This is an authoritative, gripping and often jaw-dropping account of the bedlam behind the black door of Number 10 and it confirms that we did not really have a government during his “reign”. It was an anarchy presided over by a fervently frivolous, frantically floundering and deeply decadent lord of misrule.
As Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell relate it, never in modern times has the premiership been occupied by someone so fundamentally unfit to hold the office. During one of many episodes of derangement in Downing Street, Johnson is to be found raving: “I am meant to be in control. I am the führer. I’m the king who takes the decisions.” The would-be great dictator was never in control because he was incapable of performing even some of the most basic functions of a leader.
He had no clue how to be an effective prime minister and no idea what he wanted to do with the role other than satisfy his lust for its status and perks. He was as woeful at applying himself to official papers as he was hopeless at assembling a stable and productive team at Number 10. He was almost pathologically incapable of making and sticking to decisions, especially when confronted with choices that were in any way difficult. “Dodge, duck, dip, dive and dodge” was his motto for governing, aping a line from one of his favourite films, the sports comedy Dodgeball. “Put down in 3,000 words what you think my foreign policy should be,” he told startled officials at Number 10 soon after becoming prime minister.
Johnson deliberately stuffed his cabinets with mediocrities who knew they were expected to be “nodding dogs” and whom he disdained as “the stooges”.
The authors explore whether he believed in anything except the satisfaction of his own appetites and come back from their search for a Johnsonian philosophy as empty-handed as all the other people who have pursued this vain quest.
Johnson and Brexit are “inextricably intertwined in history”. Brexit would not have happened without him; he would not have become prime minister without Brexit. Yet he never had any strategy for trying to make a success of it. He and the other architects of that misadventure were like bank robbers after they had pulled off a heist.
"No sooner had they done so than they start turning on each other over whose genius had been responsible for the success, and what to do with the spoils.”
Utterly unsuited to handling a crisis as grave as the pandemic, his endless prevarications and about-turns cost lives. “He wildly oscillated in what he thought,” observes one official. “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.” Everyone he dealt with sooner or later found him dissembling, because he was only ever willing to commit to a position if he thought there was some immediate personal advantage or because his hand had been forced. One of his officials says he lied “morning, noon and night”. He lied not just to the public, but also and often to his closest associates.
Battles for the ear of this shallow and capricious monarch turned his court into the scene of constant internecine struggle between the ever-shifting factions within the building. After the fall of Dominic Cummings, we hear Johnson whingeing about his inability to find the personnel or the structures to make his government functional, but several inside accounts suggest that he relished being at the centre of the tornado of chaos. Rather than take any responsibility upon himself, he would deflect blame for decisions he feared might be unpopular – and did not hesitate to use even his wife for that pathetic purpose. In the words of one courtier:
<“He would tell us that she was impossible to deal with and he couldn’t control her and she would do whatever she wanted. Then he’d go upstairs and tell her that we were impossible and he couldn’t control us. He liked to pour petrol on both sides and see what happened to the fire.”
Not a fawning appreciation of BJ’s talents, then … 
