LONDON — Whoever said life was too short to bear a grudge didn’t tell Boris Johnson.
The former prime minister’s book “Unleashed” is out Thursday after weeks of teasing revelations. Johnson, a former journalist, hasn’t forgotten how to grab a headline, and is promising the real lowdown on his tumultuous three years in No. 10 Downing Street, plus his Brexit-filled rise to the top.
POLITICO read his book at lighting speed and found (probably) all the people he’s decided to unleash on in a bid to sell a few more paperbacks.
1) Queen Elizabeth II
Information shared between the monarch and the prime minister is usually private. Like many British conventions, it’s one Johnson seemed unafraid to ignore when he revealed the late queen “had a form of bone cancer” in the run-up to her death in Sept. 2022. “Old age” was officially listed as Queen Elizabeth II’s cause of death. Johnson was the first prominent politician to publicly speak about how she died.
2) Prince Harry
Johnson’s charm only took him so far with Tory MPs, who booted him out of office after a few short years in the job. The same was apparently true with Prince Harry. The ex-PM tried persuading the royal to stay in the U.K. rather than move to America with his wife Meghan Markle. They even had a “manly pep talk” — something Johnson admits was a “ridiculous business” and “totally hopeless.” Better luck next time!
3) Theresa May
Downing Street has been the official residence of prime ministers since 1735. Johnson was … less than complimentary about the way his predecessor left it. In one of many interviews plugging the book, the-PM said an expensive and controversial refurbishment involving new wallpaper was necessary because the building “looked like a crack den.” The accusation was naturally denied by his predecessor Theresa May’s ex-Chief of Staff Gavin Barwell, who said: “I don’t think it should come as a surprise to POLITICO readers by now that Boris Johnson sometimes says things that bear little resemblance to the truth.” Touché.
Elsewhere in the book, Johnson takes aim at the woman who appointed him to one of the great offices of state, attacking May’s “schoolmarmy self-righteousness.” He reveals that he was “particularly fixated upon her nostrils” and “nose-twisting.” Worth knowing.
4) Benjamin Netanyahu
Johnson has been a consistent ally of Israel. But “Unleashed” includes an eye-opening suggestion that Benjamin Netanyahu left a listening device in Johnson’s personal bathroom when he was foreign secretary. “When they were doing a regular sweep for bugs, they found a listening device in the thunderbox,” Johnson writes of his security team (a “thunderbox” seems to be a Johnsonian term for a toilet. You’re welcome!)
5) Emmanuel Macron
Here’s someone else off Johnson’s Christmas card list. The ex-PM accused French President Emmanuel Macron of “being a positive nuisance” by trying to “put his Cuban-heeled bootee in Brexit Britain.” He suggested Macron turned a blind eye to irregular migrant crossings of the English Channel to give Britain a “punishment beating” over Brexit. No wonder Labour’s Keir Starmer is trying for an EU reset.
6) The EU in general
Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer. Boris Johnson decided to, er, slightly ignore that advice when he contemplated invading the Netherlands to seize five million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine because it was not being exported to the U.K.
Johnson recalled meeting military officials, some of whom suggested using “the cover of darkness to cross the Channel in ribs (rigid inflatable boats) and navigate up the canals.” Admitting the whole operation was “nuts,” Johnson then slammed the EU for treating Britain with “malice and spite.” Truly letting bygones be bygones.
7) Barack Obama
Johnson sparked a feud with the then-U.S. president during the Brexit referendum campaign when he claimed Obama had moved a Winston Churchill bust in the White House because of an “ancestral dislike” of the British Empire.
It doesn’t get much friendlier in “Unleashed,” where Johnson accuses Obama of pouring “scorn on the idea” of a U.K.-U.S. free trade deal ahead of the Brexit vote in 2016. He said Obama’s claim Britain would end up at the “back of the queue” for a deal — not a common U.S. phrase — instead of “back of the line” means No. 10 led by David Cameron had “fed the script.”
8) Joe Biden
From one U.S. president to another, Johnson seemed happy to disrupt the special relationship. The ex-PM says he handed a cheap gift — a picture printed off Wikipedia — to Joe Biden at a G7 summit. That’s in contrast to fancy items lavished on Johnson by the Americans. “I doubt that we spent as much as a penny on them,” Johnson reflects. “It was fabulously mean; which I suppose will draw the approval of the U.K. taxpayer.” American Revolution avenged?
9) The public
Freed from the constraints of winning public office, Johnson wonders why voters “so avidly craved” the Covid-19 lockdown policies he implemented and accuses them of enjoying having their “doings circumscribed.” He suggests the electorate obeyed the rules “like a religion,” though later insisted in an interview he was not mocking people. Probably a smart move, given more than 100,000 Brits died after getting Covid-19 on his government’s watch.
