I owed Ian Martin a debt of gratitude before I had even opened Unhinged: A Parody.
Ever since William Collins announced their publication of Boris Johnson’s memoir Unleashed I have been resigning myself to the unavoidable task of reading it. All 784 pages. It’s an absolute brick of a thing, bigger even than long-winded whoppers Tony Blair’s A Journey and For the Record by David Cameron. In a comparison to which Johnson could relate, Unleashed is longer than the Odyssey and the Aenid put together.
I started waking occasionally in the night worrying about the potential implications of pouring all that de Pfeffluent into my head, preparing for his excruciating attempts to present himself as one of us while simultaneously emphasising that he is, in fact, way, way above us. All those jokes lifted half-remembered and half-ruined from PG Wodehouse and pages scattered with classical Greek aperçus rote-learned at Eton, designed to suggest a lively sense of humour combined with weighty intellectual gravity.
Shuddering at the prospect of facing reams of titanium-coated self-justification from an author perceiving his book as the black box recorder of truth salvaged from the wreckage of a disaster he inspired, I was convinced that I would emerge from Unleashed more gaslit than the whole of Victorian London.
For a start the British political memoir is a genre almost entirely devoid of literary merit. I try to swerve those thumping hardbacks, their black and white cover portraits peering at you earnestly from beneath titles hinting at candid revelation and rigorous self-examination, only to deliver soliloquies of self-serving bleating and the joyless chuckle of the last laugh.
Add to this already unappealing prospect the words “Boris” and “Johnson” and you will surely understand the yawning chasm of ennui that opened beneath me when I saw Unleashed was to be inflicted on an undeserving world.
I am, after all, still in recovery from the hallucinatory experience that was Nadine Dorries’ The Plot, in which our heroine mooched around Westminster like a gumshoe, meeting shady contacts in secret locations like crowded pubs near parliament where everybody would recognise them and occasionally visiting Johnson to update him on her latest shattering discoveries.
Dorries’ version of the erstwhile prime minister was a wounded Snuffleupagus whose selfless cheery optimism was dimmed by the shock realisation that there were people out there who didn’t believe in him despite his clear passionate commitment to honesty in politics and tireless work for the betterment of the country and people he was honoured to serve.
Moments from that book still flash unbidden across my conscious thoughts to this day. Occasionally I will catch a stranger’s eye in the street and note a brief connection, a mutual recognition that we are both survivors of The Plot by Nadine Dorries. There is not even a nod, we just plunge on, disappearing into the crowds, for The Plot is not something to dwell upon even among fellow survivors.
The prospect of spending 784 pages in the company of Boris Johnson made me fear an even longer and tougher rehabilitation – which is why I owe Ian Martin a debt of gratitude, for what should land on the doormat just when I was at peak pre-Unleashed despair? The perfect way out of my predicament – Martin’s Unhinged, the “parody companion to Johnson’s own extremely honest account of the last few years”.
Martin, a comedy writer whose credits include The Thick of It, The Death of Stalin and Veep, is a brave man indeed. He has delved deep into the world of the nation’s number one political fantasist on our behalf, reading things, seeing things and recalling things that would transport most of us to dark places we would rather not revisit. In Unhinged he has provided an invaluable service to everyone but the handful of remaining Johnson lickspittles who will lap up Unleashed and declare it to be a true and frank account just as a little door opens in their forehead and a spring-loaded cuckoo pops out like a Swiss clock marking the hour.
Martin is also a brave man for satirising Boris Johnson in the first place. After all, how effective could a parody be when the source material is already so colossally preposterous? Could a burlesque of Boris work when the real thing cultivated such a veneer of clubbable buffoonery to facilitate a ruthless rise to the highest office in the land?
Unhinged has initial appeal by not being 784 pages long. Not even close. A slim volume, it is probably the length Unleashed should be had it undergone a more rigorous editorial process focused on accuracy.
Both books feature a black and white head and shoulders portrait of Johnson on the front cover, Unleashed presenting the erstwhile PM with hair meticulously tousled and wearing an open-necked shirt to show he is now free of the shackles of formality and high office. His expression suggests someone who has been through humbling self-examination while retaining a twinkle in the eye but looks more like the “before” picture in an advert shilling relief from the misery of trapped wind.
