How have the women in his life exerted more influence than any of us realise, and why is his story ultimately one overshadowed by family secrets? But none of this should be understood as evidence of racism, which for Bower would be “unusual” in a man married “to a half-Indian woman”. obviously more needs to be written on Boris’s leadership over Covid as this book only goes up to September 2020!

The clue is Bower’s use of the subject’s preferred mononym - even Charles Moore never refers to Mrs Thatcher as ‘Maggie’. 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. The first half was a fair assessment but the latter half, particularly the part after Johnson becomes PM, doesn’t even make any attempt to present a balanced or nuanced view.A former Panorama reporter, his books include unauthorised biographies of Tiny Rowland, Robert Maxwell, Mohamed Al-Fayed, Geoffrey Robinson, Gordon Brown and Richard Branson.

Bower suggests that Stanley’s mistreatment of Boris’s mother, Charlotte, is the defining secret of the Johnson family and the fact that Boris, as the oldest child, witnessed it is the key to understanding his character, including his rampant ambition. asks Bower, suggesting that of recent prime ministers only the chemistry graduate, Margaret Thatcher, would have been in a position to do such a thing. I found this unauthorised biography of Boris Johnson totally engrossing - it came across to me as a balanced and unbiased representation of his life and career about a man whose behaviour has been, on occasion, maddening and reprehensible. 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.For all Bower’s eagerness to put a kind gloss on Johnson’s actions, he doesn’t flinch from the man’s record. In the end I came away with enormous respect for Johnson, is continually attacked on all fronts by colleagues within his party, the media in general and the Metropolitan elites in particular, who can never forgive him for clinching Brexit. He imagines himself as a Churchill, his idol, and for sure he matches many of Churchills blunders and gaffes, Gallipoli, Norway, Tonypandy, the Gold Standard, the Bengal famine etc etc etc, yet when a 'real crisis' came Churchill stepped up and delivered the necessary leadership and inspiration to everyone. It shows Boris as the fool he is but also a clever man, a man who suffers depression, has not got much respect for his dad. 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.