Boris Johnson, Unleashed: The Autobiography, London: HarperCollins, 2024, 512pp.

I saw this book on one of my occasional visits to Waterstones. I turned over a few of the pages. What I saw looked like the usual ghost-written drivel that passes in modern Britain for a political memoir. I put it back on the pile and continued on my way. However, Mr Bickley has urged me to write something about the book. How to review a book I have not read, and refuse to dirty myself by reading? Here is my answer.

For decades, Boris Johnson wrapped himself in the rhetoric of libertarianism. He posed as the champion of free markets and free speech, and of limited government. He played the amiable rogue, the Latin-quoting maverick who delighted in poking fun at the managerial state. And yet, once in power, he presided over the most authoritarian government in Britain since the 1790s and the most aggressively warmongering since the 1940s. His premiership was not merely a failure; it was an act of calculated treachery against every principle he once pretended to uphold.

When he entered Downing Street, Johnson had a choice. He could have slashed the bloated state and restored ancient liberties. Instead, he took the path of least resistance, doubling down on state control and cravenly submitting to the technocratic order. He turned Britain into a lockdown dystopia, imprisoning an entire population on the pretext of a virus with a survival rate upwards of 99%. He sent the police out to harass dog-walkers and fine people for sitting on park benches. Under his rule, the government monitored the speech of citizens more closely than at any time since Pitt the Younger’s reign of terror against radicals and reformers.

And then there is war. Not content with trashing domestic liberties, Johnson gleefully positioned Britain as the chief warmonger in Ukraine. He used British taxpayers’ money to prolong and intensify a war that was none of our business. His government funnelled billions into a corrupt regime in Kiev, not to defend freedom, but to serve the geopolitical fantasies of the American empire. He helped wreck the chance of an early peace settlement in 2022, prolonging the slaughter for the sake of Western vanity. Millions of Ukrainians have suffered as a result, but for Johnson, it was all an opportunity for Churchillian posturing.

Johnson is a charlatan, a conman who betrayed his country and his principles. He should stand trial for treason, along with the grinning parasites who enabled him. And what a collection these parasites are. Self-proclaimed libertarians queued up to praise him, to justify his tyrannies, to drink down the warm, second-hand drivel of his regime as though it were pure ideological sustenance.

Indeed, when I was half-awake in a Geography lesson many years ago, I heard about some primitive tribe where the elders drink mescaline, then let the younger men drink their urine for the drug residues. That neatly summarises the relationship between Johnson and his sycophantic hangers-on. He spouted nonsense, and they lapped it up. But they were not just deceived; they were complicit. These self-styled defenders of liberty added self-abasement to their guilt. Every article they wrote, every speech they gave, every contorted excuse they made in defence of Johnson, all served to prop up the most disgraceful government in modern British history.

Now, as Johnson lurks in the political wilderness, still hoping for a comeback, they should all be held to account. He should never again be allowed near power, nor should any of those who enabled him. The time for indulgence is over. Boris Johnson was never a libertarian. He was a warmonger and a tyrant. And those who stood by him are just as guilty as he is.