Johnson at 10: The Inside Story: The Instant Sunday Times Bestseller

Johnson at 10A superb summary of the Johnson years, it confirmed what I already believed, but with reference not only to the facts of the period, but also liberally interspersed with quotes from those involved in the heart of things at the time, including the enigmatically semi-opaque “member of Johnson’s family”.It bowls along very readably, in my Kindle edition, I’ve never highlighted so many passages in a book before, practically every page has a reference and it’s certainly the most notes I’ve ever made in a book (over 50).I struggle with anyone giving it a low score on review, it’s an easy read and many of the references are named and attributable, so the veracity of the thrust of the book are difficult to challenge.Though this is, pretty much a hatchet job on Johnson and pretty much his entire cohort, it does give credit where it’s due for his lucky stance in 2021 and his foresight in wanting to help Ukraine and his fortune that the UK was one of the few countries that had kept to its NATO commitment on defence spending so was in a position to actually put its arms where its mouth was.I actually feel in tune with Johnson’s ‘wishes’/’missions’/’enthusiasms’: Levelling Up; Education, Jobs and Skills; Public Sector/Health Delivery; Criminal Justice and Energy/Net Zero.Infrastructure: HS2 is withering gradually on the vine, at the moment it MAY make it to Birmingham, but may not get to Euston until 2041, if then! So any time gained on the journey from Birmingham to London will be swallowed up by the journey time from the currently proposed London terminus of Old Oak Common to Euston. In addition, the shift to more people working from home virtually, galvanised by the pandemic, will significantly reduce the number of people benefiting.Levelling Up: unfortunately, even in Johnson’s time meant ‘producing a concrete plan without a huge pound sign’, impossible. I certainly see no ‘Levelling Up’ benefits or prospect thereof in my own deprived home town.Net Zero: unfinished business, but just this week Zac Goldsmith has resigned as Minister of State for Climate and Environment citing Rishi Sunak’s ambivalence to climate change and potential backpedalling on the COP26 Glasgow Agreement to help fund Climate Change initiatives in the same week the world experienced its hottest Summer day ever recorded.Social Care: having experienced of English Social Care first hand, supporting my elderly parents, this was a major contributary factor to the mental health struggles I have subsequently encountered, which has cost me, personally tens of thousands of pounds and my employer the benefit of my labour for much of the last 3 years; and I was one of the ‘lucky’ ones, able to (mostly) understand; navigate and minimise the financial impact of the system as it stands. Who knows where I would be if Hancock had been as effective as he claimed to be and had prevented my Mum’s death in a care home from Covid in the first wave.Education: I’d hoped the cancelling of exams during lockdown might have been a permanent thing as it’s not a good measure of future performance in the world of work; it penalises students who may have a bad day on exam day, particularly female students and it benefits those with the opportunity for a private education, the OxBridge entrance statistics speak for themselves, 32% private schooled, with only 8% of all children privately schooled and a majority are boys.NHS and ‘Essential Workers’: Heroes to zeroes in 3 years flat with ongoing shortages in NHS staff at all levels and infrastructure, confidently predicted to get worse imminently.Housing: Too few in the South East, underutilised in the rest of the country (levelling up COULD have helped address that) and woefully insufficient insulation on existing or new housing stock.The literary references are wide ranging, but I for one certainly got the ones from ‘Lord of the Rings’; ‘No Surrender’ by Hiroo Onoda and ‘Yes Minister’, all of which I read/watched when I was about 10. Although I’m surprised they didn’t pick up on Sir Humphrey’s 4 stages of a Government response to a crisis:Sir Richard Wharton: “In stage one, we say nothing is going to happen.”Sir Humphrey Appleby: “Stage two, we say something may be about to happen, but we should do nothing about it.”Sir Richard Wharton: “In stage three, we say that maybe we should do something about it, but there’s nothing we can do.”Sir Humphrey Appleby: “Stage four, we say maybe there was something we could have done, but it’s too late now.”Next on my reading list is now ‘The Thatcher Effect’, although I can’t find it on Kindle, with the benefit of around 40 years’ hindsight, she had the right idea, to offer everyone an opportunity as she had been given, but wasn’t able to see that some people weren’t in a position to ‘get on their bike’, due to ill-health; family commitments or just the lack of opportunity, for myself, living in a shut-down steel town in North East Wales with 20+% unemployment and I having left school half way through my A levels, the idea of me upping sticks to London in the hope of advancement was a huge risk. By sheer good fortune I was one of the few who made it out, but I know many of my closest friends didn’t and the town was inexorably scarred to this day.I look forward to the pamphlet on the Truss weeks and the Sunak period (timeframe to be confirmed).Incidentally, the parallels to Lloyd George are possibly even closer than those of the Lincoln/Kennedy Assassination Coincidences Urban LegendI hope to be around for the fulfilment of the triangle regarding the view of Brexit in 50 years after they happened, I’m confident I’ll reread the book before then, I’d already forgotten some detail, like losing two Ethics advisers (they also missed the obvious Oscar Wilde misquote that did the rounds at the time) and I sometimes stumbled over some characters and who they were, for a while Smith and Mirza – though that stuck very forcibly and black humouredly with one of the author’s quotes also Cain and Case, but that’s my fault for not checking enough. I don’t want to spoil who put up the 50 year premise and about what, nor the author’s rebuttal of two other events 50 years apart, though you might work it out from what I’ve already said.

