This month HarperCollins will release Unleashed, Boris Johnson’s memoirs which are billed as “candid, unrestrained, and revealing”. It is hard to know exactly what to expect: Johnson is an experienced author, with 10 books already in his back catalogue including a novel (Seventy-Two Virgins: A Comedy of Errors, 2004) and a profile of Winston Churchill (The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History, 2014) and made his name as a journalist for The Daily Telegraph. On the other hand, he is not known for his scrupulous accuracy and honesty, dismissed from his first reporting job for inventing quotations in an interview.
Given the controversial circumstances of the end of his premiership, and the strong feelings he provokes across the spectrum of the Conservative Party and the wider electorate, Johnson is anticipated to use Unleashed as an apologia and a defence of his career, and we can guess at some of the highlights.
He will relive the unexpectedly dominant victory the Conservative Party achieved over Labour in December 2019; stress the breadth of his electoral coalition and the support he found in Red Wall areas, many of which had never voted Conservative; celebrate his ability to “get Brexit done” and guide the United Kingdom out of the European Union; and reflect on what he sees as his success in dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic. It will be fiercely “fact checked”, lauded and condemned.
Many prime ministerial memoirs fulfil this sort of role in presenting the author’s version of history which accentuates the positive and dwells on triumph and achievement. This is all the more true now, given that the last six prime ministers have left office unwillingly, at the behest either of the electorate or their own parties, and three of them did so while still in their 40s. Autobiographies are a perfect platform for this kind of interpretation of history, as they carry an inherent kind of weight and authority, can run to almost any length the author likes (David Cameron’s For The Record is 750 pages) and will attract publicity by their very publication.
Prime precedence
William Gladstone, the indefatigable and prolix Grand Old Man of Victorian politics who was four times prime minister between 1868 and 1894, inevitably left a significant written record. He published seven volumes of recollections in Gleanings of Past Years as well as several collections of correspondence and speeches, while his great rival, Benjamin Disraeli, although a prolific novelist, did not write any kind of memoir. The Marquess of Salisbury, the brooding, reactionary titan who led the Conservatives after Disraeli, was a fine essayist and a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, but would have regarded memoirs as flamboyantly plebeian, while his nephew and successor, A.J. Balfour, another formidable intellect, could never muster the required seriousness of purpose.
The Earl of Rosebery, whose premiership lasted only 15 months, wrote a short biography of William Pitt the Younger but committed nothing to paper on his own tenure. His fellow Liberal Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman died less than three weeks after resigning as prime minister, but his successor, H.H. Asquith, who served from 1908 to 1916, was determined not to have his tenure unrecorded. He collected some of his speeches in Occasional Addresses 1893-1916 (1918), charted his time as an MP in two volumes of Fifty Years of Parliament (1926) and returned to the same ground two years later in another two-volume work, Memories and Reflections (1928). It was hardly surprising he should want to present his view of the tumultuous first quarter of the 20th century, since he had been manoeuvred out of Downing Street by David Lloyd George and was regarded as bearing much of the responsibility for the decline of the Liberal Party to third-party status after 1922.
Lloyd George, having risen from a modest nonconformist background in Wales, and as the only prime minister to have spoken English as a second language, was a relentless self-promoter and produced more than a dozen volumes. Some were contemporary accounts of particular policy issues, like The People’s Budget (1909) and Is It Peace? (1923), but he too wanted to frame his place in history. His six-volume War Memoirs, written in the 1930s, were essentially his bid for the good opinions of posterity, and over the course of 2,000 pages they meticulously record Lloyd George’s triumphs and wisdom and proclaim the outstanding success of his time as prime minister.
He was a skilful and persuasive writer, by then the highest-paid political journalist in the world, but he also remained a Member of Parliament and although he celebrated his 70th birthday in the year the first volume was published, he never ruled out a return to high office if the nation found itself in a crisis. In 1935, he produced a programme of economic reforms which he dubbed “Lloyd George’s New Deal”, with a nod to President Franklin Roosevelt’s policies in America, and when Winston Churchill became prime minister in 1940, he offered his old friend, aged 77, the post of minister of agriculture. Lloyd George declined, but it is significant and characteristic that he remarked to his secretary “I shall wait until Winston is bust”.
Andrew Bonar Law, Stanley Baldwin, Ramsay MacDonald and Neville Chamberlain all failed to leave a personal memoir (in the case of Bonar Law and Chamberlain, they died within months of leaving office), although Baldwin issued a collection of addresses from the final 18 months of his premiership entitled Service of Our Lives: Last Speeches as Prime Minister (1937).
In 1940, however, the office of prime minister fell to one of the greatest and most expansive writers British politics would ever produce. Winston Churchill had been a journalist from his earliest adulthood, sending articles to The Daily Graphic from the Cuban War of Independence in 1895 and reporting on General Sir Bindon Blood’s campaign against Pashtun rebels on India’s North-West Frontier in 1897. He used the latter experience to write his first work of non-fiction, The Story of the Malakand Field Force: An Episode of Frontier War (1898), which was well reviewed. For Churchill, although a mediocre pupil at Harrow and an unremarkable cadet at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, the writing instinct went deep: it kept him occupied and warded off his recurring bouts of depression, what he called “the Black Dog”, as well as allowing him to indulge and develop his profound love of the English language.
