The epigraph for Boris Johnson’s memoir is “Hasta la vista, baby,” an Arnold Schwarzenegger line from a Terminator film. Photo / Kenny Holston, The New York Times
In his memoir, Unleashed, the former prime minister is “optimistic” about the possibility that Donald Trump could regain the White House.
Boris Johnson knows he’s often cast as Donald Trump’s populist twin, and he puts up a perfunctory protest. Analogies between Brexit, which he championed, and Trump’s MAGA movement are “pretty treacherous,” he said, and the caricature of himself as a louche, shambling, Eton-and-Oxford version of Trump does no favours to the once-and-maybe-future American President.
“I wouldn’t want to damage Donald’s chances by encouraging the idea there’s any comparison with me,” Johnson said, over a platter of half-eaten sandwiches. “I wouldn’t want to burden him with the stigma of association.”
Yet, in an interview last week to promote his new memoir, Unleashed, Johnson often spoke as an across-the-pond surrogate for Trump. Drawing on his encounters with Trump when he was Prime Minister of Britain, Johnson tried to reassure anxious Americans about what a Trump restoration would look like. In a word: He’s bullish.
“I really don’t think that when it comes to it, he is going to want to begin his next presidency by making the Soviet empire great again,” Johnson said. “This guy wants to make America great again, right – not make Russia great again. I’m fundamentally optimistic about a Trump presidency.”
In the interview, conducted at Rupert Murdoch’s News Building in London (Murdoch’s HarperCollins imprint published the book), Johnson offered a systematic defence of Trump on a full range of issues: Ukraine, the Middle East, China, trade, tax policy, even climate change, where Johnson brushed aside Trump’s mockery of windmills and electric vehicles by noting that Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, “was bounding right beside him” at a recent campaign rally.
He briefly acknowledged the attack on the US Capitol by Trump’s supporters – “Clearly, the January 6 thing was terrible” – then pivoted back to his sales pitch.
In promoting Trump, Johnson knows he’s tweaking the sensitivities of many in the United States. In some ways, that’s the point. “I want your readers’ eyes to ...,” he gestured to his own eyes, pantomiming them popping out of his head. But for Johnson, praising Trump is about more than antagonising all the right people. A Trump return would lay the groundwork for what some in Britain believe is inevitable in their politics: the return of Boris Johnson.
Nothing in Johnson’s 738-page book debunks that theory. He’s got a stock line about his chances of returning to front-line politics: “About the same as being reincarnated as an olive or decapitated by a Frisbee.” But the book’s epigraph is “Hasta la vista, baby” – an Arnold Schwarzenegger line from the film Terminator 2: Judgment Day that Johnson borrowed for his farewell speech after being forced to resign in July 2022. The Terminator’s other famous line, of course, was “I’ll be back,” after which he rammed a police cruiser into a station house.
On the face of it, Johnson’s odds of a comeback appear slim. His memoir has gotten a scathing reception in Britain, with reviewers castigating him for his lack of contrition over parties held at Downing St that breached lockdown restrictions during the coronavirus pandemic. That was one of a parade of scandals that led lawmakers from his Conservative Party to drum him out of office.
But there is a sense that Johnson, like Trump, is impervious to the critiques that would sink other political figures. So often has he been labelled undisciplined, dishonest, opportunistic, entitled and any number of other pejoratives that the words no longer carry much sting.
In an era of celebrity politics, “Boris” is the only political figure in Britain universally known by his first name. His soap-operatic life and career have been so vividly dissected that little about him has the capacity to shock.
For Johnson as a memoirist, that is both a licence and a challenge. His book is breezy and well written, spiced with anecdotes that, coming from any other politician, would have seemed at the least outré and, in a few cases, outlandish. He describes taking a call from the switchboard at No 10 Downing St while standing at a urinal. The new Prime Minister, Theresa May, wanted to offer him the post of Foreign Secretary.
“Would I come and see the PM, they said,” Johnson wrote. “You bet, I said, spraying away.”
Elsewhere, he writes of a visit by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to his office in 2017, during which Netanyahu asked to use the lavatory. Afterward, the security services found a listening device had been planted there. Johnson said he got along well with Netanyahu and that readers should draw no broader conclusions about the Israeli leader from the episode.
“I put that in as an ironical aside that happens to be true,” Johnson said. “I don’t know that he was responsible.”
In March 2021, during the depths of the pandemic, Johnson wrote that he weighed a military raid on a warehouse in the Netherlands to seize five million doses of Covid vaccine that he said were being held illegally by the Dutch Government. Having run through the options, one of his military advisers warned him that this would constitute an invasion of a Nato ally.
“I knew he was right,” Johnson wrote. “I secretly agreed with what they all thought but did not want to say aloud: that the whole thing was nuts.”
However harebrained, the scheme was in the service of what Johnson casts as his proudest achievement in Government: Britain’s vaccine rollout, one of the fastest of any advanced economy. He credits not just the brilliance of the scientists at Oxford who formulated the AstraZeneca vaccine or the National Health Service, which rapidly distributed it, but also Brexit, which he said enabled Britain to approve the vaccine faster than its European Union neighbours.
Critics insist that Britain could have acted unilaterally, even if it were still a member of the European Medicines Agency, which approves drugs for the EU. Johnson dismissed that as magical thinking. “Did the Pasteur Institute?” he asked. “Did the Max Planck Institute? Did anybody else?”
The vaccine rollout is Exhibit A for Johnson’s argument that Brexit was worth the upheaval it caused in Britain. It is also his main argument for why the Tory lawmakers were so wrong to chuck him out, after he had led them to an electoral landslide in 2019. If they had just kept their nerve, he wrote, the Conservative Government might still be in power.
As it stands, the Tories were swept out in July in the worst election defeat of their modern history. Johnson has no doubt he would be doing a better job than the new Labour Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, who is struggling with overcrowded prisons and the aftermath of anti-immigrant riots, among other headaches.
“I would not, now, be doing dumb stuff like releasing alleged paedophiles from jail and locking up morons who put something stupid on Twitter,” Johnson said, referring to the release of some prisoners and the prosecution of a few people for posting material that police said helped incite the riots.
Rattled by the rise of a hard-right anti-immigrant party, Reform UK, the Tories are now lurching to the right. “You’ve got to bubble-gum together the two identities,” Johnson said of the Tories and Reform. “You’ve got to govern from the centre right. When I was running the show, Reform – those guys were on zero or about zero. Don’t pander, but just take their oxygen. Crowd them out.”
Then he added, a touch wistfully, “That’s what I used to do”.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Mark Landler
Photographs by: Kenny Holston and Tim Gruber
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
New York Times analysis: It frees Trump from operating on a schedule driven by Netanyahu.