by Tom Bower Boris Johnson: The Gambler
WH Allen 592pp £20
The Week Bookshop £15.99
Tom Bower is a veteran journalist who is famous for his scathing unauthorised biographies of powerful men, said Rachel Sylvester in The Times – among them Robert Maxwell, Conrad Black, Tony Blair and Jeremy Corbyn. You’d assume that with his latest effort he would have repeated the trick, but instead he has produced an “oddly sympathetic” portrait. It’s not that Boris Johnson: The Gambler is a whitewash. Bower is alive to his subject’s “faults and mistakes”: Johnson is portrayed as “obsessed with money, incorrigibly disloyal”, dishonest and “riddled with insecurities”. But rather than holding him responsible for such failings, Bower presents them as the “inevitable product” of a chaotic, disturbing and deeply unhappy childhood. For him, “Boris” – as he is chummily described throughout – is primarily a victim.
Actually, this book is another “acid-pen” biography, said Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian. Except that its target isn’t the man on the cover, but rather his father, Stanley Johnson. In Bower’s telling, Stanley is the true “villain of the piece”: a “lifelong flake” whose callous behaviour ruined his eldest son’s childhood. Stanley’s crimes make for startling reading. During the hot summer of 1976, when water supplies ran low, he insisted that the family’s two au pairs walk around naked – and duly began an affair with one of them. When Boris’s mother, Charlotte, questioned his right to have constant affairs, he told her she was selfish for “not wanting me to do what I want”. He was controlling (Charlotte was allowed just one dress a year) and violent: on one occasion, he broke her nose. All this, Bower suggests, was witnessed by the young Boris, and provides “the key to understanding his character”.
It’s a convincing theory, said Dominic Sandbrook in The Sunday Times. Johnson “is ruthlessly ambitious because Stanley forced his children to compete for attention”, and lazy because his father told him to display “effortless superiority”. Bower is an “indefatigable bloodhound”, and his book is packed with juicy gossip – such as the claim that when Johnson was editing The Spectator, Dominic Cummings’s future wife, Mary Wakefield, was “besotted” with him, “like a spaniel on heat”. However, it isn’t always much fun to read, being “padded beyond endurance” and written in “photocopier-manual prose”. More seriously, the book feels untrustworthy, said Stephen Bush in the New Statesman: not just because it contains lots of factual errors, but because Bower doesn’t fully divulge his connection to Johnson (his wife, Veronica Wadley, worked with him for many years and was appointed by him to the House of Lords). Poorly written and thin on real insight, The Gambler feels like a missed opportunity.