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Johnson at 10: The Inside Story: The Bestselling Political Biography of the Year

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If Johnson understood more about classical philosophy, he’d have recognised that an antithesis – being against something – isn’t enough. The country now needs a synthesis from whichever party. The great prime ministers are healers and teachers. They need to be able to tell a story of where they have come from and to where they will lead us.” I think it also overestimates Johnson's role in the Ukrain war, giving him far too much credit. Many of us saw it as a way for him to escape from the reality of the mess he had made domestically and allow him to emulate Churchill. I can understand why his forthright stance made him popular in Ukraine, but how do we balance his actions against his close association with oligarchs and Russian money? A desperate desire to hold court/power over his court. In some way BJ revelled in the chaos of having three different factions within his team, as shown by the story of Carrie and DC. It actually gave him protection and an ability to blame others. Similar to Hitler, who was well aware of the egos/dislike many German generals had for one another.

Cummings was one of the few participants in that Downing Street and Whitehall farce who did not speak to Seldon. The author does not feel that the omission is significant, since Cummings has written so very much about this period, “and his footprints are over everything anyway. People will make their own judgments,” he says of what he discovered, “but I don’t think that it’s remotely unfair to Cummings or for that matter to Johnson.” A brilliant book about a man who had the potential to be one of the great Prime Ministers of the UK and had the opportunities to be, but ultimately let himself down due to his self-centredness and his inability to tell the truth at any time. Everyone he dealt with sooner or later found him dissembling, because he was only ever willing to commit to a position if he thought there was some immediate personal advantage or because his hand had been forced. One of his officials says he lied “morning, noon and night”. He lied not just to the public, but also and often to his closest associates. This is already long enough, but I was interested in personal glimpses of two people who I know a little and a third who I am fascinated by. I knew Martin Reynolds, the Principal Private Secretary to Johnson, when he was a mid-level diplomat in Brussels fifteen years ago. He is more capable than most officials, but was nonetheless out of his depth in the sheer awfulness of trying to manage the Johnson system. On the other hand, John Bew, Johnson’s main foreign policy advisor, is one of the few people to come out of the book looking good; he gave sound advice and wrote a substantive paper on UK global strategy post-Brexit. His father was a colleague of my father’s; I last saw John when he was about ten years old, and I’m glad he is doing well.

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Politics needs innovators and lateral thinkers. There are better and different ways to do things and what I found really disappointing is that Boris never learned from any of his mistakes. I thought May was very generous to offer him the Foreign Secretary Post. According to this account, he welled up and promised to do his best. But he blew every opportunity and failed to take advantage of his role. He regularly showed little interest in issues and failed to grasp many of the key issues. I think that Johnson and Cummings were what was needed to bring the country to its senses,” he suggests. “People didn’t want things broken up. They wanted to be listened to. They wanted institutions that were more relevant to them. They felt excluded by metropolitan elite. Nobody is happy with what has happened.” The most ridiculous part of the whole book is how everyone in government has to work around Johnson, a bit like a difficult Special Needs pupil who is disruptive in class. He rarely read papers before meetings, and everything had to be shortened to suit his attention span. Ironically the people around him did get better at working around his "issues" and things did improve for a while during his time in office.

It is a book to be appreciated for all of the diligent hard work that the authors have put into it though. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month.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. Johnson was a gifted orator and writer but he was hopeless at converting his woolly ideas in substance. With Johnson trust was temporary, what he believed in really was mistrust. He wanted to run No 10 with responsibilities fuzzed, everyone distrusting each other, currying favour and owing their loyalty to Johnson alone - very similar to another politician of recent times. Do not do a Dan Rosenfeld and give a speech to N10 saying what good friends you were with a colleague everyone knew that you hated. Just keep quiet. The second moment was when Johnson ‘told his startled officials “Put down in 3,000 words what you think my foreign policy should be.”’ Cummings ultimately left Downing Street in November 2020 after losing out in a power struggle with Carrie Johnson. However, officials told Seldon that both Cummings and the former prime minister’s wife were used by Johnson to deflect responsibility.

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