Equally important in Churchill’s character was the urge for self-promotion. Lloyd George, with whom he enjoyed a strange, affectionate, rivalrous relationship, was quoted as saying, cuttingly, “He would make a drum out of the skin of his own mother in order to sound his own praises”. If it was harsh, it was not wholly inaccurate; as he would tell the House of Commons during a debate on foreign affairs in 1948, “For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all Parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself”.
Churchill understood narrative and rhetoric like no other prime minister. He thought in sweeping historical terms and was steeped in the language and imagery of heroism, which allowed him to be such an effective orator during the Second World War. While his sense of patriotism and imperial energy seems dated and “problematic” now, he was able to capture the zeitgeist, able to articulate brilliantly and memorably what many of his audience felt and believed on some inchoate level. It helped, of course, that his public career was so staggeringly long: he was a Member of Parliament for more than 60 years, his first ministerial post, under-secretary of state for the colonies, came in 1906 while he would not retire as prime minister until 1955; he took part in the British Army’s last cavalry charge with the 21st Lancers at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898, yet before he retired from the House of Commons, the United Kingdom had tested its first intermediate-range ballistic missile, Blue Streak.
He was a prolific writer of history, penning a two-volume biography of his father, Lord Randolph Churchill (1906), and a life of his great ancestor John Churchill, Marlborough: His Life and Times, which appeared in four volumes between 1933 and 1938. His most ambitious work was A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (4 vols., 1956-58), which was a huge success and praised by Cambridge historian J.H. Plumb for “its own inherent virtues—its narrative power, its fine judgement of war and politics, of soldiers and statesmen, and even more because it reflects a tradition of what Englishmen in the hey-day of their empire thought and felt about their country’s past”.
Churchill’s greatest testament and tribute to himself, however, was the sprawling, epic, six-volume history The Second World War, published between 1948 and 1953. It far transcended memoir or autobiography, and his employment of a team of assistants and ghostwriters known as “The Syndicate” made it resemble more an official history. He was planning the work from the beginning of the war itself, and certainly by his assumption of the premiership in 1940, and every week he had a weekly summary of correspondence, minutes, memoranda and other documents printed as “prime minister’s personal minutes” to avoid having to rely on classified government papers.
The account of the war which emerges from Churchill’s magnum opus is broadly a fair one but puts the best construction on its author’s actions at all times. He is the central character of his own history, but that was not so far from the public perception at the time (and has a good deal of truth in it). In The Daily Herald, Labour MP Emmanuel Shinwell described it as “a novel with Winston Churchill as the hero”. It cemented his status as a towering historical figure, a man of destiny, and it was wildly successful. Cassell paid him a lump sum of £40,000 (around £1.7 million today) and he concluded a number of lucrative deals around the world for publication and serialisation. In total, The Second World War earned Churchill around £550,000, something like £23.6 million in today’s currency. He was also awarded the 1953 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Churchill was sui generis [unique], of course, and not all prime ministerial memoirs could be six-volume epic histories. In 1954, the year after Churchill’s Nobel Prize, Clement Attlee produced a 230-page autobiography entitled, with typical understatement, As It Happened. It told the story of his life and career frankly and straightforwardly, and contains genuinely useful insights for historians, relating the importance of his military service in the First World War on his outlook and sense of duty as well as a shrewd analysis of public opinion in the volatile inter-war years. As It Happened is as representative of Attlee as The Second World War is of Churchill.
This set the pattern for a post-Downing Street apologia, in kind if not in form. If Attlee, the most self-effacing and taciturn of leaders, had written his memoirs, after all, then it was practically an obligation. Anthony Eden, after his resignation amid the Suez crisis and collapsing physical health in 1957, went on to write three volumes of autobiography: Full Circle, covering his career after 1951, was published first in 1960, followed by Facing the Dictators, in 1962 dealing with his life up till his 1938 resignation as foreign secretary, and The Reckoning, detailing the period 1938-45, in 1965. As befitting a cultured man with artistic sensibilities, they are well-written and comprehensive, though hardly revelatory.
There was more critical acclaim for a slim volume he produced in 1976, the year before he died, entitled Another World, which is an account of his life from birth to 1917. It is a much more vulnerable, emotional book, especially in its treatment of his service during the First World War. He volunteered for the KIng’s Royal Rifle Corps straight from Eton, his elder brother John having been killed in October 1914; his younger brother would be killed at the Battle of Jutland in 1916. Eden was only 18 when he was commissioned, and he proved brave and able, winning the Military Cross in 1916 (an achievement he omits) then, later that year, becoming the youngest adjutant on the Western Front, aged 19. In 1918 he became the youngest brigade major in the British Army. Another World is a profound meditation on duty, leadership and camaraderie, and in many ways shows the complex, fragile man who was temperamentally unsuited for the highest office.
