Boris Johnson’s political memoir ‘Unleashed’ was published late last year and attracted mostly negative reviews and poor sales in the UK.

The review in The Guardian was titled “Memoirs of a Clown,” and another reviewer suggested that the book may have been written by Billy Bunter.

These reviews are not only unfair – they miss the point of the book and its obvious purpose.

As one would expect from a work penned by Johnson, ‘Unleashed’ is well-written, wittily amusing, utterly self-serving, and replete with historical falsifications.

Even so, it is a very important book – not because of its self-aggrandizing content, but because it constitutes a comprehensive manifesto for Johnson’s return to British politics.

This assertion may seem fanciful to British readers, politicians and political pundits who, with very few exceptions, have assumed that Johnson’s political career ended in disgrace in 2022.

That, however, in my opinion, is a mistaken assumption – based as it is upon a misunderstanding of Johnson’s extraordinary appeal as a politician and a misreading of the fragmented state of cotemporary British politics.

I am not for a moment suggesting that Johnson’s return to politics will be successful.

Johnson’s political ascent and dramatic downfall reveal much about contemporary politics in the West. It is true that Johnson himself does not spell out these lessons in any detail in his 772-page exculpatory tome, but they nevertheless comprise the book’s subtext.

Johnson is a key transitional figure in the collapse of traditional two-party politics in the West.

Although affecting the pose of a privileged and dishevelled Tory grandee (Eton, Oxford, numerous wives and children, etc.) Johnson is, in fact, an extraordinarily effective modern celebrity populist politician of the first rank.

Johnson is cut from the same contemporary political cloth as Donald Trump and those numerous populist leaders that have attained prominence in a number of European countries in recent years – and continue to do so.

Analogies have been drawn between Johnson and David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, and they are accurate to a degree.

All three politicians were despised outsiders, lacking a factional base within the Conservative Party – and all three became prime minister at a time of acute political crisis, only to be cast aside by the party when the crisis had passed.

Johnson, however, is a quintessentially modern politician – as Lloyd George and Churchill, who were both born in the 19th century, could not have been.

Contemporary celebrity populist leaders like Johnson emerged in the last decade, when mainstream conservative parties, riven by ideological division, collapsed – and traditional social democratic parties turned their backs, Judas-like, on their working-class supporters and adopted the political programs and ideologies of the new global elites.

Thatcher and Reagan had already discredited the political programs and ideologies of the older social democratic parties – that had become increasingly irrelevant as the new global economic world order emerged in the 1980s.

Who now remembers Michael Foot or his political agenda?

Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders are the heirs to this failed political tradition, and........

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