Also as both a civil servant and a former GLA employee I wasn't too keen on the bits where he blames officials (who can't speak for themselves) rather than politicians for particular failings but I may just be being over-sensitive there. His whole life has been a gamble and the wonder is how many supporters of the British Conservative party are willing to ignore his blatant disregard for the truth just to keep their party in power. And how the foreign office people do whatever they can to boycott and sabotage their boss, when Johnson is foreign secretary.

The account of Boris’s life is pieced together from snippets and goes only part way to explaining the man, and is more interested in exposing the frailties of the man. Whether it really manages to pin down the Prime Minister's personality with all of the seeming contradictions I am not sure but as a run through of so much that happened during his time at City Hall, during the EU referendum, and as a Minister and then Prime Minister, including during the pandemic, I found it really interesting. Other characters are presented in glowing descriptive terms, again quite without necessity, suggesting the author’s bias. It goes from very one-sided information to something nearing fiction when the chapters about the pandemic start. As divisive as he is beguiling, as misunderstood as he is scrutinised, Boris Johnson is a singular figure.The author is unafraid of diving into the secrets of Boris Johnson's family background, his infidelities, and his character traits with lots of things I didn't previously know. Bower is probably is best known for his unvarnished and unauthorised biographies of Britain's most controversial tycoons including Robert Maxwell, Richard Branson, Mohamed Fayed, Tiny Rowland, Bernie Ecclestone and Simon Cowell. and yet we have in the UK, a terrible Brexit deal which will have ramifications to jobs, prosperity and GDP for decades to come, the Union looks particularly unstable, we have one of the worst economic impacts, a 10% reduction in GDP, only bettered by Argentina and Greece, and now with over 110,000 deaths, one of the worst death rates. But then most high-achievers in their fifties have long since moved on from blaming the flaws of their parents for their own misdeeds, especially when they have been blessed with a great deal of love and support from others along the way. That said, the book is interesting and the early sections well-written and quite illuminating on Johnson’s family background, early life, and complicated relationships with women.

For all Bower’s eagerness to put a kind gloss on Johnson’s actions, he doesn’t flinch from the man’s record.At the end of the day about the best Bower can muster is ‘it doesn’t matter if you’re a lascivious misogynist creep if your daddy was one too…’ the morals and the worldview bower is defending make it clear that he just doesn’t consider those things to be all that bad actually. Every chance he gets he’s slipping in snide descriptions of Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs from declaring the women as ‘shrill’ to affording them the benefit of absolutely no doubt while brushing over Johnson’s own numerous sins and clearly idolising the man’s shameless steamrolling over every rule put in place to allow for a democratic dynamic in Westminster. And yet I couldn't avoid feeling a grudging respect for him at times, certainly in the way he was treated by civil servants when Foreign Secretary under Teresa May and some of the bad press he has received over his handling of the Covid pandemic. Bower suggests that Stanley’s mistreatment of Boris’s mother, Charlotte, is the defining secret of the Johnson family and the fact that Boris, as the oldest child, witnessed it is the key to understanding his character, including his rampant ambition.

Occasional snipes at Sonia Purnell, Boris’s best-known biographer, add to a slightly febrile feel to all this.an assertion that is hard to square with her 16 years of experience in the highest court in the land, which routinely hears cases around administrative and constitutional law. This book written by Bower, was completed prematurely at the end of the Summer, before the 2nd wave hit, more dithering and indecision occurred and a failure to learn from the mistakes of the 1st time around has left the country in turmoil. This is a compulsory read for all who wish for better in our country, so that we may forgive and support our prime minister rather than berate him, for we must put aside differences as much we can so as to improve all our lives. Revelatory, unsettling and compulsively readable, this is the most timely and indispensable book on Boris Johnson yet from Britain’s leading investigative biographer. However, he is so clearly sympathetic to "Boris" that it does feel that this skews the overall balance of the book.

The first half was a fair assessment but the latter half, particularly the part after Johnson becomes PM, doesn’t even make any attempt to present a balanced or nuanced view.A Sunday Times Book of the YearA Times Book of the YearA Guardian Book of the YearA Telegraph Book of the Year'EXPLOSIVE. It is perhaps also legitimate to ask whether it was proper for Bower to use information gleaned from a vulnerable elderly woman suffering from Parkinson’s without wondering about the misery it might later cause. obviously more needs to be written on Boris’s leadership over Covid as this book only goes up to September 2020! One thing I can say is that the author doesn't have such an agenda that it is predictable where they will sit on a particular issue and they mostly back that up with facts and evidence for their point of view. His chequered background and behaviour, of ill discipline, duplicitousness, laziness, adulterousness and narcissism were 'pushed aside', enabling him to win against the awful Livingstone in London and use his Mayorship as an opportunity to promote himself and launch a career in politics.