The next 20 years would see the full range of approaches. Harold Macmillan, the Conservative prime minister who was the ultimate showman, as well as a publisher by trade, demonstrated not only his eye for self-promotion but also his deep literary hinterland and between 1966 and 1973 produced six volumes of memoirs: Winds of Change, The Blast of War, Tides of Fortune, Riding the Storm, Pointing the Way and At The End of the Day. The titles seemed portentous, even ponderous, but his career had been extraordinary.
Macmillan had served with distinction in the Grenadier Guards during the First World War and been wounded several times, then represented depression-ravaged Stockton-on-Tees in the House of Commons 1924-29 and 1931-45. During the Second World War Macmillan had been minister resident in the Mediterranean, working closely with the American commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Losing his seat in the Labour landslide of 1945 but scrambling back months later as MP for Bromley, he had rebuilt Britain’s homes as Churchill’s minister for housing (1951-54), was briefly foreign secretary then served under Anthony Eden as chancellor (1955-57) and outmanoeuvred his great rival R.A. Butler to seize the premiership when Eden quit over Suez. As prime minister for six years, from 1957 to 1963, he won a huge election victory in 1959, telling the electorate they had “never had it so good” and rode an economic boom which was beginning to peter out by the time his administration was decaying in 1962-63, with the Vassall and Profumo scandals hinting at a Conservative government which had been in office too long.
Macmillan’s autobiography stands as the longest a prime minister has produced. Is there a sense it was too much, too monumental, too likely to be reflective and self-critical? He was the most theatrical of modern premiers, the one who most consciously created a persona, that of the witty, self-deprecating Edwardian actor-manager, a man who understood life’s horrors and triumphs so completely that he was unable to take anything entirely seriously (a pose not unlike that of Balfour, except that Balfour’s was more genuine). When Macmillan’s performance worked, it was brilliant and effective, allowing him to drag the Conservatives from the doldrums of Suez to an emphatic, feel-good election win in two and a half years. But by the time he resigned in the autumn of 1963, it looked threadbare and exposed, and the sense of play-acting, of being something he was not, hung over his memoirs.
His successor was perhaps cut from the same tweed cloth but the result was utterly different. Sir Alec Douglas-Home was a Scottish aristocrat with deep roots in the Borders, his home at the Hirsel outside Coldstream only just over the boundary between England and Scotland. He had succeeded as the 14th Earl of Home in 1951, and in 1960 had been appointed foreign secretary, initially to some scepticism, but had proved a shrewd and capable minister. In the leadership chaos sparked by Macmillan’s resignation, he had disclaimed his peerage, been elected to the House of Commons for Kinross and West Perthshire and spent a year as prime minister before being narrowly defeated in the 1964 election. Although he stepped down as party leader the following year, he served a second term as foreign secretary in 1970-74, and it was not until 1976 that he wrote his memoirs.
The Way The Wind Blows: An Autobiography brilliantly captures its author’s spirit. A slim volume of 300 pages, barely registering against Macmillan’s leviathan, it is modest, unassuming, witty and perceptive. More than anything, it is suffused by a personality which, unlike any other British leader of the 20th century, did not need professional success or acclaim, yet sought office—and sought it successfully—out of an instinctive sense of duty. Home was summed up in a memorandum Macmillan wrote to the Queen to help her choose a new prime minister:
“Lord Home is clearly a man who represents the old governing class at its best… He is not ambitious in the sense of wanting to scheme for power, although not foolish enough to resist honour when it comes to him… He gives that impression by a curious mixture of great courtesy, and even if yielding to pressure, with underlying rigidity on matters of principle.”
The book was a bestseller, and if critics suggested that Home equated a political career with his beloved country pursuits of shooting and fishing, then perhaps they were not far off. Published as it was in the mid-1970s, with Britain seemingly in the grip of dysfunctional crisis and feeling as if it were “ungovernable”, it was a quietly reassuring reminder that old virtues of service, duty, decency and honesty still existed.
Harold Wilson is the last prime minister to hold office for two separate periods, from 1964 to 1970 and again from 1974 to 1976. Like Macmillan, he was a performer, though Wilson’s persona was a conscious reaction against the grouse moor Tories which Macmillan or ‘Supermac’ represented. Wilson was modern, scientifically minded, middle-class, a reliable and relatable pipe-smoker with a pronounced Yorkshire accent and (supposedly) pedestrian tastes. He was also fearsomely clever and an inveterate schemer.
From the beginning of his political career in 1945, he wrote extensively on technocratic policy issues like coal, railways and inflation as well as publishing several collections of speeches. But he produced two volumes setting out his version of his premiership: The Labour Government 1964-70: A Personal Record (1971) was a vast and exhaustive work of 1,000 pages, written almost immediately after he left office and an attempt to create order and purpose from the fissiparous and often internecine events of 1960s Labour; Final Term: The Labour Government 1974-76 (1979) was, like the administration it described, a thinner, more insubstantial book, over which hung a sense of exhaustion and disappointment. His narrative of his time in office has elements of honesty and self-criticism, but the overwhelming sense of the 1964-70 account is of the crushing accumulation of detail, as if Wilson, a trained statistician, could not bear to leave anything out.
