The Gambler , Bower’s new biography of Boris Johnson just once, but as I turned the pages, I had an uneasy sense of having read it at least twice before. Johnson has already been the subject of two excellent biographies: the sympathetic and intimate Boris by Andrew Gimson and the critical and lucid Just Boris by Sonia Purnell. There is little that is genuinely new or of interest in Bower’s account that has not been uncovered by Purnell or Gimson. That might be bearable if the resulting book was a pleasure to read, but Bower is no stylist, and his attempts at dramatic flourishes result in moments of accidental farce. Johnson’s first bid to become president of the Oxford Union, Bower tells us, “coincided with Margaret Thatcher’s new government being threatened by Marxist trade unionists, especially the miners, in a febrile political atmosphere”, leading us to believe that perhaps Johnson’s political ambitions will be thwarted by the Balliol College branch of the National Union of Mineworkers, or failing that by some posh Trots. Neither is forthcoming.

To tell the story, Bower relies heavily not on a posh Trotskyite, but on Johnson’s sister, Rachel. Bower quotes extensively, but without attribution, from a piece Johnson wrote for The Oxford Myth , a collection of essays edited by Rachel, writing that Johnson “later admitted” that his relationship with the “stooges” who helped him win was “founded on duplicity”. Reading Bower’s book, you would think that he had secured these confessions from Johnson himself, and indeed Bower goes so far as to criticise others, only two pages later, for taking The Oxford Myth as a “confession of dishonest politicking”. There is nothing in the chapter to alert you to the fact that these sections have been taken from an already-published book: other, that is, than the fact they are noticeably better written than the rest of The Gambler . And what Bower seems not to have understood is that the people that Johnson duped were not the electorate but the lesser candidates running on his ticket. It’s emblematic of the failings of Bower’s book, which brings to mind that old cliché: The Gambler is both good and original, but what is good is not original, and what is original is not good.

There is so much that is not good about The Gambler that it is difficult to know where to start, but it is perhaps best to begin where Bower does not: with his own relationship with Boris Johnson. As Bower reveals, in a typically pompous manner, “readers should be aware that Boris Johnson is not a stranger in my home”. He is certainly right, which makes one wonder why this disclosure takes place on the 527th page of a 528-page biography. To make matters worse, the disclosure is incomplete. Bower continues: “Veronica Wadley, my wife, has known him as a journalist since he joined the Daily Telegraph in 1988. She became the newspaper’s deputy editor before serving for seven years as the editor of the London Evening Standard . Their long relationship is one of colleagues rather than friends. She played no part in researching or writing this book.” He neglects to mention that those seven years in question covered the entirety of Ken Livingstone’s second term as mayor, during which Wadley’s Standard was the loudest and most reliable part of Johnson’s supporters’ club; that from 2012 to 2016 she worked for Johnson while he was mayor of London; and that in the summer of this year Johnson appointed Wadley to the House of Lords.

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This partial and belated disclosure leaves the reader with a choice. Either we take Bower at face value, and conclude that he embarked on this life of Johnson without once asking the woman with whom he lives for help in explaining a man she has known and worked with for more than three decades, which means we can’t trust his judgement. Or we can conclude that Bower’s disclosure note is not just tardy and incomplete but wholly false, which means that we can’t trust him.

That question rears its head at multiple points during the book: are we witnessing a failure of journalism or a failure of character? Bower claims that antagonism between Sonia Purnell and Johnson forced Jeremy Deedes, the Telegraph ’s chief executive, to visit Brussels in 1989 to get the bottom of the dispute. That would suggest great powers of prediction on the part of Deedes, as Purnell did not go to Brussels to work with Johnson until 1992. Is this a failure of fact-checking or a desire to belittle the author of a rival biography? Discussing Johnson’s near-death experience earlier this year, Bower writes of a scientist who described “Covid to MPs as ‘a very deceitful virus’ [and] likened Boris to an ‘invisible mugger’”. There are a number of problems here, not least that it was Johnson who made the “invisible mugger” comparison to describe the experience of fighting the virus. It’s unclear if Bower did not understand this or if he wanted to bolster his preferred narrative: that the story of the coronavirus crisis is of a Prime Minister failed by those around him, rather than of a Prime Minister out of his depth.

Bower made his name as the author of “hatchet jobs” of Robert Maxwell, Richard Branson and Conrad Black, and has since added politicians to his list of subjects, with books on Gordon Brown, Corbyn, Blair and now Johnson. But a hatchet job requires a level of precision that Bower lacks: his style is more that of a drink driver. Almost everybody Bower writes about is given a disparaging descriptor that calls doubt on their abilities or their motives. Amber Rudd is a “perfidious lightweight”, civil servants are “lazy and incompetent”.