10) His own government
Accountability is meant to rest at the top in politics. But that didn’t stop Johnson slamming his own administration for the Covid-19 lockdowns he himself signed off on. Johnson writes that he could hardly believe “the audacity of the government in trying to micromanage humanity.” If only he’d been able to speak to senior officials about all of this!
11) Tory MPs
They helped him become leader — and then they got rid of him. Johnson’s ex-parliamentarians, often dubbed the most conniving electorate in the world, came in for their share of criticism after removing the dear leader. Johnson suspected some “had been rattled … by the hate storms of Twitter” and wrongly believed a change of leader could see them “canter to victory.” He labeled the decision to oust him “worse than a crime.”
12) Rishi Sunak
Johnson’s successor-but-one comes in for a pasting. He resigned as Johnson’s chancellor with a blast at his leadership and later went on to become prime minister. Johnson says he had “not seen the evidence” Sunak knew how to cope “with the scale of the job, how to mount a truly massive campaign, how to project a vision of the future.” He insists he would have been supportive of Sunak succeeding him after the 2024 election and says Sunak “assured me of his complete support ‘for as long as you want.’” That’s politics!
13) David Cameron
The schoolboy rivalry that began at the elite, fee-paying Eton boys’ school never really ended. Irritated that Cameron beat him to No. 10, Johnson says he was “wrong-footed” after Cameron “flounced off the stage” when he lost the EU referendum and quit as prime minister.
14) Michael Gove
Gove doesn’t escape an earful from Johnson. The pair initially ran on a joint Conservative leadership ticket after the 2016 referendum … but Gove then stabbed Johnson in the back and ran for leader himself. Eight years on, Johnson expresses bemusement about why Gove “did me in” and decided to “blow me up on the launchpad,” a move he brands “stupidity.”
15) Philip Hammond
Theresa May’s dour chancellor is described by Johnson as “dry as dust.” Johnson says the top finance minister nevertheless urged him to take over after Theresa May lost her majority in a snap election gamble.
16) Keir Starmer
Forever irate that Starmer — now Britain’s prime minister — outlasted him, Johnson takes aim at the Labour boss in his usual colorful manner. He attacks Starmer’s more cautious approach to reopening schools during the Covid pandemic, and says at one point Starmer responded to him by doing “his puzzled/irritable face, like a bullock having a thermometer unexpectedly shoved in its rectum.” There’s an image you can’t unsee.
17) Sue Gray
Gray’s just been ousted as Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, but she first burst to public prominence as the civil service investigator tasked with looking into lockdown-busting parties in Johnson’s government. In a Trumpian move, Johnson brands her investigation — which was excoriating about the way Johnson ran No.10 — a “ridiculous and unfair witch-hunt.”
18) Dominic Cummings
It’s hard to imagine now, but Cummings used to be Boris Johnson’s top adviser and is seen as the mastermind of his 2019 election victory. The pair have fallen out spectacularly since, and Johnson accuses Cummings of possessing a grid of “grossly exaggerated stories” about him for the media. He claims Cummings was “systematically trying to undermine both me and the government” all throughout 2020. It’s reassuring to know the most powerful people were working so well together at a time of national crisis.
19) Brenda Hale
As a Supreme Court justice, Hale rocked Johnson’s administration just weeks into his premiership by declaring that his move to shutter parliament to stop MPs messing with the Brexit process was unlawful. Johnson uses his book to accuse judges of bowing to “psychological pressures that had driven them to this piece of legal adventurism.”
20) His own neighbors
After resigning as an MP, Johnson departed London for a life in the Oxfordshire countryside, where the neighbors are clearly getting on his nerves. Johnson reveals that the “European flag flies over some of the homesteads” nearby, possibly to wind him up. The ex-PM compares this flag-flying to “despairing fifth-century owners of Romano-British villas still paying lip-service to their bust of the emperor.” Or, you know, it’s just a nice flag.
21) Emma Watson
Johnson’s forays into the cultural world didn’t always land with success. He described inviting Harry Potter star Emma Watson to a U.N. event in 2017 about female education while he was foreign secretary. “For some reason she turned me down,” he laments.
22) Leonardo DiCaprio
Attempts by Johnson’s team to meet the Titanic star at the 2021 COP26 climate summit in Glasgow hit an iceberg. DiCaprio “checked his stride” and “quickened his pace” when he spotted Johnson, only saying “I will see you later, my friend” when asked about a meeting. Get the tiny violins out!