In 1986, Wilson penned an additional volume, Memoirs: The Making of a Prime Minister 1916-64, a little more than 200 pages and not, as was long supposed, ghostwritten. By the time it appeared, however, Wilson was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and had faded from public view almost entirely; it is strange to think he lived to see Tony Blair become leader of the Labour Party, so distant do they seem from each other.
Edward Heath, the Conservative prime minister for barely four years from 1970 to 1974, was perhaps even less suited to leadership than Eden. He was cold, outwardly unemotional, self-righteous, impatient and, often, appallingly rude. Yet he was a man with wide and varied interests, a gifted musician who had won an organ scholarship to Oxford and an accomplished yachtsman. It was his “hinterland”, to use Edna Healey’s phrase, that supplied him with the inspiration for four books in rapid succession after he left office: Sailing: A Course of My Life (1975), Music: A Joy for Life (1976), Travels: People and Places in My Life (1977) and The Joy of Christmas: A Selection of Carols (1977). The first three of these earned him £300,000, proving the attraction of a prime ministerial name on a dust jacket.
A considered account of his political career had to wait, not least because he remained in the House of Commons for more than 25 years after being forced out as leader of the Conservative Party and came, in some truculent way, to relish his status as a thorn in Margaret Thatcher’s side. Eventually, however, in 1998 he published The Course of My Life: My Autobiography, a substantial work at around 750 pages if hardly on the scale of Macmillan or Churchill. In its obituary, The Daily Telegraph noted waspishly that his memoirs “involved dozens of researchers and writers (some of whom he never paid) over many years”. Its fundamental story was fascinating and important, from Heath’s early awareness of the threat of Nazi Germany in the 1930s through every major political development from 1950 onwards and his insights were valuable. But there was an inherent limitation in the autobiography of a politician who never seemed to be able to admit fault and nursed Herculean grudges. Moreover, by waiting so long to produce the book, he guaranteed that it was of largely historical interest, detailing old battles and crises like Suez, Profumo and the three-day week more than a year into the first Blair government.
Jim Callaghan, who succeeded Harold Wilson and was prime minister for only three years losing the only general election he fought as leader of the Labour Party, waited until 1987 to write a surprisingly hefty autobiography of nearly 600 pages, entitled Time and Chance. If his premiership had been brief, he had enjoyed a long political career in total, the only person to occupy the four great offices of state (prime minister, chancellor, foreign secretary and home secretary), and when he stepped down from the House of Commons that year, he had been an MP for 42 years and was Father of the House.
Margaret Thatcher was the first prime minister since Pitt the Younger to hold power for a whole discrete decade – the 1980s. Her premiership was revolutionary and epochal, and her sense of mission made it inevitable she would put pen to paper after leaving office. It was equally inevitable she would not, like Callaghan or Heath, wait very long. Significantly, regarding her early career as essentially a prelude to her premiership, she first wrote an account of her zenith in The Downing Street Years (1993), more than 800 pages of reiteration rather than reflection. In a sign of the times, it was accompanied by an award-winning four-part BBC documentary, and it showed that Thatcher had few regrets but still harboured enormous resentment at the circumstances of her fall: “It was treachery with a smile on its face,” she told the camera with venomous disdain for her former colleagues. In 1995, the shorter and more workmanlike The Path to Power was released, but it was her time in Number 10 which was the main event.
Growing tales
In publishing her memoirs, Thatcher had to accommodate two factors which had been much less significant for her predecessors. The first was the boundless growth in ministerial recollections: by the 1980s and 1990s, it seemed almost expected that anyone who had reached cabinet rank would be able to justify an autobiography. Some threw useful and revealing light on the way government worked, but others were entirely forgettable. By the mid-1990s, as well as those who had held the highest offices, cabinet ministers including Cecil Parkinson, Norman Tebbit, Norman Fowler, Lord Young of Graffham, Peter Walker, Jim Prior, Ian Gilmour and Nicholas Ridley had all written autobiographies. So too had backbenchers like Julian Critchley and Sir Anthony Meyer, and middle-ranking former ministers like Rhodes Boyson and Edward du Cann. Publications like Hard Labour: The Political Diary of Robert Kilroy-Silk (1986) suggested that saturation point was drawing near.
The second element was the growing popularity of politicians’ diaries, which were distinct from autobiographies in presenting themselves as contemporaneous and somehow more authentic, more honest and representative of the moment in which they were written. It was Harold Wilson’s Labour cabinet of 1964-70 which really kickstarted the trend: former housing minister Richard Crossman’s three-volume Diaries of a Cabinet Minister (1975-77) exposed some of Whitehall’s secrets to a new audience, and were followed by Barbara Castle’s massive and painstaking The Castle Diaries, 1974-1976 (1980) and The Castle Diaries, 1964-1970 (1984) and Tony Benn’s nine volumes of diaries between 1987 and 2013.
