Politics as Ripping Yarns: the breathless brio of Boris Johnson’s memoir

It is, perhaps, hard to imagine a collaboration between Virgil and Captain W.E. Johns, a fusion of the Aeneid and Biggles Pulls It Off, but that is how Boris Johnson’s memoir reads. Our intrepid hero travels round the world, wooing Gulf potentates, sticking it to Vladimir Putin, snatching submarine contracts from under Emmanuel Macron’s snooty Gallic nose and then makes it home in time for some uniting and levelling up before settling down to a well-deserved glass of Tignanello. He also, like Aeneas, endures a thousand ordeals and makes himself father of the world’s greatest city (while also making some truly dreadful puns: ‘Was it H.J. Eysenck who gave me that idea? Eysenck it was…’).

There is a breezy, breathless, boosterish brio to this tale which could have come from no politician, or writer, other than Boris. It is politics as Ripping Yarns. For his fans, and I am still very firmly one of them, this is a box of Turkish Delight as addictive as the White Witch’s in Narnia. For his critics, it will be confirmation that he approached the leadership of a G7 nation as Mr Toad approached driving. But I defy anyone to finish the book without smiles constantly breaking out, and without having to acknowledge there is actually something heroic – often chaotic, but still heroic – about the man’s determination to champion Britain’s virtues.

It is the fate of all politicians to divide opinion. To govern is to choose. And Boris’s choices have won him at least as much enmity as admiration. Few more so than his decision to back Brexit and then, in his drive to deliver it, to take the whip away from 21 colleagues, prorogue parliament and provoke the Supreme Court into an unprecedented rebuke to the executive.