This approach has two downsides. The first is that it is wearying: one almost expects Bower to start weaving in invectives against Johnson’s local corner shop. The second problem is that the overall effect is incoherent. He writes of an interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg in which Johnson “reeled defensively, unable to articulate a focused message of even limited success”, which, he claims, had the effect of “making it easier for the final edit to be chopped up to suit the BBC’s agenda”. If Johnson’s answers were defensive, inarticulate and unfocused, no editing was required: if he was the victim of a put-up job, then his answers are immaterial.

Bower spends far too much time making declarative statements about matters he cannot possibly know about. His chief contribution to the sum of knowledge about Boris Johnson lies in allegations about Johnson’s father, Stanley, here depicted as a philanderer and an abusive husband who frequently hit Johnson’s mother Charlotte. It is Stanley who is cast as the architect of Johnson’s vices and shortcomings. “Stanley’s violence has forever haunted Boris,” Bower writes, describing a later conversation between Johnson and a girlfriend in which Johnson, talking of his parents’ split, said: “My father promised me that they wouldn’t divorce, and I could never forgive him for that.” “Divorce,” Bower asserts, is “code for Stanley’s rage towards Charlotte.” Bower is even less of a child psychologist than he is a prose stylist and it feels somewhat distasteful to read his speculations about the consequences of Stanley’s behaviour and what Johnson “meant” in referring to it.

The book includes one or two interesting tidbits about Johnson’s later life. For example, while Bower is not the first to report that Dominic Cummings urged Johnson and other Brexiteers to vote for Theresa May’s deal, he is to my knowledge the first to get the exact quote, that MPs would be “strategic idiots” if they didn’t vote for it.

The problem, though, is that these insights, as well as being thin, are hard to trust, even when they have the ring of truth. A book that suggests, whether through accident or malice, that one-liners deployed by Johnson were insults hurled at him, and that gets dates wrong, can’t persuasively lead us to make comforting conclusions about Johnson or the people around him. A book that discloses on its penultimate page a major conflict of interest cannot escape questions about judgement or impartiality. As with Bower’s study of Corbyn, reviewers have rushed to point out the errors and misconceptions in this book, only to conclude that perhaps there is something serious in there worth studying. But these imprecise and poorly written biographies can’t be elevated to something they’re not, simply because it suits some reviewers to throw stones of their own at Johnson and Corbyn. Bower’s less than candid admission about his relationship with one of Johnson’s allies should not have been the final words of this book, but it ought to be the final word on him. 

The Gambler Tom Bower WH Allen, 592pp, £20

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Journalist Tom Bower confirms he is writing Boris Johnson biography

Author is said to specialise in books about ‘men with something to hide’

With Boris Johnson facing mounting calls to resign following this week’s supreme court ruling, and a brewing conflict of interest scandal, he is likely hoping nothing else will add to his list of woes.

But the prime minister has another potential pitfall on the horizon as, the Guardian has learned, the investigative author Tom Bower is writing a biography of him.

The award-winning journalist, whose wife, Veronica Wadley, served as a senior adviser to Johnson during his time as mayor of London, confirmed the book will be ready to hit the shelves next year.

Bower, who has been responsible for a series of damning biographies about high-profile figures over the years, has a reputation for unearthing damaging revelations about his subjects. He is said to specialise in books about “men with something to hide”.

News of the impending book will come as an unwelcome headache for the prime minister – who has a notoriously colourful private life – after a series of damaging revelations in recent months, including his late-night row with girlfriend Carrie Symonds.

This week, the prime minister stonewalled questions about a Sunday Times investigation that revealed he had a close friendship with US model-turned-entrepreneur Jennifer Arcuri, whose business received public funds while he was mayor. It comes as Johnson was hit by the supreme court’s ruling on Tuesday that his move to suspend parliament was illegal.

Bower has penned a series of biographies about Labour political figures including Jeremy Corbyn , Tony Blair and Gordon Brown but it is the first time he will dig into the life of a Conservative leader.

The columnist Peter Oborne accused Bower of systematically distorting the truth in his biography of the Labour leader, Dangerous Hero: Corbyn’s Ruthless Plot for Power, which was released earlier this year. In a scathing review , he wrote: “[The book] systematically omits relevant facts in order to portray Corbyn as a ruthless Marxist and antisemite hellbent on destroying western liberal values.”

By comparison, the Times’ review labelled it a “forensically detailed portrait” of Corbyn. Despite the praise, the reviewer concluded: “Yet Bower never really unpicks precisely why so many people, despite everything, continue to support such a joyless, limited and dogmatic man.”

