All the fancy verbiage in the world cannot disguise the emptiness at the heart of this self-serving, solipsistic book

Written once their authors have lost power, most prime ministerial memoirs try at some level to be reflective. David Cameron’s begins by confessing that he still has daily anxieties about having called the Brexit referendum. John Major’s starts even more disarmingly, by wondering why he went into politics at all.

But Boris Johnson does not do reflective. He never has and he never will. And nor does his new memoir, with its unnerving title, Unleashed. It covers his time as London mayor, Brexit campaigner, foreign secretary and prime minister. But if it is heart-searching and confessions you seek from the pen of Britain’s most iconoclastic prime minister, you can stop now.

It wasn’t just the physical distress; it was the guilt, the political embarrassment of it all. I needed to be bee-oing-oing back on my feet like an india rubber ball. I needed to be out there, leading the country from the front, sorting the PPE, fixing the care homes, driving the quest for a cure.