Women can’t – surely – be the only ones curious to know how, after his well-documented career in sexual incontinence, Boris Johnson has managed to weave this dismal tale into Unleashed, a memoir largely about his parallel preoccupation, politics, and which his publishers describe as “unvarnished”.

Will it feature some tribute, however glancing, to the young women he persuaded, when in one important job or another, to share the burden of his narcissism with the second Mrs Johnson and their children? Some of these women also became pregnant by Johnson, a father of at least eight, whose personal dedication to population growth remains, given the book’s rudimentary allusions to family life, a mystery. The only girlfriend to feature is, it turns out, “Carrie”, the third Mrs Johnson, a person who, in a memoir otherwise bloated with irrelevant detail (Damian Lewis’s “brother was in my rugby team at school”) unexpectedly appears as successor to “Marina”, herself identified by way of disambiguation as “my wife in 2016”.

Two years on, after resigning over Brexit, the great inseminator, also MP for Uxbridge and South Ruislip, was to be found enjoying a “wilderness” period with someone who, you intuit, now holds the key to his heart. “I led a kind of hillbilly existence,” he writes, “by the pool in Thame, having barbecues with Carrie and sitting around in my shorts, drinking beer and shooting champagne bottles with my airguns.” (Future generations, unfamiliar with that intra-party romance, may benefit from more hints that Carrie is not, like James Middleton’s spaniel, a valued........

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