For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. Research suggests that a high proportion of leaders had damaged childhoods. Bereavement or illness, parental divorce, delinquency or addiction are features in the early lives of many senior politicians. The phenomenon has a name: the Phaeton complex.

A former Panorama reporter, his books include unauthorised biographies of Tiny Rowland, Robert Maxwell, Mohamed Al-Fayed, Geoffrey Robinson, Gordon Brown and Richard Branson. Few regard his calamity-studded stint as foreign secretary as his finest hour. Yet his myriad gaffes and blunders are excused on the grounds that he had been “set up” to fail by May and was then let down by “recalcitrant Foreign Office mandarins”. The author blames civil servants for thwarting a Johnsonian wheeze to buy an island in the Arctic Ocean from Norway to turn it into a spy base. Others may think it never happened because it was one of Johnson’s many fantasy projects. Yet despite his celebrity, decades of media scrutiny, the endless vitriol of his critics and the enduring adoration of his supporters, there is so much we've never understood about Boris - until now. Previous biographies have either dismissed him as a lazy, deceitful opportunist or been transfixed by his charm, wit and drive. Both approaches fall short, and so many questions about Boris remain unanswered. And yet, isn’t that what leadership is about? Bower’s recitation of the failures of, for example, Public Health England is certainly damning of that body, but surely the task of leaders is to get a grip when something is not working. Johnson’s hero, Winston Churchill, did that with the entire war effort, from the manufacture of armaments to military strategy. It would be hard to imagine Churchill pleading that he could do no more than follow the guidance of his subordinates. The book is written in a breathless OK! manner and yes, the father Stanley is a dissolute wastrel and wife abuser, which Boris too has embraced gleefully, but many other people came out of dysfunctional families to do something relevant and useful.

Customer reviews

So, all in all, a revealing read about the mechanisms of power. I suppose Mark Rutte is not very different from Boris Johnson.

I was very curious about this biography, I know that Boris Johnson evokes quite a few negative feelings in many. Personally I have always had a certain sympathy for the man, also found his books very worthwhile. For Bower, a painful, chaotic and fractured childhood explains Johnson’s ambition, exhibitionism, secretiveness, unreliability, vulnerabilities and resilience. “Boris agonised over his mother’s fate. Not only had he watched his mother suffer from being regularly hit, but he also saw his father blatantly deny the truth. Unwilling to confide in others about his father’s violence, he became a loner… To mask the misery and hurt, he demanded attention.” The advantage of this as a biographical framing device is that it offers an apparently logical explanation for his subject’s frequently appalling behaviour as an adult. The flaw in assigning all the culpability to Stanley is that it gifts Boris a gold-plated alibi. We should not, it suggests, think too badly of him when he betrays a wife, concocts fabrications or stumbles from debacle to disaster through a public health crisis. We should think of him as the victim of that troubled childhood. An unauthorised biography by Bower of Richard Desmond, provisionally entitled Rough Trader, awaits publication. Bowers's biography of Simon Cowell, written with Cowell's co-operation, was published on 20 April, 2012. The Guardian review sums it up for me….yes he might be a womanizing liar but he did have a difficult childhood. 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.Apart from the first chapters, this is a tedious book - chapter after chapter of excusing the failings, chapter after chapter with no constructive analysis or ability to recognise Johnson for what he is, lazy, a man with no vision or insight, an English Nationalist, privileged, seeing himself as naturally part of England's social elite yet ... for all that, looked down on by them as an arriviste, someone who has only just recently bought himself into the club but who really doesn't have the pedigree. The book includes one or two interesting tidbits about Johnson’s later life. For example, while Bower is not the first to report that Dominic Cummings urged Johnson and other Brexiteers to vote for Theresa May’s deal, he is to my knowledge the first to get the exact quote, that MPs would be “strategic idiots” if they didn’t vote for it. I was given this book for Christmas as I do like a political biography. 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. This one is a detailed account of Boris Johnson's life, focusing on his career as a politician, as an MP, as Mayor of London, in the Brexit referendum, and ultimately as Prime Minister with even some bits covering the pandemic. Based on a wealth of new interviews and research, this is the deepest, most rounded and most comprehensive portrait to date of the man, the mind, the politics, the affairs, the family - of a loner, a lover, a leader. Tom Bower (born 28 September 1946) is a British writer, noted for his investigative journalism and for his unauthorized biographies.