Boris Johnson

- Blurb -

Andrew Gimson, whose previous book Boris is the essential read on Johnson' s earlier career, returns with a penetrating and entertaining new account of Boris Johnson' s turbulent time as prime minister, from the highs of a landslide election victory to the lows of his car-crash resignation. In Boris Johnson: The Rise and Fall of a Troublemaker at Number 10, Gimson sets out to discover how a man dismissed as a liar, charlatan and tasteless joke was able, despite being written off more frequently than any other British politician of the twenty-first century, to become prime minister. During his ascent, Johnson benefited from being regarded as a clown, for this meant his opponents failed to take him seriously, while his supporters delighted in his ability to shock and enrage the Establishment. He even changed the language of politics; a new word, ' cakeism' , entered the English lexicon to describe his implausible but seductive claim during the Brexit negotiations that it was possible to have one' s cake and eat it. In a series of brilliant vignettes, Gimson sheds light on the parts played by sex, greed, boredom and low seriousness in Johnson' s rise and fall, describes how Partygate fatally imperilled his prime ministership, and places him in a line of Tory adventurers stretching back to Benjamin Disraeli: disreputable figures who often blew themselves up, but who also could display an astonishing ability to connect with the British public. What kind of a person is Johnson? What kind of a country would dream of making him its prime minister? And why did he fall? Nobody has got closer than Gimson to finding out the answers.