Où les électeurs voient un homme de caractère qui peut les guider, ses amis ou ennemis voient surtout le danger de donner le pouvoir à une star peu fiable. 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 . If you happen to be a Johnson fan, this book will provide you with all the confirmation bias you need. There have been books on Johnson before, some fawning, some full of spite, I was hoping for something in between, a genuine look at the man, his politics and his complicated personal life.

Anyway, it is probably churlish to dwell on the bits I didn't like that much, and overall this is a thorough examination of the Prime Minister's life with a warts-and-all approach that seems to be well-evidenced as well as readable. The narrative then peters out in mid-2020, presumably when his publisher was demanding the final manuscript.

Overall, this is a disappointing read, and perhaps I should have paid more attention to the fact that all the quotes on the front are from right wing newspapers or commentators.

He rarely mentions Corbyn, the former Labour Party leader, without describing him as "the anti-Semitic Marxist". And how the foreign office people do whatever they can to boycott and sabotage their boss, when Johnson is foreign secretary.However, having read his book on Corbyn last year, Johnson comes out slightly better from the Bower treatment - especially over his time as mayor of London. There are some new nuggets – I’d happily have read more about Johnson’s fisticuffs with George Osborne when the two men were in a lift together during a visit to China – and some useful insights. Revelatory, unsettling and compulsively readable, it is the most timely and indispensable book yet from Britain's leading investigative biographer. I definitely feel as though I know Boris better, but would have preferred for the book to be slightly more streamlined! Ce livre est non seulement distrayant, mais un must si on veut comprendre ce qui s’est réellement passé au Royaume-Uni ces dernières décennies.

Johnson's continuous struggle against established institutions such as the BBC and NHS are also very enlightening and make him more sympathetic to me. Sure, when he was the Telegraph’s correspondent in Brussels, serving up comedy EU tales of bureaucrats dictating the right size of a condom or the correct curvature of a banana, his colleagues believed he was a charlatan and a liar, making stuff up, but Bower says they were “an undistinguished pack” and, after all, who remembers any of them? Bower vaguely tries to place the blame of Johnson’s considerable personal failings at the door of an abusive childhood but this theme barely makes it past the introduction as Stanley barely makes an appearance in the narrative. A Sunday Times Book of the YearA Times Book of the YearA Guardian Book of the YearA Telegraph Book of the Year'EXPLOSIVE.

Gammon and spin-age: I wanted to read a biog of our Lord and master that might uncover whether there is any substance beneath the contrived meejah image, but Tom Bower’s The Gambler isn’t it. That said, there are one or two amusing anecdotes revealing the depth of Johnson’s rivalry with David Cameron and his disdain for the acolyte George Osborne - such as his having initiated fisticuffs with each of them during the coalition years and their having to be pulled off by aides (fnarr fnarr), or Boris’s text on the morning of the 2015 general election: “good luck Dave and if you bog it up I’m standing by to fill the gap! But what makes the book very interesting is the description of all political contradictions, not only between the parties but also within the party.