Other biographies authored by Bower include books on Prince Charles, the Formula One tycoon Bernie Ecclestone, the billionaire Richard Branson, TV judge Simon Cowell and the businessman Mohamed Al Fayed. In 2003, Bower won the prestigious William Hill sports book of the year prize for Broken Dreams: Vanity, Greed and the Souring of British Football, his investigation into corruption in the game.

Bower’s latest book is published by Ebury, part of Penguin Books. It will be the third major biography of Johnson, following Sonia Purnell’s Just Boris: A Tale of Blond Ambition, published in 2011, and Andrew Gimson’s 2006 Boris: The Rise of Boris Johnson.

Wadley, a former editor of the Evening Standard who has been married to Bower for more than 30 years, was a senior adviser to Johnson from 2012 to 2016.

Drummond Moir, the group deputy publisher at Ebury, said: “WH Allen are proud to confirm they have signed up Britain’s leading investigative biographer to write a new biography of Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. Written with Bower’s trademark access, insight and candour, the book will be published in 2020.”

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Dilyn the Jack Russell-cross has become a fundamental part of Boris Johnson’s premiership. There’s the chancellor, the health secretary, the first fiancée plus Dilyn (it would seem). Therefore it’s fitting that he is being written into the history books. Investigative journalist and biographer Tom Bower is currently working on an additional chapter to include in the paperback edition of his Boris Johnson biography ( The Gambler ) that will be published in June. It is dedicated to the power struggles in Downing Street – and Dilyn is reportedly central to such combative tussles.

The Times Diary reports that the regular briefings against Dilyn – for his lack of discipline; that the PM is ‘struggling’ with an energetic pup about the house and that he is slowly destroying the antique Chequers furniture – are a thinly veiled attack on the mistress that pampers him, Carrie Symonds. She tweeted following reports that Dilyn was to be returned to a dog’s charity year: ‘There has never been a more loved dog than our Dilyn.’ Which certainly put rumours to rest.

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Boris Johnson was granted special neighbourly rights to exercise in the grounds of Buckingham Palace last year (since the Queen was seeing out the pandemic at Windsor Castle). Johnson is oft photographed with beloved Dilyn on his not infrequent runs. But the Times Diary reports that Dilyn has been leaving ‘little gifts’ in the grounds of the palace – and Mr Johnson is somewhat slack at cleaning up after him. The Diary says: ‘Fortunately, palace gardeners keep a supply of plastic bags at hand.’ A palace source told the newspaper: ‘It’s still not as bad as the corgis used to be.’

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Literary Review

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21st Century , Biography , Brexit , Politics

Michael White

Feasting for europe, holy man of westminster, the galba question, the camerons who knew me, a magazine or a cocktail party, crisis what crisis, boris johnson: the gambler, by tom bower, wh allen 592pp £20.

Tom Bower is an assassin among political biographers. When children hear that daddy has come to Mr Bower’s attention, they weep all the way to school and fail their exams. Wives change the locks or hire a divorce lawyer. Bower’s books hiss with menace and attract writs. Yet this one gives ‘unauthorised biography’ a bad name.

As a rule, Bower is keen to spray around blame. Here, however, we find him firing blanks. Might this have something to do with the peerage recently given by Boris Johnson to the former Evening Standard editor Veronica Wadley? In Bower’s account, it was Wadley who persuaded Boris – he is never ‘Johnson’ here – to run against Ken Livingstone in the 2008 London mayoral contest, and she backed him through thin and thinner thereafter. Bower just happens to be married to Wadley (now Lady Fleet), a fact he discloses to innocent readers only in the acknowledgements on page 527. His reticence is telling and reflects the selective nature of Bower’s scorn, from which he gallantly shields Boris – who is, he coyly admits, ‘not a stranger in my home’.

Bower’s intentions are not immediately clear as he relates the now-familiar story of the four older Johnson siblings’ savagely dysfunctional upbringing. Bower has had access to Boris’s mother’s version of events, and here provides details of her husband Stanley’s regular physical and verbal assaults. This means that Boris’s father is cast as villain-in-chief here. We are invited to believe that his eldest son was burdened with awareness of his father’s ambitiously selfish, restless, priapic and mean but also frivolously self-defeating failings. Boris grew up a solitary, insecure child, determined to do much the same as his father but better.

It is a bleak but riveting story, involving ‘parentless’ children as feral as council estate waifs – and sometimes as hungry too. But it serves a useful purpose, allowing Bower to present Johnson as a victim, a clever ‘mixed-race outsider’ making his way among dim, snooty aristos and arrogant members of the liberal elite. Johnson strives against envious ‘Boris haters’ in the press, Parliament, the civil service and, of course, Brussels, where he first gained fame reporting on bent bananas and condom sizes.

