The best and worst prime minister memoirs of all time

Boris Johnson has struck a deal with publisher HarperCollins to write a memoir that will reportedly earn the former Tory leader more than £6m.

The book will chronicle his “notorious run” as prime minister during Brexit and the pandemic before being ousted from office last September, said The Independent. No target publication date has been announced, but the lucrative deal has been agreed “ongoing speculation that he might harbour ambitions to return to front-line politics”, the paper added .

Former journalist Johnson has already published 11 books, but has failed to complete a biography of William Shakespeare for which he took an £88,000 advance in 2015. The publishing director at HarperCollins’ William Collins imprint, Arabella Pike, promised that Johnson’s latest project would be a prime ministerial memoir “like no other”.

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Here are some the best and worst books in the niche field.

The best political memoirs

Margaret Thatcher’s “weighty” The Downing Street Years, published in 1993, “reads like an official history, shorn of the intimate details or introspection we have come to expect”, said The Guardian’s Gaby Hinsliff. “Even the poll tax riots, seen by many as a defining moment in her downfall, are dismissed with an indignant reference to what she sees as the ‘wickedness’ of the protesters fighting in the street.”

Yet despite the book’s shortcomings, said Thatcher biographer John Campbell, “it is still by far the most comprehensive and readable of modern prime ministerial memoirs”. Her versions of events are “partisan”, of course, but readers also get “a clear and vivid account of her side of the arguments”, Campbell wrote in Margaret Thatcher: From Grocer’s Daughter to Iron Lady.

High praise, but “the contemporary yardstick” in this field, according to Hinsliff, is Tony Blair’s A Journey. The former Labour leader which manages to “pull off the difficult trick of being informative about how government works without being stuffy”. According to Hinsliff, Blair’s memoir is also lit up by “disarming glimmers of self-awareness about his own shortcomings”, including “what he calls his ‘boundless, at times rather manic lust for modernisation’ and its potential to be misdirected”. Above all, said The Independent’s John Rentoul in a 2010 review, the book is “a political argument about how to win elections and make social progress”. But “what makes his memoir so absorbing” is that Blair is “the first of a generation of politicians to conduct their craft as if observing themselves from an amused and admiring distance – and then to write about it”.

Another great, according to the publisher Penguin, is Winston Churchill’s The Grand Alliance – a six-volume history of the Second World War that is “lucid, dramatic, remarkable both for its breadth and sweep and for its sense of personal involvement”. First published in 1950, the memoir is said to be “universally acknowledged as a magnificent reconstruction and is an enduring, compelling work that led to Churchill being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature”.

The worst political memoirs

David Cameron’s For The Record, details both his time in office and his reaction to losing the country’s referendum on EU membership. But in a 2019 review for the London School of Economics, author and academic George Kassimeris predicted that “future historians are unlikely to be any kinder to Cameron than today’s political commentators”. The main problem, said Kassimeris, is that the book lacks any kind of “mea culpa” for the impact of Brexit. “Cameron’s legacy is sealed but having had the grace to offer a full apology, even on paper, would have gone some way towards restoring his reputation.”

By contrast, John Major: the Autobiography is let down by the moderation of its author, said The Guardian’s Kenneth Baker in a 1999 review. “This is a balanced book from a balanced man. If he makes a sharp comment about a colleague, in the very same sentence he will add a softening touch.” Yet this moderation was one of Major’s flaws as prime minister, because “at times the affairs of a great nation need something more than a balancing act”, Baker added.

Another former leader with a reputation for being boring is Robert Peel, who had two stints as PM in the 19th century. Following Peel’s death, in 1850, journalist Walter Bagehot asked his readers: “Was there ever such a dull man? Can any one, without horror, foresee the reading of his memoirs?” This was “by no means a rhetorical question”, said Reviews in History. The late Tory leader had prepared a three-volume autobiography, Memoirs by the Right Honourable Sir Robert Peel, for publication after his passing. His less than enthralling memoir would go on to gain a place on the website forgottenbooks.com.