Very well -written and researched.Exposing Boris Johnson for the egotist he is.He was only concerned with himself and treated his long-serving wife very badly.

This is a very well-written book, laid out to some extent in the manner of a textbook but that does make it easier to follow and understand the structure.The overarching theme is that all of Johnson’s shortcomings were evident to one and all when he was a child. Unfortunately, his charm and humour, together with an absolute sense of entitlement that meant he believed power was his without any obligation to use it responsibly, led others to fall for him and permit him eventually to become prime minister. All that happened in office was that his total lack of any coordinated vision, self-discipline, an inability to form a reliable and cohesive team whom he trusted and who trusted him, resulted in a chaotic maelstrom of incompetent leadership compounded by the crises of the aftermath of Brexit, the arrival of Covid, and the Ukrainian war.These all served only to reveal that as prime minister there was no beginning to his talents.The authors firmly blame Johnson for his eventual fall and the failures of his government though they do not pull their punches when it comes to some of his lieutenants, most notably the destructive and dangerous influence of Dominic Cummings. They describe Johnson’s characteristic tendency to flit from one adviser to another (including his wife), reflecting whoever he had last spoken to.The authors are to some extent apologists for Covid lockdowns and appear to believe that Johnson could have locked more and for longer, blaming him for vacillating and being unable to show leadership when it came to conflicting advice. They do not really address the possibility that Johnson might have recognized the potential social and economic consequences of the lockdowns which are now much more widely recognized.They praise him for his leadership over Ukraine, but perhaps overlook that this was an area Johnson resorted to in order to occlude his shortcomings and failures elsewhere.The book is a devastating and excoriating verdict on a prime minister who is judged by the authors to have fallen far short of the demands made upon him for a variety of reasons but which they regard him as wholly responsible for. Most damning of all is their assessment that the attributes which were formerly regarded as Johnson’s assets are now more generally seen as liabilities, making his return to political prominence unlikely.In my opinion, they could have made much more of those who put Johnson in power in the cynical belief that they would bring him the power and patronage they craved for themselves, believing his promiscuous and reckless promising of office and other goodies in return for their support.The book is immensely detailed and follows by and large a clear chronology. The large number of individuals means that it is a challenge to keep on top of the cast and thus the book would probably merit being read more than once.Ultimately, the book is likely to serve in an historical sense as a dispiriting account of a very difficult time in British history when the country ended up with perhaps the most unsatisfactory and unsuitable person possible at the helm, yet who was so desperate for power that he would do or say anything to get it – Brexit being the most obvious, a cause for which he had no personal commitment beyond the belief that it might serve his purpose. To that end they graphically contrast Johnson’s performance with those they regard as Britain’s finest prime ministers. David Lloyd George, whom they regard as in some ways as the most similar to Johnson, receives a far better judgement despite his shortcomings.

While loaded with details, the authors assume the audience’s knowledge of the key events, and the book is a commentary on them. Like many long books, some sections are written better than others. Some sections are page turners, others a slog. The narrative is peppered with Latin, Roman Empire references, and posh words such as “vituperative“ and “fissiparous”. I would only recommend this for anyone undertaking hard core research into the Johnson premiership who already had a good deal of background knowledge.