There is no great mystery about why Boris Johnson chose to release his Unleashed memoir this week. He wants the attention. He always does. More than that, though, he wanted to overshadow the Conservative party conference. He hoped the rib-tickling yarns and ebullient, confident language of his memoir would remind the Tory faithful of all they were missing. He intended to show the four leadership candidates that he is the election-winning Tory colossus that they can only dream of being.
Mr Johnson also wants to be thought of as a current player, not a former one. His book is explicit about this. He is blithely confident – no surprises there – that if he had been Tory leader he would have won this year’s general election. “If we had all stuck together I would have no doubt that we would have gone on to win in 2024,” he writes. Rishi Sunak’s mistake in July was to ignore the Johnson legacy: “We never mentioned any of the good things that had been done in the period 2019-2022, when I was PM.”
At the end of his memoir, Mr Johnson unveils a 10-point programme for the defeated Tory party to follow. One word – “fix” – is common to all the 10 proposals that he lists. For example, says Mr Johnson, the party should “fix housing”, should “fix immigration” and “fix the NHS”. It should go further still, he adds, and “fix government”. It should even “fix capitalism”. This is all made to seem beguilingly simple.
The insurmountable catch, though, is that none of these things is simple at all. Government by slogan remains Mr Johnson’s most audacious political trick. He pretends that solving something is merely a matter of will. Get Brexit done. Level up. Protect the NHS. Today he has a new slogan. Fix everything. But the trick is still the same and the truth, in every case, is that Mr Johnson’s approach is, as he might put it, an inverted pyramid of piffle. In reality, government is difficult. Mr Johnson is not good at things that are difficult. In fact he is hopeless, as he showed in office.
British voters have now tumbled to this. It is why, in 2022, the Tory party realised that Mr Johnson had to go. It is why, save for a few acolytes, almost no one seriously wanted him back when Liz Truss resigned. Even Mr Johnson himself admits in his memoir: “I don’t think you should underestimate how many goofs I made.” Well, goofs is one word for it, but there are many others.
This may help to explain something worth logging about British politics today. Mr Johnson’s book, and its expensive serialisation in the Daily Mail, did not dominate the Conservative party’s week in Birmingham after all. Instead, the conference, buoyed up by Labour’s struggles, managed to concentrate on the contest to succeed Mr Sunak and to dream to itself of an improbable recovery.
Mr Johnson, by contrast, provided little more than off-stage entertainment. This is partly explained by his familiar laziness – not bothering to attend the conference. But the Tory party is slowly moving on. After nearly 20 years of making the weather, Mr Johnson is not the force he once was. All political careers end in failure, Enoch Powell once wrote. Even, it now begins to feel, Mr Johnson’s.