In 1993, Alan Clark, a frustrated middle-ranking minister who had just stepped down as Conservative MP for Plymouth Sutton, reinvented the genre with his catty, perceptive and shockingly indiscreet Diaries covering the period between 1983 and 1992; these were followed posthumously by Diaries: Into Politics 1972-1982 (2000) and Diaries: The Last Diaries 1993-1999 (2002). Similar publications from intelligent and interesting but second-order political figures would follow: Conservative MP and television celebrity Gyles Brandreth, MP for North Durham and cerebral observer of the Treasury Giles Radice, Labour minister and select committee chairman Chris Mullin and short-lived Blairite loyalist Oona King.
By the mid-1990s, then, the ecosystem of political recollections had changed substantially. A prime minister still carried an imprimatur of authority—no serious student of post-war British politics would leave Thatcher’s memoirs unread—but with the sheer profusion of volumes, the currency had changed subtly from information to interpretation. What Churchill had promised half-jokingly was now absolutely true: prime ministers and other senior politicians had to write the history if they wanted to control how they were remembered. And timescales were shortening.
Playing a major key
John Major, who led the country from 1990 to 1997 and won an unexpected general election in 1992, followed Thatcher’s example in self-memorialisation if not, to her chagrin, in policy terms. Only three years after he was swept out of Downing Street, he published a huge volume, John Major: The Autobiography (1999). He not only wanted to explain his premiership but also, again like Thatcher, vent his anger at those who had made it more difficult, in his case the Eurosceptic wing of the Conservative Party which had tortured him over the Maastricht Treaty.
There was also a piercingly personal element. Major had grown up in easily the most deprived circumstances of any Conservative leader before or since: his father was a 63-year-old former music hall entertainer by then selling garden ornaments, while his mother was a librarian and part-time dance teacher. When he was born in 1943, the family was, in Major’s phrase, “comfortable but not well off”, but by the early 1950s, his father’s health was failing and his business was in decline. When a business loan was called in in 1955, the family sold their house in Worcester Park in Surrey and moved into a small rented top-floor flat in Brixton, and the straitened circumstances took their toll on Major’s academic performance at Rutlish School. He left education just before his 16th birthday with only three O-levels passes, to the great dismay of his parents.
The BBC had commissioned a three-part profile of the former prime minister, The Major Years, which was screened to coincide with the publication of his autobiography. As he would write, his early life had marked him deeply, and the interviews betray a sensitive man still nursing raw wounds.
“My parents always hoped and expected a great deal of me, and when they were alive, I didn’t deliver any of that. For a range of circumstances I never settled down at the school, I didn’t like the school, I didn’t work at the school. I wasn’t particularly a trouble maker but I was pretty alienated from the system there and I left school with a miserable academic record that must have, given their expectations, have been quite heart-breaking for them. Through sheer idleness and disinterest and a determination almost not to conform at school, I let them down. When I went home with those dreadful examination failures, when they knew I should have passed and I knew I should have passed, even then there was no reproach. You could see the hurt at the failure, but there was no reproach. I realised then that I just had to do better in future.”
Major’s enduring pain is obvious in the interview, and almost unbearable to watch. But the television series and his autobiography revealed so much of a prime minister which the voters had simply not seen when he was in office. His public image—his caricature—had been the grey, boring puppet of Spitting Image fame, the man who, in Steve Bell’s enduring Guardian cartoons, wore his underpants over his trousers, and who, it was quipped with a nod to his father’s former profession, “ran away from the circus to become an accountant”.
The truth was that he had overcome genuine hardship and privation unknown even to Edward Heath’s modest background, starting with no qualifications but gradually hauling himself up the ladder of promotion in the financial sector with District Bank and then Standard Bank; he worked briefly in Nigeria, won election to Lambeth Council in 1968, completed an AIB diploma in banking and acted as assistant to the bank’s chairman, former chancellor Lord Barber. This was autobiography as revelation to an unusually acute degree.
The book attracted some very favourable reviews. Kenneth Baker, who had served as Major’s first home secretary, called it “a balanced book from a balanced man”, and described it as “John Major’s attempt to influence the muse so that when he comes to be sieved he will not fall into the group of the less successful prime ministers of the twentieth century, alongside Balfour, Chamberlain and Eden”. In The Daily Telegraph, Bruce Anderson hailed it as “the finest government memoir since Nigel Lawson’s” and often “deeply moving”. Even Roy Jenkins, the archpriest of centrism, admitted it fell “well within the higher range of political pièces justificatives”. It went on to outsell similar volumes by Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson and Spice Girl Geri Halliwell, which perhaps showed at last a nation at ease with itself.
Box office Blair
Tony Blair’s record of his premiership was always destined to be box office of a different order. Like Thatcher and Major, he wasted little time: stepping down as prime minister (and a Member of Parliament) in June 2007, he started writing quickly, and in March 2010 Random House Group announced that its Hutchinson imprint would publish A Journey that September. Gail Rebuck, chairman and chief executive of Random House (and wife of Philip Gould, Blair’s polling guru), predicted that the book would “break new ground in prime ministerial memoirs just as Blair himself broke the mould of British politics”.