How can Bower, the tenacious researcher, square the record of Johnson’s profligacy, opportunism and dishonour, much of which he reports in masochistic detail, with the generous and principled hero of his imagining? With evident difficulty, but he tries, employing the Boris-like device of blaming each successive disaster on someone else. ‘Had he sought to be better briefed’ is the kind of weasel wording deployed here to exculpate Johnson.

There are few jokes in a Bower biography but one laugh-aloud moment in this one comes when George Eustice, David Cameron’s press spokesman while in opposition, leaves a message on Johnson’s phone. Before hanging up, he says to a colleague next to him, ‘That man is a complete cunt’. Aggro-averse Boris rings back in a spirit of mollification and Eustice lives to tell the tale. Brexit-compliant by conviction, not opportunism, he is now one of Johnson’s Cabinet ministers. Most of those who cross Boris are not so lucky.

The same goes for Bower. So Jeremy Corbyn is an ‘anti-Semitic Marxist’ and Keir Starmer is ‘not the finest legal brain at the Bar’. Michael Howard is ‘impetuous and blinkered’, Philip Hammond is a ‘class-conscious’ transport secretary who does ‘dry freakery’, David Cameron has ‘drunk his own Kool-Aid’ and Chris Patten was a ‘presumptuous chairman’ of the BBC. Simon McDonald, permanent undersecretary at the Foreign Office (until he was effectively sacked by Johnson) is ‘unctuous and fluent’ – and also ‘from Salford’. The Department for Transport is staffed by ‘notoriously incompetent civil servants’. The BBC and The Guardian (even its investigative scoops) are relentlessly derided. On the other hand, Jacob Rees-Mogg is ‘an exceptionally polite and well-educated fund manager’ and the Tory peer Greville Howard’s house has ‘elegant’ flower boxes.

This would matter less if Bower’s partisan narrative was softened by witty or worldly political judgements. Instead, they are harsh and crass. At one point he describes populism as ‘the sin of serving the needs of the working class while ignoring the self-interest of the liberal elites’. Billionaire outsider Donald Trump could not have put it better. Bower believes that Johnson really has ‘got Brexit done’, though he parks that unfolding story with Johnson’s December election victory, shifting the focus to the coronavirus outbreak.

The pandemic is a rare example of a Johnson career crisis – political, financial, sexual, administrative – that has not been self-inflicted. But in largely ignoring it for two crucial months, and then by dithering, Johnson has made it his own. Bower blames the medics and scientists and useless health officials for Britain’s high mortality rate (and foreigners for fiddling their own figures). There is some truth in his strictures, but no one has recently called Chris Whitty or Patrick Vallance a ‘genius’, as Charles (coincidentally, now Lord) Moore did of Johnson. The pandemic presented Johnson with the prospect of a Churchillian moment and he flunked it. Careless, clinically obese and self-deceiving, he caught the virus himself and nearly died while his revolutionary Dr Strangelove was taking an eye test at Barnard Castle.

The phrase that often springs to mind here is ‘opportunity cost’. Back in January, Johnson was too busy with the Brexit bongs to fret about some Chinese clap. A leader whose aides fear to bring him bad news, is careless with details and facts, is prey to his own demons and is constantly juggling the Petsys and Carries is unlikely to be able to master a real challenge. ‘Be careful what you wish for’ might serve as an epitaph for World King Boris I, if he gets one.

From Eton, through Balliol and Brussels, sort-of editing The Spectator and pretending to be foreign secretary, Johnson mostly got away with it, leaving family and friends, colleagues and staff to sweep up the wreckage. Disdain for rules and hard work coupled with impudent charm got him through. Bower is just another enabler. By the time of the 2019 election, ‘the majority of the British public accepted he was a rogue and wanted to move on,’ he writes. But Johnson’s bluff has now been called and Bower comes close to admitting it in his epilogue.

Would this have happened if Labour activists had not stood by the hopeless Jeremy Corbyn, allowing their Tory counterparts to safely (as they thought) indulge their own reckless fantasy of a Johnson leadership? Bower does not ask. But Corbyn still has his allotment. What Bower brings sharply into focus here is how lonely Johnson is, how dependent on excitement and applause to stave off recurring depression and sustain his erection. Being PM was a form of 24/7 therapy until the coronavirus burst in. As Johnson might put it in one of those £5-a-word Daily Telegraph columns, he is not so much Caligula as the horse.

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