It was my own fault really. I shouldn’t have read BoJo’s book when my opinion of the man himself had crashed to an all-time low. After his nakedly careerist pro-Brexit leadership and the resultant shivving by the even more awful Michael Gove, the Johnson joke just isn’t funny anymore.



Unpleasantly, both the narrative voice of this ‘comic’ novel about a botched terrorist attack on Parliament and Boris’ protagonist-by-proxy (a bumptious, bicycling MP whose personal peccadillos are apparently due to

It was my own fault really. I shouldn’t have read BoJo’s book when my opinion of the man himself had crashed to an all-time low. After his nakedly careerist pro-Brexit leadership and the resultant shivving by the even more awful Michael Gove, the Johnson joke just isn’t funny anymore.



Unpleasantly, both the narrative voice of this ‘comic’ novel about a botched terrorist attack on Parliament and Boris’ protagonist-by-proxy (a bumptious, bicycling MP whose personal peccadillos are apparently due to hit the papers any second – wherever did he come up with a character like that?) throw off casually racist lines and lines of thought that say a lot about a man who so famously called black foreigners “picaninnies” in 2002.



Boris (the novelist) seems completely confused that anyone ‘dark’ could have a Welsh accent while one of his characters encounters a group of “asylum-seeking” bricklayers (asylum seekers were then, and still are, banned from working while seeking asylum). Roger Barlow (the MP) sees non-whites and immediately decides they’re asylum seeking windscreen washers. More than once, asylum seekers are conflated with “aliens”. Literal aliens from other planets.



And that underhanded, creeping snarkiness about modern society (remember this was published in 2004 when Labour were in charge) doesn’t stop with his apparent obsession with asylum seekers. In Boris’ telling, Key Stage 1 consists of nothing more than gluing things onto paper (complete and utter flapdoodle, that) and the people who do such diligent work in vetting prospective parents for adoption have the “chilly hearts of the adoptocrats.” Not really. They just try and make sure children who’ve often had a horrendous start in life are placed with decent families.



What a bunch of bastards, eh?



At the time of publication, Boris was a year or so away from being made Shadow Minister for Higher Education, a job he breezily went about with no real understanding of the issues – I know because I went and saw him speak at Keele University in 2006 where any vaguely tough questions were blustered aside with his flummoxed stutterings and gesticulations.



Given his slapdash approach to things he’s being paid large sums of money to do, I suppose it’s unsurprising he makes such fundamental errors as referring to ‘the Battle of Kosovo Pole’ instead of Polje (‘the field of the blackbirds’). Yes, Boris – who is now Foreign Secretary, remember - seems to have been under the impression that hundreds of years of Serb/Kosovan antipathy was down to a row about a metal stick.



Yes, yes, yes, I know this is a comic novel, not a serious study of European history. But it’s not hard to get stuff like this right is it? Really? The fact so much of this survived the editing and publication process suggest there was more of it to begin with and that no one involved was particular bothered.



The publishers’ blurb on the back makes much of supposed comparisons to Ben Elton and Stephen Fry’s books. I’ve read a few of each and both of them are a) significantly funnier and b) don’t litter their books with factually incorrect twaddle or such pompous, ill-placed gibberish as this (“… he wasn’t a genuine akratic. Maybe it would be more accurate to say he had a Thanatos urge.”) Not even Stephen Fry gets this arcane. Or at least when he does, he makes it both relevant to the story and understandable to the reader.



That said, the book has moments of real, and successful, humour. Boris is clearly a funny, well-educated man. His Jihadis have a habit of cursing in poetic terms that are always amusing. And their inclusion of a British convert for reasons of “… tokenism… political correctness gone mad”, despite him having “absorbed far too much of the risk-aversion of the modern British male” is almost inspired. He details a shrubbery-and-cheese-inspired feud between neighbours in terms that genuinely raise a smile and are – refreshingly for this book – grounded in some kind of realism.



But things really fall apart once the terrorist plot is in full swing. The absurdity and unreality of it all comes, not from the bumbling of the terrorists, but from Boris’ snide comments and inability to properly plot things out.



*** SPOILERS***



Two things are particularly unbelievable. Firstly, in the aftermath of everything, ONE OF THE TERRORISTS is simply left as “no one took much notice of” him. WHAT? Throw in absurd characters who go pantomime-and-then-some (the television chef is presumably there because some real life chef or other had criticized Boris at some point) and the downright insulting claim (repeated more than once) that people whose lives are dedicated to saving others always think first about the career implications of what they’re about to do and the final third of the book is a complete fiasco.



And finally, the most appalling insult of all, and one I picked up on early and was desperately hoping he wouldn’t follow through to the bitter, unfunny end, Boris outright steals a gag from PG Wodehouse about the name ‘Eulalie’. Shamelessly opportunistic, lazy and fundamentally sleazy - the book that is, not Boris. I think.