Labour's Boris bashing driven by their psychotic Derangement Syndrome

'Twisted.' 'Shameless.' 'Fractured, venal, shallow.' 'Narcissistic.' 'A clown.' 'The sociopath's sociopath.'

These are some of the Leftie media’s more positive responses to Boris Johnson's new memoir Unleashed, which is published tomorrow. Although they're not actually a review of the book, so much as a review of the man himself.

The Guardian website currently contains no fewer than three separate analyses of the 700-page tome, a further precis of the key chapters and even a review of Johnson's interviews promoting the book. Each of them seeks to play the man, not the manuscript.

'The former prime minister's brazen memoir is in fact little more than the latest chapter in his bid to present himself as a Churchillian hero...

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

I've yet to read the complete book myself. But having sampled the extensive serialisation in the Mail, and spoken to those who have perused Unleashed with a less jaundiced eye, a couple of things are clear. 

Our former prime minister has produced an elegantly written, engaging record of his period in office. Sections are self-serving. Others need to be treated with a healthy degree of scepticism. But the same can be said about any political memoir.

Tony Blair's autobiography fails to properly confront the catastrophic invasion of Iraq, and the lies that attended it. John Major – whose administration became a byword for incompetence and sleaze – successfully used his own autobiography to recast himself as a benign elder statesman. 

Neither received a fraction of the opprobrium currently being dumped on Boris Johnson for his chronicling of plans for a madcap raid on the Dutch to snatch some Covid vaccine, or accepting a cake on his birthday during lockdown.

The reality is the publication of Unleashed has seen liberal antipathy towards Johnson morph into full -blown psychosis. A psychosis that in its own twisted way is starting to have a deleterious and dangerous impact on the wider Left, and its political worldview.

Over the past month, people in Westminster have been scratching their heads over the Wardrobegate scandal engulfing Keir Starmer and his government. 'How could they not see this coming?' the scribes and greybeards have inquired.

Part of the answer is simple. Boris Derangement Syndrome. Labour based so much of their strategy on defining themselves against the perceived perfidy of Boris Johnson they became blinded by their own self-righteousness. And in turn, blind to their own hypocrisy and malfeasance.

Keir Starmer sat in his suits paid for by Lord Alli, in the flat paid for by Lord Alli, sagely raised his glasses paid for by Lord Alli and intoned: 'Right, how are we going to keep exposing Boris and the Tories over cronyism and sleaze?'.

Speaking to Labour ministers, I have encountered genuine incredulity at the idea anyone would have the temerity to upbraid the current government for its own misconduct. 'Comparing Keir to Boris is just a false equivalence,' has become the line to take.

Why? What is the moral distinction between accepting a gift of clothes and a gift of wallpaper? How was the plotting, backstabbing and infighting surrounding Boris and his most senior aides a matter of major national interest, but similar dysfunctionality within Starmer's team is dismissed as a confection of a hostile press?

Why do those who kept assailing Johnson for opening fast lanes for his mates to access lucrative government contracts think it's defensible for Keir Starmer to open fast lanes by which his mates get access to No10 and lucrative government jobs?

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Again, the answer is BDS. The perception that whatever our new prime minister and government are doing is morally defensible because at least it's not Boris Johnson and his administration doing it.

'How can anyone say the sleaze under Keir and Labour is as bad as it was under Boris and the Tories,' I was asked last week. You can't. But that's only because Johnson was in office for three years, and his party a further 11 years. And Starmer has been in office for three months. And so far, the signs are not encouraging.

Everyone knows what Boris Johnson's faults are. We don't need his book – nor any hysterical and hyperbolic reviews of his book – to tell us. His estrangement from the truth eventually saw him run headlong into reality. And his insistence the nation shoulder the hardships of lockdown while he and his staff partied rightly led to his downfall.

But the picture being painted of Johnson by his enemies is now far more distorted than any he has attempted to paint himself. Far from being an extremist bigot, he was in fact a socially progressive one nation Tory, happy to embrace LGBT rights and environmental issues.

Instead of being a Thatcherite fundamentalist he presided over the highest taxation, public expenditure and public borrowing in post-war British history. 

He did a decent job protecting the nation from the physical and economic ravages of Covid, despite pressures from the Right of his party to resist lockdown and its associated costs. 

He pushed his Levelling Up programme with a flawed but genuine passion. And he avoided the foreign policy misadventures of his predecessors, while resisting the siren call of the isolationists.

And as Boris's detractors are so keen to proselytise, the truth does actually matter. Especially now.

We are venturing into treacherous political waters. 

Labour's promise of change has already been replaced by disillusionment. The Tory crisis remains an existential one. The bulldog of populism, in the form of Nigel Farage and his Reform insurgency, is snapping at the heels of the two main parties in the opinion polls

Rather than traducing Boris, and distorting his record, people would instead be better served stepping back and attempting to learn some lessons from it. About how he was able to keep the Right broadly united. 

How he managed to reach out to those disaffected working-class communities that felt abandoned by the political classes. How on his watch Britain, almost uniquely among the major Western democracies, was able to just about keep the surge of populism in check.

Because if we don't, other forces may soon be unleashed. And that really will give Britain's progressives something to complain about.