Boris Johnson has published his memoirs Unleashed

Transcript

00:00I can imagine that many readers are still vaguely mystified about how I came to be Prime

00:07Minister, what possessed the Tory party to choose me. Remember, to the prune-lipped Pharisees

00:15of the UK establishment, I was the guy from some satirical TV game show, have I got news

00:21for you. I was the gaff-prone scandal-magnet who should have long since been excised like

00:29some benign but irritating polyp from the body politic. It was almost 20 years since

00:37the former Defence Secretary and media star Michael Portillo had written a column in the

00:43Sunday Times that announced, following one of my regular career disasters, that his political

00:51career is over. As a piece of political prophecy, this turned out to be premature by at least

00:59two decades, but it showed what people were thinking. I still treasure a piece by Simon

01:06Carr, then the Independence sketch-writer, who concluded at about the same time that

01:11the Tories will never recover until Boris Johnson leaves the stage. I expect that there

01:18were many Tories who agreed, secretly or openly. So what the hell happened? They say politics

01:27is all about timing, and of course that is true. But it is also about what you do to

01:34make your own luck, and to try to script the movie in which you vainly believe you are

01:41starring. Some people have a knack for being in the right place at the right time. They

01:47just happen to be under the tree when the apple plops into their lap. Some have to bash

01:54and bop at the base of the tree for an awfully long time, until the exhausted apple stalk

02:01can bear the weight no longer. I am definitely in the second category.