Anthony Seldon published his Cameron at 10 book when David Cameron was still in Number 10. It made for uncomfortable reading for the then prime minister, with its analysis of who the man in charge was and well-sourced revelations about how he made policy.
Such has been the pace of modern politics since then, that Johnson at 10 didn’t make it out even for Boris’s immediate successor. Two prime ministers on from him, we now have the authoritative account of what he did with his time in power. That doesn’t make it any more comfortable for Johnson, who unlike Cameron hasn’t retreated for a period of silence in a shepherd’s hut. Instead, it serves as a cautionary reminder for those who are still dreaming of a Terminator-style Boris sequel.
The biggest warning in Seldon’s book, co-authored by Raymond Newell, is that Johnson hasn’t seemed to learn very much from the jobs he’s done, whether as mayor of London, foreign secretary or indeed prime minister. Anyone hoping he might have reflected on his downfall from Downing Street would do well to read the authors’ repeated assertions about jobs teaching him little.
Of his time in the Foreign Office, the book says: “Johnson had forged some important personal relationships that were to bear fruit later, but had learned little of value as foreign secretary about leadership to take forward with him into Downing Street, least of all about the kind of people on whom he would have to rely, and about how to define strategy then to deliver it.” This, we are told, was a “squandered opportunity that was to cost him dear”.
This is hardly the first book about Johnson, with plenty of ink being spilled over the politician’s tumultuous childhood and his rise to power, and indeed his downfall. Johnson at 10 wisely summarises the other accounts of his early life, and focuses instead on the psychodrama of his time at the top.
There is more than enough of that drama going around, anyway, particularly whenever his wife, Carrie, and his aide-turned-enemy, Dominic Cummings, appear. Seldon and Newell try to be fair to everyone, including Johnson, and neither Carrie nor Cummings end up being the Lady Macbeth and Iago-esque cartoons they’ve been painted as elsewhere.
In fact, Johnson turns out to be as responsible as anyone else for these caricatures, often blaming decisions he’s taken on his wife or his aides. The personality clash between Carrie and Cummings, though, prompts some of the most explosive passages in the book, including an extraordinary outburst in which Johnson declares: “I am meant to be in control. I am the führer. I’m the king who takes the decisions.”
The book isn’t the account of a breathless journalist trying to get the first draft of history into print. Seldon, who has written political biographies of prime ministers’ times in office since Thatcher, is an historian and the tone of the writing is loftier and more detached. But he’s also a headteacher, and the tone of disapproval at a pupil who keeps wasting all the opportunities and good fortune rings through the pages.
Even though the book doesn’t labour what many would see as Johnson’s substantial personal and moral failings, it’s hard for it not to give the impression of someone who has learned mostly how to wing it rather than to do things better.
Boris’s utter surprise and horror that the nation had voted for the Brexit he had campaigned for is beautifully, shockingly told: he is overheard asking “what have we done?” after the result and then fretting about how distraught Samantha Cameron seems as her husband resigns from office. He shocks staff in Downing Street when, on winning the 2019 election, he claims there is an “oven-ready” plan to reform social care. When they ask him what plan he’s talking about and tell him, “We don’t have a plan”, his response is, “Well, we’ll have to decide which option to go for, won’t we?”.
After worrying in his first few months that he would end up being the briefest PM in history (that honour fell to his successor, on whom Seldon is presumably only preparing a pamphlet rather than a full book), Johnson then assumed that with Brexit done, life would be relatively plain-sailing.
Covid proved him very wrong on that, though interestingly this account doesn’t pin the blame for the early mistakes made fully on Johnson. Neither does it allow him to take the credit for the thing he is proudest of, the vaccine programme, saying that this falls to Emily Lawson who actually put together the successful campaign.
Indeed, Johnson relies heavily on brilliant people around him who by and large lose patience with the operation they have to deal with, if not the man himself. What makes this book so worth reading is that so many of these brilliant people have chosen to talk to Seldon and Newell, some of them unusually on the record. For instance, Graham Brady, chair of the Conservative Party’s 1922 Committee, tells the story of a “grovelling apology” from the PM after Cummings banned Johnson from speaking to him.
It won’t be the last book on Johnson, not least because there is almost certainly another act of this politician’s career to come. But as with the many acts he has already performed, it is unlikely Johnson himself will learn the lessons it offers.
Johnson at 10 by Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell is out 4 May (Atlantic, £25)
