Bower vaguely tries to place the blame of Johnson’s considerable personal failings at the door of an abusive childhood but this theme barely makes it past the introduction as Stanley barely makes an appearance in the narrative.

He dedicates a significant part of the later quarter of the book to Covid, where I think he went so off-piste with his confident analysis that I felt the whole thrust of this bio was to absolve Boris of any culpability and to frame him as potentially one of the greats - if only we and the media would give him a chance. I struggled with parts of the book, was the author expressing his opinion or was he writing what he thought Boris was thinking…if the latter, he needs a different approach. Officials, aides, junior ministers, Cabinet colleagues, the Foreign Office and the BBC have all let Johnson down — in Bower-view it is always their fault, never Johnson’s own. His previous books about the failure to denazify post war Germany and the hunt for Nazi war criminals, Anglo American intelligence operations against Russia during the Cold War and corruption in the Premier League won great acclaim.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. This gets worse as the book goes on, and culminates in the last few chapters where the author says of the Supreme Court judges ‘the bias was obvious’ (p.

It would be hard to imagine Churchill pleading that he could do no more than follow the guidance of his subordinates. This was borne out by what I read, and I can’t help feeling that this was a book rushed out for the Christmas 2020 market. Unfortunately, however, as it progresses it becomes more rushed and less well-structured, and the final few chapters almost completely ignore Brexit at the expense of a very generalist account of the battle against Covid. And to save you the pain of wading through this depressing saga of lies, betrayals, amorality, jealousy, xenophobia, misogyny and depression depicted in a book subtitled The Gambler, I will tell you why now: it’s everyone else’s fault.

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. Please get in touch and we will do our best to source your book, no matter how unusual or specialist. I found the book most interesting in its coverage of the current government’s handling of Brexit and the Covid pandemic - as such it was less of a history book than a commentary on the functioning of contemporary U. Full of rich detail, in Bower’s usual way, this is an entertaining stab at documenting very recent history. I have not read this author before but he has written a lot of unofficial biographies where he can dig up the dirt on lots of famous people.