Paul reviewed Boris Johnson by Tom Bower
Review of 'Boris Johnson' on 'Goodreads'
2 stars
I had high hopes for this book - as one of the Penguin ‘orange spines’ I was expecting an even-handed and well-researched biography of our current (though not for much longer - he resigned the day after I bought the book) Prime Minister. Sadly, I was disappointed, and this book falls well short of the quality I’ve come to expect.
The failing of this book is the author’s endless insistence that Johnson is great and everyone else is wrong. I don’t know if he had a previous relationship with the subject (the acknowledgements suggests not), or fell under Johnson’s spell during the course of writing, but the outcome is a level of bias I would only expect from an autobiography.
At every stage, when something goes right it proves Johnson is great, and when something goes wrong (a frequent occurrence), it is the fault of someone else. Whilst there is …
I had high hopes for this book - as one of the Penguin ‘orange spines’ I was expecting an even-handed and well-researched biography of our current (though not for much longer - he resigned the day after I bought the book) Prime Minister. Sadly, I was disappointed, and this book falls well short of the quality I’ve come to expect.
The failing of this book is the author’s endless insistence that Johnson is great and everyone else is wrong. I don’t know if he had a previous relationship with the subject (the acknowledgements suggests not), or fell under Johnson’s spell during the course of writing, but the outcome is a level of bias I would only expect from an autobiography.
At every stage, when something goes right it proves Johnson is great, and when something goes wrong (a frequent occurrence), it is the fault of someone else. Whilst there is no doubt that some of the people Johnson trusted let him down, many of the mistakes are clearly of his making, even if he refused to take responsibility (at a minimum, he hired most of his inner circle, and therefore is at least partly to blame for their incompetence). 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.411) and Lady Hale is dismissed as ‘a family lawyer and administrator without any specialist knowledge of constitutional law’ (p.410) - 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.
The final two chapters, covering the pandemic, lambast most of the scientific community - with the exception of those whose views favoured the government - leaving the reader with the question of whether they should trust Boris Johnson (Classics (BA)) or Chris Whitty (Physiology (BA), medical science (DSc), Medicine (BM BCh), Tropical Medicine & Hygiene (DTM&H), Epidemiology (MSc), Medical law (LLM), practising consultant, Professor of Physic). When it comes to criticise one of the models produced for the pandemic, the author is unsure if it was written in C or Fortran (p.435), and then goes on to claim that it is an outdated language (the book was likely written on a computer running an operating system mostly written in C) and that ‘modern industry best practice’ would require a 15,000 line program to be broken up into 500 source files.
Overall, this is a disappointing read, and perhaps I should have paid more attention to the fact that all the quotes on the front are from right wing newspapers or commentators. If you happen to be a Johnson fan, this book will provide you with all the confirmation bias you need. If not, you’ll leave angry and frustrated.