Boris Johnson’s new memoir Unleashed is to be published next week, and with the highly-anticipated account promising to be the ‘political memoir of the century’, Mr S was rather interested in what exactly it contains within its pages. Steerpike has put together a list of the top 15 things we learned from the former Prime Minister’s length memoir…

Partygate stories ‘grossly exaggerated’

First to one of the most prominent scandals of Boris Johnson’s career: the matter of Partygate. In his 800-page tome, the former PM insists that he was told by his adviser that the pandemic parties broke no lockdown rules. Johnson admits he put it down as ‘desperate nonsense being peddled by embittered former advisers’ and ‘forgot about it’. On his Covid fine – received after the ex-PM was said to have been ‘ambushed by cake’ – Johnson fumed: ‘I saw no cake. I ate no blooming cake. If this was a party, it was the feeblest event in the history of human festivity.’ Crikey.

Not that the ex-Tory leader was able to hide from the pile-up of stories for long, of course. ‘There were about 15 occasions when officials in Downing Street briefly slackened the tempo of their work and raised a glass to a departing colleague,’ Johnson revealed – before pinning blame for the press’s Partygate obsession on his one-time chief adviser, Dominic Cummings:

I should have realised that my old amigo Dom Cummings – still scorched by Barnard Castle – was behind it all, and that he had a ‘grid’ of grossly exaggerated stories that he and his sidekick Lee Cain were feeding to the media.

No love lost there, eh?

Brexit helped UK win ‘the vaccine race‘

Johnson’s popular prime ministerial campaign slogan of ‘Get Brexit Done’ won him the 2019 general election – and Brexit, the ex-PM claims, won him ‘the vaccine race’. Despite scepticism in some quarters at the former Tory leader’s claim that his Brexit deal resulted in the UK’s vaccine rollout being faster than elsewhere, Johnson is adamant:

Under my deal, we came out. We took back control. That meant that when it came to the approval of vaccines, we no longer had to go at the pace of the rest of the European Union. We had our own agency – the ­Medicines & Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency – and we could do our own thing.

Not that the ex-Prime Minister had been all that relaxed about vaccines at the time. In another curious revelation, Johnson reveals that during the rush for Covid jabs, he ‘had commissioned some work on whether it might be technically feasible to launch an aquatic raid on a warehouse in Leiden, in the Netherlands, and to take that which was legally ours and which the UK desperately needed’. It came at the same time that pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca was ‘trying, in vain’ to bring more vaccines from the Netherlands to Britain. Desperate times call for desperate measures…

Frustration at Covid measures

Despite being the man in charge, Johnson has confessed that the Covid taskforce’s tier system made him ‘want to scream’. While the ex-PM said he had ‘hoped it would work’ – comparing it to, er, whack-a-mole – Boris fumed about the whole idea: ‘I can hardly believe the gall, the audacity of the government in trying to micromanage humanity.’

And despite presiding over the many lockdowns that, for a........

© The Spectator