Johnson at 10: The Inside Story: The Bestselling Political Biography of the Year

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Johnson at 10: The Inside Story: The Bestselling Political Biography of the Year

Johnson at 10: The Inside Story: The Bestselling Political Biography of the Year

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In the end was his beginning as Anthony Seldon puts very succinctly. The PM BJ most resembled was Lloyd George in both his character (serial womanisers) and governing approach (candidate approach to Britain’s institutions). However, where Lloyd George triumphed in WW1, BJ failed miserably in his war moment - Covid. BJ was an insider desperate to be seen as an outside, while LG was an outsider desperate to be seen as an insider. A PM (or any leader really) is only as good as the team they have around them. LG understood this, BJ did not. BJ thought that governing was like his time at City Hall, a lot of PR, ceremonies and popularity, with no need to have the desire to do the hard work to solve policy issues. BJ was definitively supportive of staying within the EU. In a 2001 book about his Henley constituency, his said that to exit Europe was to lose influence over a continent that it was in Britain’s interest to keep onside. He secretly despised the ERG, but knew his future depended on them. The most ridiculous part of the whole book is how everyone in government has to work around Johnson, a bit like a difficult Special Needs pupil who is disruptive in class. He rarely read papers before meetings, and everything had to be shortened to suit his attention span. Ironically the people around him did get better at working around his "issues" and things did improve for a while during his time in office.

Johnson, a clown at No 10 The inside story of Boris Johnson, a clown at No 10

Sir Anthony Seldon’s verdict on Boris Johnson has made headlines even before his book, Johnson at 10, written with Raymond Newell, is published on Thursday. Here are ten things we learnt from his study of the former prime minister. Anthony Seldon’s account of Johnson’s time in Downing Street confirms he was hopelessly out of his depth.The authors of this book highlight Johnson’s plethora of flaws, and show he was driven by nothing except his own lust for power and attention, such that even when he had outstanding opportunities to remake the country, his deep personal failures prevented him from doing so. Boris Johnson and wife Carrie on their final day in Downing Street. Photograph: Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty Images Covid proved him very wrong on that, though interestingly this account doesn’t pin the blame for the early mistakes made fully on Johnson. Neither does it allow him to take the credit for the thing he is proudest of, the vaccine programme, saying that this falls to Emily Lawson who actually put together the successful campaign.

Johnson at 10 by Anthony Seldon, Raymond Newell | Waterstones

These are only some of the questions and topics that Seldon and Newell cover in the first of an avalanche of books and research on the Johnson administration:I recently read the excellent Chums: How A Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over The UK which covers (amongst other things) Boris Johnson's formative years at Eton and Oxford, which set the scene for his later life. It was therefore an excellent, if unintentional, personal sequel. Boris Johnson has never made any secret of his admiration for Winston Churchill or discouraged comparisons between himself and his predecessor as prime minister. Yet a better parallel, argue Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell in their account of Johnson’s time in office, is David Lloyd George. Sixteen years ago, while he was Conservative MP for Henley but before he became London’s mayor, Boris Johnson appeared on a chat show hosted by Dame Edna Everage. The clip was circulating on social media last weekend after the death of Barry Humphries. To the bitter end, he blamed everyone but himself for the implosion of his premiership. The authors are right to dismiss that as another of his fictions. Bad King Boris was dethroned because he was and always had been utterly unfit to wear the crown. The related tragedy was the national one, in which we are still living. Whatever you thought of Brexit, Seldon argues – he thought it was a bad idea – it did provide “the overdue opportunity to modernise the British state and Britain’s institutions. There was a desperate need to bring the civil service up to date,” he says. “To forge better connections between universities and public life, to rejuvenate professions.”

Johnson administration Extracts from new book shed light on Boris Johnson administration

The authors do apportion some praise as well as criticism. His greatest accomplishments were on global issues where broad brush strokes were needed and not the fine detail he struggles with. Getting a deal on Brexit, Net Zero and Ukraine is what he'll be remembered for. With the right team and without Covid (which saw off Trump too) he could have been a better PM, but his decision-making around appointments sounds consistently poor. At their best when against something (getting Brexit done, against Russia, against Covid) but never for anything. That extended to his team around him, most of all DC who did not have a clue what levelling up meant. This book is truly an eye opener as to the inner workings of a government in crisis from the day Johnson came into power, a man in his own eyes who could do no wrong or make no wrong decisions, instead he was making them daily. History will not remember him kindly, nor should it, as I said in my first sentence we are a country now lower in world statistics in virtually all areas since Johnson was elected to power. The conservative party are still in disarray even though he has left. The next government whoever it may be has a very very long road to go down to bring us to where we were a decade or so ago, and with no extra money in the pot. I am now so disillusioned with government and democracy as I cannot see which political party can get us out of the mess that was Boris and take us forward. Could he have been a better leader, if he had paid more attention to his briefs, liaised closer with his own cabinet ministers, MPs and cabinet staff, despite Covid and the war in Ukraine?People we spoke to were afraid of Cummings, personal fear,” he says. “And to an extent of the whole Johnson court. In the seven books I’ve written, we saw some fear of some of the people around Gordon Brown, but this was off the scale. And that’s a deeply unhealthy facet of modern government that you let in people who are using fear as a method of control. Quite a lot of that was misogynistic in what we saw.” Cummings was one of the few participants in that Downing Street and Whitehall farce who did not speak to Seldon. The author does not feel that the omission is significant, since Cummings has written so very much about this period, “and his footprints are over everything anyway. People will make their own judgments,” he says of what he discovered, “but I don’t think that it’s remotely unfair to Cummings or for that matter to Johnson.” An obvious lazy approach/clear avoidance of doing the tough boring work. Implementation, and strategy he avoided at all costs. Ultimately he lied to himself. He was a man who could not cope with more than 3 slides of information, which he invariably forgot. The King of the World ended up without a horse and stranded by history.



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