Everything critics have said about the ‘twisted’ book Unleashed

Boris Johnson’s former Cabinet colleague Amber Rudd has branded him as ‘two-faced’ and ‘untruthful’ ahead of the publication of his memoirs on Thursday.

Ex-Home Secretary Rudd, who once said Johnson was the “life and soul of the party but not the man you want to take home at the end of the night”, wrote in The Independent that his new book Unleashed shows his ‘split personality’. ‘ and reads as ‘Billy Bunter unleashed at Westminster’.

Johnson’s memoirs were highly anticipated: in January last year his register of interests revealed that he had received an advance of £510,000, well above the £7,674 received by his successor Liz Truss for her book 10 Years To Save The West.

And perhaps unsurprisingly, given that Johnson is one of the most polarizing figures in British politics, Unleashed has received both positive and negative reviews from critics.

Read the reviews of the book from our media partners below.

Boris Johnson beats his own drum in his memoir, Unleashed, and fair enough

This is of course the former Prime Minister’s chance to get things out of his mind, and where others pay for their therapy, the reader pays for Boris’s.

He has a lot to say about where things went wrong for the Tories at the last election – see Chapter 59. He is right to point out that in his last election he got a whopping ten points more vote than Keir Starmer in July. . Boris, who ran on the ‘Get Brexit Done’ ticket, was one of the great populist vote winners of modern politics.

What he is less good at is analyzing how he failed to deliver on his own very real promise.

Boris Johnson’s Unleashed: a memoir that is twisted, acidic and full of even more lies

Lacking Boris Johnson’s fine classical education – again on rich display in his dodgy memoir Unleashed – I cannot quote with any sense of confidence whatever the antonym of mea culpa is in Latin.

So we will have to stick to English and suggest that this book would best be subtitled ‘Not me, guv’.

No opportunity to deflect blame is missed: no scapegoat is allowed to escape the chain; and no uncomfortable truths impose themselves in what has been portrayed by his old comrade Nadine Dorries as a tragic fall from grace of Shakespearean proportions.

Boris Johnson writes better than any other politician – his memoirs are proof

Unleashed is incomparably more readable than a standard political memoir. Still, I felt a little left out of Johnson’s inner life.

He enjoys crazy wheezes: going out to sea in an inflatable kayak, plotting to invade the Netherlands, signing the Northern Ireland Protocol, proposing a bridge over the Channel. Some are reminiscent of Churchill, in whose siren suit Johnson sees himself. The best in this sense was his defense of Ukraine, which looked principled.

A light-hearted Wodehousian personality takes the reader along corners where uncomfortable events lurk.

Unleashed by Boris Johnson review – memoirs of a clown

Most of the Prime Minister’s memoirs, written after the authors have lost power, attempt to be reflective on some level. David Cameron begins by admitting that he still has daily concerns about the calling of the Brexit referendum. John Major’s begins even more disarmingly, by wondering why he entered politics in the first place.

But Boris Johnson does not reflect. He never has and he never will. And that also applies to his new memoir, with the unnerving title, Unleashed. It covers his time as Mayor of London, Brexit campaigner, Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister. But if it’s heart research and confessions you’re looking for from the pen of Britain’s most iconoclastic Prime Minister, you can stop now.

This is not ‘the political memoir of the century’ as the Daily Mail heralded it last week. Or, if it does, there are still 76 thankless years ahead for the publishing industry.