Unleashed, Boris Johnson’s account of his time as mayor of London, foreign secretary and prime minister, has already become an instant bestseller. In its first week following publication on 10 October, the memoir sold more than 40,000 copies, nearly twice the amount David Cameron, Johnson’s long-standing rival in Conservative politics, with his own memoir, For the Record.
The book is peppered with some shocking claims. Foremost among Johnson’s revelations is the allegation that Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu—or members of his security team—bugged Johnson’s private bathroom during a meeting at the Foreign Office when he was Foreign Secretary.
Although Johnson has been a loyal ally of Israel, he claims that Netanyahu went to use the bathroom, “and it may or may not be a coincidence, but I am told that later when they were doing a regular sweep for bugs, they found a listening device in the thunderbox."
Pressed by journalists after the book’s publication to provide more details regarding this extraordinary claim, the former prime minister simply replied, “I think everything you need to know about that episode is in the book.”
This is not the first time Israeli diplomats have been accused of spying on close allies. As the news website Politico reported in 2019, the US government believed Israel was responsible for planting cell phone surveillance devices near the White House and other sensitive locations around Washington, D.C. The devices were designed to fool cell phones into giving them their locations and identity information.
Direct tone on Ukraine
Amid the jocularity, self-justification and hyperbole that pervades his book, Johnson is at his most eloquent and direct in tone when discussing the Ukraine conflict. While trying to talk down the Russian president from invading Ukraine, Johnson said that he was very concerned about NATO missiles being fired at Moscow.
As Johnson recalls: “No one was proposing NATO missiles on Ukrainian soil. But Putin kept going back to it. It would take hardly any time, he said, for a missile launched from Ukraine to hit Moscow."
“At one point, he made a kind of spooky-jocular remark about the risk of miscalculation—an unintended nuclear exchange between Russia and NATO. ‘I would not want to hurt you, Boris,’ Putin allegedly said (a remark the Kremlin later denied. Never believe anything Moscow says until it has been officially denied).”
Johnson vividly describes the buildup to the invasion in early 2022. “We could see the sheer weight of Russian armour gathering at the border, eventually mounting to 115 battalion tactical groups. We could hear their chatter and the revving of their tanks as they moved to their forward positions. We could see their deployment of their field hospitals and their blood supplies. We could see the maps—and how short a distance it was down the motorway from the Belarussian border to Kyiv.”
Johnson describes giving a rousing pro-Ukraine speech at the annual Munich Security Conference not long before the invasion, explaining that the West’s ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence-sharing network—comprising the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—was all by then convinced Putin would invade.
Although a number of key European countries, such as Germany, were unhappy about supporting Ukraine, Johnson was unequivocal in backing the Ukrainian cause. “The choice,” he writes, “between Ukraine and Putin was a choice between right and wrong, good and evil, and if I was vociferous in those early meetings – of the G7, NATO and other bodies—it was because I had no doubt that I was right, and the cause was desperate...Putin must be defeated, and Ukraine must be free.”
Even Nicola Sturgeon, former first minister of Scotland and leader of the Scottish National Party, an avowed political enemy of Johnson, says in her own review of his book: “Where Johnson does deserve praise is in the UK’s support for Ukraine, and he writes powerfully and movingly about its battle for survival. As pressure potentially grows on Ukraine to strike a peace deal with Russia which rewards its aggression, voices like Johnson’s will be important—not something I’d say on other issues.”
Verve and bluster
Johnson’s book is sometimes written with verve but also bluster. There’s talk of a ridiculous supposed plot to invade the Netherlands to recover blockaded COVID-19 vaccines. But regarding COVID-19, he writes memorably: “My government, against all my previous instincts, promulgated these weird restrictions on human contact, like something out of Leviticus,” adding that “we auto-napalmed our own economy like a suicidal Buddhist monk.”
Johnson’s memoir is colourfully written, but there is a strange lack of true introspection. For this reason, as one British reviewer noted, while Johnson’s Unleashed is likely to be remembered as an important historical document, it might not necessarily be seen as a valuable one.
