If the reign of Bad King Boris looked dreadful from the outside, it was even more diabolical viewed from the inside. This is an authoritative, gripping and often jaw-dropping account of the bedlam behind the black door of Number 10 and it confirms that we did not really have a government during his trashy reign. It was an anarchy presided over by a fervently frivolous, frantically floundering and deeply decadent lord of misrule.
As Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell relate it, never in modern times has the premiership been occupied by someone so fundamentally unfit to hold the office. That may not be a wholly original observation, but the great merit of their account is the weight of evidence they marshal to support the contention that Johnson was an utterly incapable prime minister. The authors say they have gathered testimony from more than 200 witnesses, a lot of them officials and aides, “the silent voices of those who will never publish memoirs and diaries”. While this necessarily means that a lot of the sourcing is anonymous, it all rings horribly true.
