A howl of scholarly frustration at a prime minister out of his depth
Boris Johnson has been accused of many, many things over the years. But the parties and the lies, the sleaze and the juicier scandals don’t seem to interest historians Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell much. Their central complaint in this utterly scathing account of his time at No 10 is the more fundamental one that, as they put it, he “never understood how to be prime minister, nor how to govern”; that he didn’t know what he was doing, barely bothered learning, and was so lacking in moral seriousness that even when he tried he couldn’t transcend the limitations of his “base self”. It’s a lofty charge, but a grave one nonetheless.
A career headmaster and stickler for detail who has published report cards on each prime minister back to Tony Blair, Seldon was never likely to warm to the overgrown schoolboy Johnson, and so it proves. The story really begins with Johnson’s response to his side winning the Brexit referendum: far from celebrating, they write, he paced the house looking “ashen-faced and distraught”, panicking aloud that: “Oh shit, we’ve got no plan. We haven’t thought about it. I didn’t think it would happen.” What weighed most heavily in his choosing leave over remain, they suggest, was his own personal ambition. From this unfolds a tale of power pursued without much purpose, or latterly dignity.
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