The publisher had agreed an advance of £4.6 million with Blair, but the former prime minister announced before the book came out that he would donate not just the advance but all royalties to the Royal British Legion’s Battle Back project to build a rehabilitation centre for injured service personnel. In an interview, Blair conceded “You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t feel both a sense of responsibility and a deep sadness for those who have lost their lives. That responsibility stays with me now, and will stay with me for the rest of my life.” It was perhaps stereotypically Blairite to find a “third way” between the book being a commercial success and a flop.
A Journey deals with the period between Blair’s election as leader of the Labour Party in 1994 and his resignation as prime minister in 2007. Readers wanted his definitive stance on a number of issues: the modernisation of the party, his relationship with Gordon Brown, the Northern Ireland peace process and, above all, the intertwined invasion of Iraq in 2003 and his personal dealings with President George W. Bush. Blair gave little ground on any of it. He and his chancellor were “a couple who loved each other, arguing over whose career should come first”, but Brown was a “strange guy” with “zero” emotional intelligence.
This must have stung Brown, who had lost the general election and resigned as prime minister only four months before A Journey was published. Blair ground salt into the wound by arguing that the election loss was directly linked to Brown’s abandoning the principles on which the previous successes had been built.
“I won three elections. Up to then, Labour had never even won two successive full terms. The longest Labour government had lasted six years. This lasted 13. It could have gone on longer, had it not abandoned New Labour.”
On Iraq, Blair was—and is—unrepentant. Military action by the United States and the United Kingdom was essential because Saddam Hussein “had not abandoned the strategy of WMD [weapons of mass destruction], merely made a tactical decision to put it into abeyance”, and he wrote that he would make the same decision again under the same circumstances. He admitted that lack of planning had made the post-conflict period a “nightmare”, and he expressed deep sympathy with the families of those who had been killed in the military operation.
“I feel desperately sorry for them, sorry for the lives cut short, sorry for the families whose bereavement is made worse by the controversy over why their loved ones died, sorry for the utterly unfair selection that the loss should be theirs.”
That Blair resiled from nothing should hardly have been a surprise, as it was no more his style than it had been Margaret Thatcher’s. Andrew Rawnsley, writing in The Observer, allowed that A Journey was “a more honest political memoir than most and more open in many respects than I had anticipated”, but nevertheless maintained that Balir was “slippery on inconvenient facts and passes over issues that are too painful to confront. He is not always reliable about either chronology or detail. Events and relationships are sanitised.” Julian Glover in The Guardian was savage.
“A book written as if in a dream—or a nightmare; a literary out-of-body experience. By turns honest, confused, memorable, boastful, fitfully endearing, important, lazy, shallow, rambling and intellectually correct, it scampers through the last two decades like a trashy airport read… one consequence was Iraq, to which he devotes long and uninformative chapters. Suffice it to know that Blair thinks he was right and the war on terror both real and continuous. He won’t persuade unbelievers on this.”
Blair’s autobiography was not a book which would persuade. By the time of the Iraq War, Blair himself was no longer a figure who dealt in persuasion: loyalists would remain true believers, while critics saw the former leader as irretrievably steeped in wrongdoing. But it was the smash hit Rebuck had predicted, becoming Waterstones’s fastest selling autobiography ever and topping Amazon’s best-seller list. The bookseller’s political buyer argued that A Journey transcended its genre, and had to be considered in the same context as novels by J.K. Rowling or Dan Brown to understand its success and appeal.
Gordon Brown was more patient than Blair, and more patient than he had ever been in anticipating the premiership. Unlike Blair, he stayed in the House of Commons for the rest of the parliament after leaving Downing Street, though he rarely attended or spoke, and he conducted a kind of dress rehearsal for a memoir by writing Beyond the Crash: Overcoming the First Crisis of Globalisation in 14 weeks. Published in December 2010, it was a modestly sized volume which examined the global financial crisis of 2007-08 and drew out lessons for avoiding such a set of circumstances occurring again. It was a sensible and cautious start to creating his legacy, as Brown’s handling of the crisis was widely regarded as his finest hour as prime minister.
Brown stepped down as an MP in 2015, and his autobiography, My Life, Our Times, was released in November 2017. By then, of course, a Conservative government was struggling to find a way to a Brexit deal, and Brown’s premiership seemed more than a mere seven years distant. George Parker of The Financial Times noted the difference between Brown’s book and its comparators, saying he had “resisted the usual pressures to produce an instant memoir” and “resists the temptation to engage in much gossip either”. Several reviewers remarked on the heavy seriousness of Brown’s book, but Brown, unlike any prime minister since Wilson, had begun life as an academic; he had undertaken doctoral research at the University of Edinburgh, writing a thesis entitled “The Labour Party and Political Change in Scotland 1918–1929”, and had published a biography of the Glasgow Independent Labour Party legend James Maxton in 1986.