Unhinged opts for a contrasting monochrome shot of Johnson, hair like he fell asleep on a bus while it was still damp, eyes wide and mouth open in mock surprise, exactly the image that as far back as the London mayoral elections of 2008 some people saw, thought: “LOL, look at that mad posh bastard” and considered that enough to secure their vote.
Martin makes the wise decision not to produce a spoof memoir. For one thing, Unleashed will be absurd enough in itself to preclude such a thing. For another, well, the joke would wear thin pretty quickly even in the most skilled satirical hands.
Instead Unhinged arrives as a kind of self-help manual to sit alongside Unleashed that pitches Johnson as a lifestyle guru who succeeded by finding his own truth and sticking to it, something we should all emulate if we are to achieve greatness and riches.
The first section comprises a Match of the Day-style highlights package of Johnsonian political shenanigans since he became Tory leader in 2019. These bitesize nuggets remind us, sometimes disturbingly, of the more outlandish moments of his period in office as well as those that were more landish but still startling when you think about them.
This was the first time I had cause to think about Jo Johnson in quite a while, for example. Remember him? Blimey. And Amber Rudd! Bless my soul, Amber Rudd. Sheesh.
Each of these microchapters opens with a brief summary of the incident presented as the “discredited narrative” you might have seen or read in the mainstream media or witnessed through those notoriously unreliable channels, your own eyes. With them come the associated response nuggets of “Unhinged Truth” presented so frighteningly accurately in Johnson’s own voice you fear he might actually be standing behind you speaking directly into your ear.
“I need specifically to thank the two nurses who helped save my life,” we read of his personal brush with the Covid-19 virus in April 2020. “Both immigrants, so there’s a nice little sub-story there. We may not all of us necessarily approve of immigrants, but the ones who work in the NHS, scurrying around bravely in their improvised binbag costumes and ill-fitting facemasks, certainly get a thumbs-up from yours truly. As a precaution, I ask the Home Office to make sure their paperwork is in order.”
There are meetings with the Queen including the one where he absolutely didn’t lie to her about the reasons for proroguing parliament, and the October 2020 cabinet meeting in which he expressed horror at the prospect of another lockdown and suggested the government “let the bodies pile high”. Martin’s creation excuses this as reservations about making an incorrect decision. “’Let the bodies pile high in our consciences if we get this wrong!’ I say very carefully, clenching my fist, jaw, buttocks and balls to reinforce the point”.
The rest of the book invites us to “Be More Boris”, applying lessons gleaned from the life of Johnson to our own paltry existences. Life is, we learn, “not simply a question of working out what it is you want, getting what you want, holding on to it with dwindling enthusiasm and then seeing something you want more and grasping for that instead”. Taking the positives from partygate we learn that “Sometimes sacrifice means breaking the rules for the greater good. And sometimes sacrifice means being happy when others can’t”.
I had feared that some of the memories triggered by Unhinged might be too traumatic to appreciate the jokes but Martin packs in so many zingers that dipping in to the book feels like a valuable form of therapy. Lines like “As I never tire of saying, I don’t MAKE the rules, I simply delay them” and his heartfelt tribute following the death of Prince Philip who “had a profound influence on my own hilarious-but-never-racist takes on overseas folk”.
Above all, I hope Ian Martin is OK. Inhabiting Boris Johnson for as long as he has while researching and writing Unhinged would break many people. He has produced a traumatically funny book that takes its place in the noble and historic pantheon of British political satire. Unhinged is a welcome and convincing alternative to the ordeal of Unleashed, for which a nation and particularly its book reviewers are profoundly grateful.
The last word should of course go to Martinstein’s Johnster and a line that serves as the perfect epitaph to the former PM’s inexplicable rise to the highest office achievable on this sceptred isle.
“All love in the end is self-love,” he writes. “And the most important forgiveness is self-exoneration.”
Unhinged: A Parody by Ian Martin is published by Bloomsbury, price £12.99
