And yet I couldn't avoid feeling a grudging respect for him at times, certainly in the way he was treated by civil servants when Foreign Secretary under Teresa May and some of the bad press he has received over his handling of the Covid pandemic. Having read some of Tom Bower’s previous books and been impressed by his thoroughness and writing style – particularly his forensic description of the financial and business affairs of Robert Maxwell – I had high hopes for this account of Boris Johnson. The failing of this book is the author’s endless insistence that Johnson is great and everyone else is wrong. I was hoping for more detail and insight into Johnson’s own hospitalisation and brush with death as a result of Covid, but all that Bower presents is a rehash of existing information from other sources. The narrative then peters out in mid-2020, presumably when his publisher was demanding the final manuscript.

TB has expertly put together this incredible story with lots of mind-boggling facts surrounding this PM. At every stage, when something goes right it proves Johnson is great, and when something goes wrong (a frequent occurrence), it is the fault of someone else. In Bower’s telling, Johnson Snr is a lifelong flake: dabbling in jobs, failing at most of them, then using his connections to find something else.Bowers appears to rely heavily on newspaper articles verified through interviews to piece together his account.

but one who respected the statesmanship, integrity and convictions of Thatcher, Major, Heseltine, and Cameron. No matter that she had forgiven him so much; she had dared to deny him once too often when he demanded unquestioning full-time adulation.

But that was long ago and if anyone expected his latest book to be an unsparing, detached appraisal of our Prime Minister, they will be disappointed. The author is unafraid of diving into the secrets of Boris Johnson's family background, his infidelities, and his character traits with lots of things I didn't previously know. It’s really appalling that a work likely to draw so much attention received so little when it came to the editorial department. His most recent books include the most authoritative and best selling account of Tony Blair's decade as prime minister and the definitive biographies of Jeremy Corbyn, Gordon Brown and Geoffrey Robinson MP. makes excuse after excuse - his father was a womaniser, beat his mother in front of him, the children were forced to witness their mother being admitted to hospital with a nervous breakdown, etc.

That said, there are one or two amusing anecdotes revealing the depth of Johnson’s rivalry with David Cameron and his disdain for the acolyte George Osborne - such as his having initiated fisticuffs with each of them during the coalition years and their having to be pulled off by aides (fnarr fnarr), or Boris’s text on the morning of the 2015 general election: “good luck Dave and if you bog it up I’m standing by to fill the gap! His transformation from bumbling stooge on Have I Got New for You to a triumphant Mayor of London was overshadowed only by his colourful personal life, brimming with affairs, scandals and transgressions. The onetime Telegraph diarist Quentin Letts is struck that Johnson never passed on any gossip: “He doesn’t notice people’s quirks and their embarrassments,” Letts observes, which Bower puts down to Johnson’s “narcissism”: he’s just not that interested in anyone other than himself. Ever since Harold Wilson imposed socialism on Britain after 1964, the country’s decline had been marked by a crippling brain drain.

All this is laid out in the opening chapters, inviting the reader to see the prime minister as the inevitably damaged product of a morally inadequate father. He dedicates a significant part of the later quarter of the book to Covid, where I think he went so off-piste with his confident analysis that I felt the whole thrust of this bio was to absolve Boris of any culpability and to frame him as potentially one of the greats - if only we and the media would give him a chance. The man cheats on his wives, he lies, he manipulates, he lets people down, he is an egomaniac concerned only about himself, he will do whatever is necessary to get to the top and can't be trusted. His ascent to Number 10 in the wake of the acrimonious, era-defining Brexit referendum would prove to be only the first act in an epic drama that saw him play both hero and villain - from proroguing parliament to his controversial leadership of the Covid-19 Crisis, all against the backdrop of divorce, marriage, the birth of his sixth child, revolts among Tory MPs and the countdown to Brexit.

or where he excused false claims made by saying that they were OK because they illustrated a broader point he agreed with (around EU bureaucracy or immigration numbers). That said, the book is interesting and the early sections well-written and quite illuminating on Johnson’s family background, early life, and complicated relationships with women. Bowers's biography of Simon Cowell, written with Cowell's co-operation, was published on 20 April, 2012.

But what makes the book very interesting is the description of all political contradictions, not only between the parties but also within the party. an assertion that is hard to square with her 16 years of experience in the highest court in the land, which routinely hears cases around administrative and constitutional law.