I felt that despite the warts and all approach, we are supposed to see Boris as a victim, misunderstood, even manipulated. And yet I couldn't avoid feeling a grudging respect for him at times, certainly in the way he was treated by civil servants when Foreign Secretary under Teresa May and some of the bad press he has received over his handling of the Covid pandemic. Photograph: Jessica Taylor/UK Parliament Handout/EPA View image in fullscreen Boris Johnson during a parliamentary session on Covid.

Critic after critic is dismissed as consumed by envy or pomposity — and yet where vision and empathy should be there is emptiness. Shocking is the description at the end of the Corona period, had Johnson himself not got Corona, he would have neglected it even longer. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.Bower portrays him as an absent father and violent husband, who punched his wife so hard he broke her nose. There are inaccuracies in this account but much that is written elsewhere on Covid is subjective in any case.

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. and Lady Hale is dismissed as ‘a family lawyer and administrator without any specialist knowledge of constitutional law’ (p. It goes from very one-sided information to something nearing fiction when the chapters about the pandemic start.After an argument about education, his first wife realises with horror: “Oh God, he’s got … no ideals. But what makes the book very interesting is the description of all political contradictions, not only between the parties but also within the party. His ruthless ambition was evident from his insistence, as a three-year-old, that he would one day be 'world king'. It’s very rare that I find a biography so hard to put down that I put away 300 pages in one weekend, but this one hit the spot!