To be the most popular and defining politician of the last decade in the United Kingdom, it is striking that the only trace of an alleged johnsonism in public debate is a hangover of frivolity from which the British Conservative Party has not completely recovered.
Boris Johnson’s memoirs go on sale on October 10. Unleashed (something like Unleashed), published by Harper Collins. A book that “breaks the mold of the modern prime ministerial memoir genre,” says the publisher. “The political memoirs of the century,” the conservative tabloid proclaims with self-interested exaggeration. Daily Mailwhich has published fragments of the text in recent days.
The main British newspapers and columnists have delved into the copies advanced by the Harper Collins press department to issue their verdict on 784 pages of anecdotes, gossip and statements that are difficult to corroborate, covering his time as mayor of London, as a standard bearer of Brexit , as Foreign Secretary and, finally, as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. The memories of a public figure with a high concept of himself and his place in history. “The memoirs of a clown,” the columnist from Guardian Martin Kettle.
Kettle joins a torrent of devastating opinions that define the former prime minister as “a daffodil with his gaze intensely fixed on his own reflection” or a character “who hides in his own caricature.”
Camouflaged under a lot of apparently harmless jokes and anecdotes, the book nevertheless reveals the arrogance of a politician who neither admits mistakes nor has any qualms about admitting his traps and deceptions.
Johnson acknowledges that, to push through Brexit, he signed an Irish Protocol in which he did not believe. An order based on the conviction that the EU would look the other way and not hinder trade between the two Irelands. Such clumsiness caused one of the most acute crises between London and Brussels.
In the same way that the former prime minister now claims that he was wrong to apologize for the scandal of the parties banned in Downing Street during confinement. They were “pathetic” and “humiliating” apologies that gave the impression “that we were more guilty than we really were,” says Johnson, like the child who refuses to admit the mischief.
But it is undoubtedly the revelation that Elizabeth II suffered from a certain type of bone cancer during the last months of her life, an open secret that Buckingham Palace never confirmed or denied, that reveals the character of a character like Johnson. Isabel II expressly wanted her illness to disappear from the official version, to present her old age as the only reason for the farewell.
The former prime minister, by including it as another joke in his book, makes it clear that, as has always been his case, the rules that subject the rest of us mortals do not obligate him anything.
The Conservative Party, which held its annual conference last week in Birmingham, focused on electing a new leader to lead an electorally defeated formation in opposition, has chosen to ignore a character who has been a key part of its recent political life. The four candidates who aspire to lead the tories they have He invoked Margaret Thatcher more than Johnson in his speeches.
“He will always be the king on our horizon. He is a great character,” Nicky Morgan, who was Minister of Culture in her Government, defined him during the Cheltenham Literature Festival, where the memoir has been on the lips of all the guests. “Party members still consider him very funny, but they no longer see him as part of their future,” Morgan summed up the general feeling.
A money making machine
The book has already reached the top of the best-seller list on Amazon, where it has been put on pre-sale for 15 pounds (about 18 euros), half of what it will likely cost when it hits store shelves. bookstores. Johnson has already received an advance of more than 600,000 euros from the publisher. Her successor, Liz Truss, received an advance of around 9,000 euros for her memoirs, titled Ten Years to Save the West.
The different anecdotes scattered throughout the book, advanced by the Daily Mailhave these days delighted all those for whom Johnson is a hidden vice that leaves a notable hangover, but whose temptation is impossible to avoid.
Netanyahu and the microphone in the toilet
Johnson remembers when, during his brief tenure as British Foreign Secretary, he received the current Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, in London. It was 2017, and, with his usual mix of erudition and self-confidence, he showed the Israeli politician the desk of Arthur Balfour, the Downing Street tenant who 100 years earlier had signed the famous Balfour Declaration that promised British support for the establishment of “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine.
When Netanyahu asked to go to the bathroom, Johnson directed him to a toilet hidden in a secret annex of the office. “Bibi [como se llama coloquialmente a Netanyahu, y como también le llama él] dallied for a while, and it may or may not have been a coincidence, but when one of the frequent inspections for possible listening devices was carried out shortly after, they found a microphone in the thunder box” Johnson blurts out. A full-fledged accusation of espionage, masked in the middle of an apparently humorous joke.
Castaway in Scotland
Johnson has the undeniable ability to hide his excessive self-love by laughing at himself. The former prime minister tells how, during a holiday with his wife on the Isle of Skye, in the Scottish Highlands, in August 2020, he was overwhelmed by the invasion of mosquitoes that is common in the region during the summer months .
He couldn’t think of anything better than jumping into the sea aboard an inflatable kayak canoe purchased at the Argos supermarket. His body weight caused the bow of the canoe to rise, and it became “a kind of sail.” Wind and tidal currents pushed Johnson nearly 600 meters from shore. For half an hour he rowed hard, trying to return. “I had to choose between two equally bad options. Let myself be swept away by the sea and drown, or at least provoke a ridiculous rescue operation by the coast guard, or abandon the canoe and start swimming.”
Finally, he chose the last option and, helped by one of his escorts who braced himself towards him, he managed to get to safety.