It’s just a guess, but I suspect that the mere sight of this book would make David Cameron gnash his tiny, perfect dolphin teeth until his gums began to bleed. What on earth can he do about Boris Johnson? What can any of us do? There’s something inexorable — irresistible even — about his progress, and this slender volume of drolleries represents another small step on the increasingly well-lit path to ultimate power: what may come to be known as the ‘Boris Years,’ or even the ‘Boris Hegemony’.
This book thus becomes more than merely amusing and entertaining (it’s both, needless to say); it becomes potentially significant. Future generations may ask themselves, who was this Boris Johnson exactly? Will Self has described him as ‘an enigma wrapped up in a whoopee cushion’; but as this book shows, Boris isn’t really a man of mystery at all. On the contrary, he is the acknowledged master of hiding everything in plain sight. His intelligence is obvious, his charm legendary and his ambition terrifying. He is also bone idle (say some), libidinous to the point of priapism (say all) and ‘the right man to lead us back into the 17th century’ (says Paul Merton).
And throughout his strange and still golden career, he has assisted future historians by writing literally millions of words of journalism, most of them at speed and a few of them quite stunningly ill-judged. ‘In the Tory Party we have become used to Papua New Guinea-style orgies of cannibalism and chief-killing, and so it is with a happy amazement that we watch as the madness engulfs the Labour Party,’ he famously wrote in 2006. And a few days later: ‘I mean no insult to the people of Papua New Guinea, who I’m sure lead lives of blameless bourgeois domesticity in common with the rest of us.
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