One of Churchill’s opponents in Parliament said of him, “He wins debate after debate but loses battle after battle,” and Johnson seems to pile on with faint praise: “The British military performance wasn’t as bad as all that. I mean, how does one get elected in the UK if not by pandering? In Johnson’s telling, the Germans and Japanese are portrayed as having bellies fired to a higher temperature, while the risk-averse Brits cling to a crumbling empire by the skins of their stiff upper lips. He doesn’t use the phrase “greatest generation” once, nor any Limey equivalent. Johnson’s dissimilarities with our American politicians don’t end there however. He references Blake and Tennyson, tosses off words like amanuenses and desiderata while making it all seem conversational. He uses Britishisms like prang, tosser, blarney, barmy, twig (as a verb), strop and trowsty. Indeed, Johnson uses phrases like mini-me, perv, whacko, vamoosed, jefe and sex bomb. Even the title reads as if Robert Ludlum had turned to historical fiction, letting us know things will move fast without getting bogged down in footnotes or unjuicy details. His pre-political background is in journalism, which gives the writing here a distinct flair.

Johnson penned this work while serving as the mayor of London (and is a potential future Prime Minister himself). The Churchill Factor by Boris Johnson reveals how this latter version of Churchill morphed into the former.

This was Winston Churchill, the career politician with a long history of blunders, drunkenness, opportunism and egotism. Keep in mind, this wasn’t Winston Churchill, the infallible myth we read about in textbooks. Meanwhile, the UK stood nearly alone against the Nazi menace, and not everyone thought its new leader was up to the task. May 1940 might have been the most dire month of the entire 20th century: France was on the ropes, Stalin was allied with Hitler, America was in the thrall of isolationists.

The churchill factor