Johnson filled his cabinet with mediocrities and created a team in Number 10, including his partner/wife, whose main job was sniping at each other. (His mayorship of London had been supported by a strong team of advisers, most of whom refused to work with him again in Number 10.) His vision did not exist, beyond winning the 2019 election and “getting Brexit done”. But most of all, his personality is so flawed that he is unable to exercise leadership. He says one thing before a meeting, another in the meeting and something else entirely after it is over. He hates making decisions. He doesn’t really like or understand people in general. He has no idea how government works, and is therefore incapable of governing. It also argues that Cummings increasingly cut Johnson out of the decision-making process in his own government. It states that Cummings would tell officials and ministers: “Don’t tell the PM” or “Oh, don’t bother him with this”. The book claims it eventually led to the extraordinary outburst from Johnson: “I am meant to be in control. I am the führer. I’m the king who takes the decisions.”

The third is a moment in which Seldon and Newell analyse one of the elements in Johnson’s downfall. This is what they say: Seldon and Newell have interviewed hundreds of people who worked in the Johnson government, mostly but not all off the record, to build a comprehensive picture of how and why it was such a disaster. And the answer is pretty clear. Like Lloyd George a hundred years before, Johnson came into the office distrusted by large parts of the political system and with a chaotic personal life distracting him. But Lloyd George was good at surrounding himself with other strong figures and listening to them, and also had a vision for what he wanted to achieve, which enabled him to achieve it. This book is truly an eye opener as to the inner workings of a government in crisis from the day Johnson came into power, a man in his own eyes who could do no wrong or make no wrong decisions, instead he was making them daily. History will not remember him kindly, nor should it, as I said in my first sentence we are a country now lower in world statistics in virtually all areas since Johnson was elected to power. The conservative party are still in disarray even though he has left. The next government whoever it may be has a very very long road to go down to bring us to where we were a decade or so ago, and with no extra money in the pot. I am now so disillusioned with government and democracy as I cannot see which political party can get us out of the mess that was Boris and take us forward. Could he have been a better leader, if he had paid more attention to his briefs, liaised closer with his own cabinet ministers, MPs and cabinet staff, despite Covid and the war in Ukraine? The authors do apportion some praise as well as criticism. His greatest accomplishments were on global issues where broad brush strokes were needed and not the fine detail he struggles with. Getting a deal on Brexit, Net Zero and Ukraine is what he'll be remembered for. With the right team and without Covid (which saw off Trump too) he could have been a better PM, but his decision-making around appointments sounds consistently poor.Cummings also barred Johnson from meeting Graham Brady, chairman of the 1922 Committee of Tory MPs, it states. “It was a very odd insight into the mentality of No 10 and resulted in a grovelling phone call of apology,” said Brady. “Cummings had contempt for our MPs and thought that we should be grateful for being in government, for the general election result, and that our job was now merely to behave.” 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.

The book states that Johnson described his then-fiancee Carrie as “mad and crazy” as he used her as an excuse to avoid confrontations.

Johnson at 10

When Johnson came to power Seldon hoped the programme might continue – Johnson did after all have a lucrative contract to write a book about Shakespeare. There was no interest whatsoever. “Covid made things difficult obviously,” he says, “but we did come in. Johnson never once showed up. As [his school reports showed] he had no deep interest in any classical history, language or literature or Shakespeare. His examples were always for show. At his heart, he is extraordinarily empty. He can’t keep faithful to any idea, any person, any wife.”

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Johnson was clearly a man unfit to govern. He was lazy; his attention was spasmodic; he chose to be surrounded by people who would not challenge him; he was unable to make decisions effectively; he was often torn between what Carrie, his wife, would say, what his advisers were advising and what he felt ought to be done; he did not cultivate his MPs; his inclinations were at odds with the influential (and obstinate) Conservative right-wingers; he was a liar, arrogantly self-confident, inconsistent to the exasperation of his aides and advisers, often unbriefable, utterly casual over detail… And so on and so forth. He was a vortex of chaos, and No 10 became one as well without the kind of clear and consistent leadership that makes for an effective administration. The heart of government was, in fact, under Johnson, dysfunctional. How did Johnson play upstairs-downstairs between his Cabinet and his new wife, Carrie? To what extent did Johnson prefer infighting rather than coherent government? Boris was deeply flawed before he even came into power, a self-serving shallow but intelligent man who had the makings of becoming something great, but his small personality came into play. He could have become a good prime minister but this book takes us behind the inner workings of government, goes into all the nooks and crannies and round all the corners to take us to the truth of a poorly selected government, a PM who couldn't stand civil servants and trod them down at every opportunity, he was the main man and nobody else could challenge him. He was incapable of making decisions and waivered all the while so no decisions were being taken when they were desperately needed. We would like to thank Isaac Farnworth and John Paton, but cannot for the life of us remember what you did to help. Cummings was one of the few participants in that Downing Street and Whitehall farce who did not speak to Seldon. The author does not feel that the omission is significant, since Cummings has written so very much about this period, “and his footprints are over everything anyway. People will make their own judgments,” he says of what he discovered, “but I don’t think that it’s remotely unfair to Cummings or for that matter to Johnson.”

I think readers will be aware that I was never Johnson’s biggest fan. He cynically supported Brexit because he thought (correctly) that it would make him Prime Minister (though he screwed up on the first attempt in 2016), building on a career of lies about Europe and about his personal life. In office as Foreign Secretary, he displayed casual incompetence to the point where he endangered the life of a British citizen held captive in Iran. He endorsed Theresa May’s Brexit deal with the EU, before deciding that it would be more convenient to resign in protest, disrupting and upstaging a Balkans conference in London that the UK had laboured on for months. From then on, it was only a matter of time before he got to Number 10. At times reading & re-living some of this was unsettling. It reignited the fury, contempt, disgust & disbelief I felt at the time that a prime minister could behave so badly, lie so enthusiastically and lead so abysmally. I couldn’t understand how someone so clearly incapable (to me!) of effective leadership could become prime minister and this book helped me to understand how this seeming mystery came about. A myth peddled that he was the best leader given the toughest brief and any failures are to do with others (Trump often blames is failures on his predecessors). Evidence proves his personal floors were such even if he had become PM at the 1st time of asking, it would likely still have been a disaster. Johnson’s eventual solution to getting Brexit done as prime minister was to bring in Cummings to do the work that he had no appetite for, in the full knowledge that his chief adviser was a wholly destructive force. That, Seldon, suggests to me, was another first for British political leadership:Politics needs innovators and lateral thinkers. There are better and different ways to do things and what I found really disappointing is that Boris never learned from any of his mistakes. I thought May was very generous to offer him the Foreign Secretary Post. According to this account, he welled up and promised to do his best. But he blew every opportunity and failed to take advantage of his role. He regularly showed little interest in issues and failed to grasp many of the key issues. He lied to everyone around him: the authors point out it was more the Court of Henry VIII than a modern functioning government. I think that Johnson and Cummings were what was needed to bring the country to its senses,” he suggests. “People didn’t want things broken up. They wanted to be listened to. They wanted institutions that were more relevant to them. They felt excluded by metropolitan elite. Nobody is happy with what has happened.” The chapter on Covid is particularly damning. An official observed that it was “astonishing how hard he found it to grasp the finer points of Covid policy… he couldn’t process the volume of information”. Another official noted that “in one day he would have three meetings in which he would say three completely different things depending on who was present, and then deny that he had changed his position”. When he insisted he hadn’t made a decision, officials had to show him printouts of what he had agreed earlier that day.