Although Brown had allowed his earlier book on the financial crisis to steal some of My Life, Our Times’s thunder, it was an important part of his self-portrait as a statesman of international standing. It almost took him out of the world in which his predecessors and successors were moving, distancing himself from party politics and instead portraying a philosopher and policy heavyweight. He reinforced this with Seven Ways to Change the World: How To Fix The Most Pressing Problems We Face (2021) and Permacrisis: A Plan to Fix a Fractured World (2023), quasi-academic treatises addressing global political challenges.
New records
If David Cameron had been “one of the ablest” undergraduates his tutor, Vernon Bogdanor, had encountered, with an acute intellect which gained him an exhibition to Brasenose College, Oxford, and a first-class degree in philosophy, politics and economics, the Conservative prime minister was nonetheless far from Brown’s glowering academic seriousness. After his unexpected resignation in 2016 following the Brexit referendum, he quickly agreed an £800,000 contract with HarperCollins UK to write a “frank” and “tell-all” account of his premiership which would explain his policy choices and be open about “what worked and what didn’t”. It was initially expected to appear in 2018.
Although Cameron treated himself to a £25,000 designer shed in which he could write, the publication was delayed because he was anxious not to seem as if he was interfering with his successor Theresa May’s ongoing Brexit negotiations. For The Record was eventually published in September 2019, just before the Conservative Party annual conference, by which time May too had left Downing Street and had been replaced by Boris Johnson.
Cameron’s memoir had been somewhat pre-empted by former Conservative Party treasurer Lord Ashcroft and his writing partner Isabel Oakeshott, who had brought out an “unauthorised” biography of the former prime minister, Call Me Dave, in 2015. Ashcroft now habitually rushes out cut-and-paste profiles of political figures when they achieve a certain degree of prominence—Jacob Rees-Mogg, Rishi Sunak, Sir Keir Starmer, Carrie Johnson, Angela Rayner, Kemi Badenoch—and they are generally unenlightening and flimsy, though sometimes glittering with unfamiliar gossip. They are not meant as long-term contributions to historiography, but they can make the weather against which more serious volumes have to struggle. In the case of Call Me Dave, almost all of the oxygen was consumed by an uncorroborated story that Cameron, as part of an initiation ritual for the Piers Gaveston Society at Oxford, had put his penis in the mouth of a pig’s head. There has never been any proof that it is more than fabrication, but it endures in the public consciousness.
For The Record was appropriately weighty: while no prime minister has approached Macmillan’s daunting six volumes, its 752 pages stand comparison with Blair, Major and Thatcher. More than establishing Cameron’s narrative of his time in Downing Street, it was actively intended as a corrective to what he thought were misleading impressions, hence the title of the book. In particular it sought to explain his decision to hold a referendum on the United Kingdom’s membership of the European Union, which had seemed logical enough when set against the assumption that voters would choose to remain; given the narrow result in favour of leaving, however, it was clear that the process had brought Cameron’s premiership to an abrupt end.
The novelist Robert Harris, writing in The Times, was sharply critical of For The Record’s self-justifying nature. Although he granted that it was “not bad by the standards of the genre”, he said that it “could hardly be worse timed. It is as if Stanley Baldwin, another quintessential Tory leader, had published his memoirs at the height of the Blitz.” It is hard not to see Harris’s review as suffused with a desperate loathing of Brexit. Other voices were more approving of the book; John Rentoul in The Independent called it “easy to read, with some nice self-deprecating touches”. Philip Johnston’s review for The Daily Telegraph rated it “well-written and lucid”, and described Cameron’s account of the death of’s account of the death of his as “heartbreaking”.
What is striking is how likeable many found Cameron through his authorship of his memoirs. Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian admitted it “reminds you why Cameron dominated British politics for so long. The prose is, like him, smooth and efficient.” His biographer, James Hanning, argued in the i that For The Record “displays all the sensitivity and communication skills he showed in office”. And yet, like Thatcher and Blair before him, there was a sense that Cameron was making few converts. This was perhaps a reflection of a political culture which was becoming more polarised, and of a strand of opinion among Remainers that Brexit was an unforgivable folly and an original sin, and that the man who had enabled it—even if he had wanted to remain within the EU—could never be readmitted to polite society.
Told in Brexit’s shadow
As we wait for Boris Johnson’s memoirs to burst upon the political landscape, it is interesting that his predecessor and successor, Theresa May and Liz Truss, have both written books since leaving office but neither has produced a conventional memoir. (It is true that it is only five years since May resigned, and only two since Truss was forced out of Downing Street.) Instead, though they have little enough else in common, each has chosen to write a policy prescription-cum-warning which is inevitably informed by the experience of being prime minister.
Theresa May’s The Abuse of Power: Confronting Injustice in Public Life, published in September 2023, examines the way in which public institutions, and those who run them, use and misuse power. May analyses the police’s response to the Hillsborough disaster, the Windrush scandal, the Grenfell Tower fire, the sexual exploitation of children in Rotherham, the Post Office Horizon IT scandal and the misuse of stop-and-search powers and tries to understand why human beings, at every point, made unethical and immoral but often defensive decisions rather than doing the right thing. In the introduction, she reminds readers that on taking office in July 2016 she “pledged to fight against the burning injustices in our country”, describing her “mission to make Britain a country that works for everyone”.
