Despite the fact that Liz Truss said, ‘Boris, you are admired from Kyiv to Carlisle’, to what extent was Truss loyal to him? I’ve read a number of political memoirs by Anthony Seldon and find his approach to his subject well balanced and supported by meticulous research and sources. This book is written in collaboration with Newell, also politically well informed and the result makes compelling listening or reading. Johnson was clearly a man unfit to govern. He was lazy; his attention was spasmodic; he chose to be surrounded by people who would not challenge him; he was unable to make decisions effectively; he was often torn between what Carrie, his wife, would say, what his advisers were advising and what he felt ought to be done; he did not cultivate his MPs; his inclinations were at odds with the influential (and obstinate) Conservative right-wingers; he was a liar, arrogantly self-confident, inconsistent to the exasperation of his aides and advisers, often unbriefable, utterly casual over detail… And so on and so forth. He was a vortex of chaos, and No 10 became one as well without the kind of clear and consistent leadership that makes for an effective administration. The heart of government was, in fact, under Johnson, dysfunctional. How did Johnson despise the Conservative Parliamentary Party with a number of his own MPs doubting he was a Conservative with his high-spending and interventionist views?

A spokesperson for Johnson told the Times, which has serialised the book, that the revelations were “the usual malevolent and sexist twaddle” from the former PM’s enemies.Secondly, it refutes the dangerous myth that Boris Johnson was foiled by a remainer establishment, rather than his own incompetence. His former chief of staff Eddie Lister declares that there is “no evidence that the civil service impeded the delivery of Brexit” and the authors conclude that if Johnson didn’t always get what he wanted from Whitehall, that’s because he led it poorly.

I think readers will be aware that I was never Johnson’s biggest fan. He cynically supported Brexit because he thought (correctly) that it would make him Prime Minister (though he screwed up on the first attempt in 2016), building on a career of lies about Europe and about his personal life. In office as Foreign Secretary, he displayed casual incompetence to the point where he endangered the life of a British citizen held captive in Iran. He endorsed Theresa May’s Brexit deal with the EU, before deciding that it would be more convenient to resign in protest, disrupting and upstaging a Balkans conference in London that the UK had laboured on for months. From then on, it was only a matter of time before he got to Number 10. The second moment was when Johnson ‘told his startled officials “Put down in 3,000 words what you think my foreign policy should be.”’ There are a couple of points to be said in Johnson’s favour. He did win an election with a clear majority, which is a notable achievement even in the supposedly decisive British system (helped of course by the incompetence at the time of Labour and the Lib Dems). He was seriously committed to Net Zero, and was ready to argue the toss on climate with sceptics in his own party, though less good at doing the preparatory legwork for the Glasgow COP meeting. He came in early and strong on Ukraine’s side in the war, and helped consolidate the G7 and NATO in support. (Though there too, the UK is a smaller player compared to the US and the EU.)This is not a book that I enjoyed, not a book to be enjoyed from the viewpoint of my politics certainly because of all of the depressing confirmation that it provided of the failings that Johnson brought into No.10 and the damage it did to our nation. This mirthless farce had tragic real-world consequences. Utterly unsuited to handling a crisis as grave as the pandemic, his endless prevarications and about-turns cost lives. “He wildly oscillated in what he thought,” observes one official. “In one day he would have three meetings in which he would say three completely different things depending on who was present, and then deny that he had changed his position.” His personal brush with Covid encouraged some to think it might prompt a reform of his behaviour. They were disappointed. Even coming near to death couldn’t remedy character flaws that were so deeply ingrained.

I recently read the excellent Chums: How A Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over The UK which covers (amongst other things) Boris Johnson's formative years at Eton and Oxford, which set the scene for his later life. It was therefore an excellent, if unintentional, personal sequel.

Events have flowed so bizarrely over the past four years that it's easy to become confused. This book is going to be a godsend to people writing about this era because the authors have recorded the views and thoughts of the participants before time and hindsight rewrite them. To those many people who say, ‘Of course he believed in Brexit’, the evidence is absolutely clear,” Seldon says. “From the beginning it was striking that he believed that there was a cause far higher than Britain’s economic interests, than Britain’s relationship with Europe, than Britain’s place in the world, than the strength of the union. That cause was his own advancement.” How did Johnson play upstairs-downstairs between his Cabinet and his new wife, Carrie? To what extent did Johnson prefer infighting rather than coherent government? Boris was deeply flawed before he even came into power, a self-serving shallow but intelligent man who had the makings of becoming something great, but his small personality came into play. He could have become a good prime minister but this book takes us behind the inner workings of government, goes into all the nooks and crannies and round all the corners to take us to the truth of a poorly selected government, a PM who couldn't stand civil servants and trod them down at every opportunity, he was the main man and nobody else could challenge him. He was incapable of making decisions and waivered all the while so no decisions were being taken when they were desperately needed. Why did Britain get the Covid pandemic wrong in the early stages and did the government learn from its mistakes?