Boris Johnson: The Gambler

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I was given this book for Christmas as I do like a political biography. I have not read this author before but he has written a lot of unofficial biographies where he can dig up the dirt on lots of famous people. This one is a detailed account of Boris Johnson's life, focusing on his career as a politician, as an MP, as Mayor of London, in the Brexit referendum, and ultimately as Prime Minister with even some bits covering the pandemic.

Few regard his calamity-studded stint as foreign secretary as his finest hour. Yet his myriad gaffes and blunders are excused on the grounds that he had been “set up” to fail by May and was then let down by “recalcitrant Foreign Office mandarins”. The author blames civil servants for thwarting a Johnsonian wheeze to buy an island in the Arctic Ocean from Norway to turn it into a spy base. Others may think it never happened because it was one of Johnson’s many fantasy projects. The Guardian review sums it up for me….yes he might be a womanizing liar but he did have a difficult childhood. I struggled with parts of the book, was the author expressing his opinion or was he writing what he thought Boris was thinking…if the latter, he needs a different approach.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. Stanley was exceptional. Dynamic, intelligent and intensely social, he had a wide range of friends in Oxford, had already travelled across the world and was sufficiently impressive to be identified as a recruit for MI6, the foreign intelligence service.” 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. 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. So, all in all, a revealing read about the mechanisms of power. I suppose Mark Rutte is not very different from Boris Johnson.

The apologias continue once he becomes prime minister. When his attempt to shut down parliament in 2019 is ruled unlawful by the supreme court, the villain of Bowers’s account is the court’s president, Brenda Hale, “who had rarely concealed her contempt for Boris” and was animated by “her determination to slap down the government”. This suggests that the Tory leader had been confounded by one outrageously biased woman, rather than condemned by the unanimous verdict of all 11 of the country’s most senior judges.A former Panorama reporter, his books include unauthorised biographies of Tiny Rowland, Robert Maxwell, Mohamed Al-Fayed, Geoffrey Robinson, Gordon Brown and Richard Branson. I had high hopes for this book - as one of the Penguin ‘orange spines’ I was expecting an even-handed and well-researched biography of our current (though not for much longer - he resigned the day after I bought the book) Prime Minister. Sadly, I was disappointed, and this book falls well short of the quality I’ve come to expect. Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? So if you were wondering, Johnson still comes off as a lascivious, self-serving creep even in a biography written by a mewling johnson sycophant. Bower takes pains to let you know he is super not party-biased, honest in his earlier Tony Blair book. Look at me I voted for new labour! But he’s lying. Every chance he gets he’s slipping in snide descriptions of Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs from declaring the women as ‘shrill’ to affording them the benefit of absolutely no doubt while brushing over Johnson’s own numerous sins and clearly idolising the man’s shameless steamrolling over every rule put in place to allow for a democratic dynamic in Westminster.

Revelatory, unsettling and compulsively readable, it is the most timely and indispensable book yet from Britain's leading investigative biographer. Read more Look Inside Details 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. Tom Bower (born 28 September 1946) is a British writer, noted for his investigative journalism and for his unauthorized biographies. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here.The problem from the beginning is Bower like the rest of the UK's 4th estate seems enamoured with BJ - from his messianic scrabble game at the age of 10 beating all takers to the bewildering acceptance of BJ's disregard for acceptable journalist practice. Bower highlights and no doubt supports the British notion of being superior in every way to other member states of the EU albeit through Johnson's skewed lens. (Bower is a Daily Mail journalist - so that's like Pravda writing about Putin) Gammon and spin-age: I wanted to read a biog of our Lord and master that might uncover whether there is any substance beneath the contrived meejah image, but Tom Bower’s The Gambler isn’t it. Although there are artfully placed tales of unreliability, infidelity and double-crossing, mostly these are of the “ooh you are awful” variety that serve to propagate the myth, and conceal a slide into fan-wank. The clue is Bower’s use of the subject’s preferred mononym - even Charles Moore never refers to Mrs Thatcher as ‘Maggie’. All this is laid out in the opening chapters, inviting the reader to see the prime minister as the inevitably damaged product of a morally inadequate father. Bower suggests that Stanley’s mistreatment of Boris’s mother, Charlotte, is the defining secret of the Johnson family and the fact that Boris, as the oldest child, witnessed it is the key to understanding his character, including his rampant ambition. Charlotte, who eventually had a breakdown and was hospitalised, says of her son: “I have often thought that his being ‘world king’ was a wish to make himself unhurtable, invincible, somehow safe from the pains of your mother disappearing for eight months.” Apparently Boris Johnson’s long-suffering second wife, the human rights lawyer Marina Wheeler, took a similar view: “She unhesitatingly rebuked Stanley for her husband’s sins.”