No-one doubted at any point that May was a politician of sincerity and high moral purpose, stemming in part from her religious convictions and her childhood as the daughter of a clergyman. Some of her lessons sit uneasily, however, especially the Windrush scandal which had its origins in her long stint as home secretary from 2010 to 2016 and unfolded when she was prime minister. She also conflates abuse of power with what many regarded as legitimate political tactics, especially over Brexit. Andrew Rawnsley described the inclusion of Brexit alongside the other scandals as “repulsive”, while Tom Peck, writing in The Independent, called the book “an abuse of reality”.
The moralising framework of the book was a mistake. No doubt May honestly felt it was justified, but in a way few of her predecessors, however fervent, had done, she sought to disengage disagreements over policy from everyday politics and instead cast them in a Manichaean light, forcing issues like Brexit into a judgemental context which was bound to infuriate and insult those who held different beliefs. In a sense, though, the book was an avatar for May’s personality and style of leadership: dedicated, sober and virtuous, she was nevertheless utterly lacking in the ability to communicate this effectively to supporters, let alone waverers or doubters. She simply lacked the capacity to lead.
There is a strong echo of this in Liz Truss’s recent work, Ten Years to Save the West: Lessons from the only conservative in the room. Covering her ministerial career, which was long but never involved serving in a job for more than two and a half years, the book is an apologia stripped bare of artifice or modesty. As she demonstrates in the text and has made clear repeatedly since its publication, she admits virtually no faults during her brief, 49-day premiership nor in her previous ministerial roles. To a degree which is alarming even in politics, Truss is devoid of self-awareness or any capacity or desire for reflection. When her plans did not succeed, it was because they were thwarted, either by incompetent individuals or by a malign “deep state”, a theme she has warmed to as she sees a potentially profitable future in American conservatism’s more paranoid waters.
Truss’s strange, defiant book has been controversial. Although she shared a draft of the text with the Cabinet Office, it was not fully approved, a spokesman saying “we did not agree to the final wording. So the author is in breach of the Radcliffe Rules.” Under the terms of the Ministerial Code, the Radcliffe Rules, drawn up in 1976, prohibit the disclosure of content likely to damage the United Kingdom’s national security or diplomatic relations and which is contrary to the confidentiality of government business. In particular, officials felt that Truss’s descriptions of her conversations with the late Queen Elizabeth II were a clear breach of these rules.
Moreover it is a very bad, poorly argued book. It was described by critics as “physically incapable of self-reflection or awareness of any sort” (Matt Chorley), “brilliantly presumptive” (Tim Stanley), “faintly deluded” and “a blatant rewriting of history” (Gaby Hinsliff) and “impossible to read”, “the sort of bracing polemic one would expect from a politician now marooned far adrift of establishment respectability” and full of “conspiratorialism, bluster and blame” (Patrick Maguire). Never have a prime minister’s reflections on Downing Street been so comprehensively ridiculed.
The Johnson Job
Where does this leave Boris Johnson and the forthcoming Unleashed? It is bound to be better written than Truss’s volume: whether or not his style appeals to you, Johnson thinks carefully about the words he uses and the way he constructs his prose, though his journalism sometimes carried an air of last-minute essay crisis. Nor is it likely to be as superficially eccentric. He is a smooth and practised liar—although he would probably describe it as being divergent from the strict letter of the actualité—but he rarely appears as distant from reality as his successor.
On the other hand, it will almost certainly be a punchy attempt to frame a positive narrative and create a legacy. Johnson is thin-skinned and minds criticism, and has a petulant sense that he has been denied credit for what he sees as his achievements in office. He will dwell on the speed with which the UK developed and distributed a Covid-19 vaccine; he will emphasise his early and staunch support for Ukraine and for President Volodymyr Zelenskyy; and he will point to the fact that he “got Brexit done”. In short, he will echo Shelley’s Ozymandias: “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
We should not expect any of the revelations or personal reflections which made the memoirs of David Cameron, Gordon Brown and John Major both insightful and unexpectedly moving. That is not how Johnson was raised or educated, nor is it part of his self-image.
That is a shame, because those surprising details are one of the virtues of modern prime ministerial autobiographies. The main purpose, now, more than it ever was, is self-justification: setting out in favourable terms the case for the defence. That is still of interest both to contemporary readers and to historians, but we should reflect on a shift in emphasis. When departed premiers produce memoirs, it is no longer a summation of their achievements and challenges in office, but rather a portrait of how they wish to be perceived, and how they perceive themselves.
Maybe in a culture of “fake news”, “alternative facts” and “the big lie”, that is all we can hope for. These volumes will always matter—you would not set aside an eyewitness account of any significant event, let alone that of someone at the heart of it—but they have to be weighed and evaluated, and will often tell us more about the author than the account being given.
Image top – 27/04/2020. London, United Kingdom. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson gives a statement outside 10 Downing Street, as he returns to work following recovering from Coronavirus at Chequers. Picture by Pippa Fowles / No 10 Downing Street.
