Does Boris Johnson really expect us to think he’s Churchill?

As you would expect, it’s impossible to read this book without drawing fairly direct comparisons between its author and its subject. In promotional exchanges, with the well-worn practice of self-deprecation, its author will of course insist that there is no comparison between the great man and the present humble supplicant. The readership will, with tolerant amusement, conclude that there are plenty of points which could be brought to bear on the argument; plenty, indeed, which may have occurred to the author himself, emerging in some striking encomia:

He was eccentric, over the top, camp, with his own special trademark clothes — and a thoroughgoing genius… From his very emergence as a young Tory MP he had bashed and satirised his own party… There were too many Tories who thought of him as an unprincipled opportunist… His enemies detected in him a titanic egotism, a desire to find whatever wave or wavelet he could, and surf it long after it had dissolved into spume on the beach… He did behave with a death-defying self-belief, and go farther out on a limb than anyone else might have thought wise.