Well,” he says, “this is the reason why for the moment Starmer is disappointing, because there is this enormous desire for renewal. But Starmer seems micro when he could be macro, cautious when he could be passionate, dull where he could be inspirational.” An obvious lazy approach/clear avoidance of doing the tough boring work. Implementation, and strategy he avoided at all costs.

I think it also overestimates Johnson's role in the Ukrain war, giving him far too much credit. Many of us saw it as a way for him to escape from the reality of the mess he had made domestically and allow him to emulate Churchill. I can understand why his forthright stance made him popular in Ukraine, but how do we balance his actions against his close association with oligarchs and Russian money? Reading this is a sad experience. This is not to make a political point but to reflect how far Boris Johnson's tenure in 10 Downing Street fell short of the demands of office, which is why he fell so spectacularly from power after only three years.I doubt Johnson will have read it, but his wife Carrie will and probably realise that somewhere ahead a very damning account of her role in his downfall is coming. But of course it's Johnson alone who destroyed this premiership. A life built on lies and infidelity in all his relationships was bound to end in tears. Despite the fact that Liz Truss said, ‘Boris, you are admired from Kyiv to Carlisle’, to what extent was Truss loyal to him? How did Johnson play upstairs-downstairs between his Cabinet and his new wife, Carrie? To what extent did Johnson prefer infighting rather than coherent government? This book is truly an eye opener as to the inner workings of a government in crisis from the day Johnson came into power, a man in his own eyes who could do no wrong or make no wrong decisions, instead he was making them daily. History will not remember him kindly, nor should it, as I said in my first sentence we are a country now lower in world statistics in virtually all areas since Johnson was elected to power. The conservative party are still in disarray even though he has left. The next government whoever it may be has a very very long road to go down to bring us to where we were a decade or so ago, and with no extra money in the pot. I am now so disillusioned with government and democracy as I cannot see which political party can get us out of the mess that was Boris and take us forward. How did Johnson despise the Conservative Parliamentary Party with a number of his own MPs doubting he was a Conservative with his high-spending and interventionist views?

To the bitter end, he blamed everyone but himself for the implosion of his premiership. The authors are right to dismiss that as another of his fictions. Bad King Boris was dethroned because he was and always had been utterly unfit to wear the crown. It’s difficult to understand, at times, how this self centred egomaniac ended up as Prime Minister. Until one realises that without exception, every prevarication and wavering was a means to ensure that his own needs came first. Never mind what may be good for the country or the people, as long as Boris got what he wanted.At times reading & re-living some of this was unsettling. It reignited the fury, contempt, disgust & disbelief I felt at the time that a prime minister could behave so badly, lie so enthusiastically and lead so abysmally. I couldn’t understand how someone so clearly incapable (to me!) of effective leadership could become prime minister and this book helped me to understand how this seeming mystery came about. A myth peddled that he was the best leader given the toughest brief and any failures are to do with others (Trump often blames is failures on his predecessors). Evidence proves his personal floors were such even if he had become PM at the 1st time of asking, it would likely still have been a disaster. Johnson’s eventual solution to getting Brexit done as prime minister was to bring in Cummings to do the work that he had no appetite for, in the full knowledge that his chief adviser was a wholly destructive force. That, Seldon, suggests to me, was another first for British political leadership: Boris Johnson and wife Carrie on their final day in Downing Street. Photograph: Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty Images

Cummings was one of the few participants in that Downing Street and Whitehall farce who did not speak to Seldon. The author does not feel that the omission is significant, since Cummings has written so very much about this period, “and his footprints are over everything anyway. People will make their own judgments,” he says of what he discovered, “but I don’t think that it’s remotely unfair to Cummings or for that matter to Johnson.” The third is a moment in which Seldon and Newell analyse one of the elements in Johnson’s downfall. This is what they say:This is already long enough, but I was interested in personal glimpses of two people who I know a little and a third who I am fascinated by. I knew Martin Reynolds, the Principal Private Secretary to Johnson, when he was a mid-level diplomat in Brussels fifteen years ago. He is more capable than most officials, but was nonetheless out of his depth in the sheer awfulness of trying to manage the Johnson system. On the other hand, John Bew, Johnson’s main foreign policy advisor, is one of the few people to come out of the book looking good; he gave sound advice and wrote a substantive paper on UK global strategy post-Brexit. His father was a colleague of my father’s; I last saw John when he was about ten years old, and I’m glad he is doing well. He lied about Brexit. In particular he was happy to sacrifice the Good Friday Agreement, international treaties and mislead the Queen without ever having an oven ready plan for Brexit or the skills or ability to make one. There are a couple of points to be said in Johnson’s favour. He did win an election with a clear majority, which is a notable achievement even in the supposedly decisive British system (helped of course by the incompetence at the time of Labour and the Lib Dems). He was seriously committed to Net Zero, and was ready to argue the toss on climate with sceptics in his own party, though less good at doing the preparatory legwork for the Glasgow COP meeting. He came in early and strong on Ukraine’s side in the war, and helped consolidate the G7 and NATO in support. (Though there too, the UK is a smaller player compared to the US and the EU.) What proves that Johnson was never a Brexiteer with no clear or ambitious plan for a post-Brexit Britain?