What is Boris Johnson doing now – and is he returning to politics?

Boris Johnson's wife, Carrie, has given birth to a baby girl named Poppy, the couple's fourth child and, as Carrie wrote in an Instagram post, "final gang member". (Johnson has four children with his second wife, barrister Marina Wheeler, and at least one other fathered via an affair; the 60-year-old has consistently refused to confirm how many children he has.)

But even with his young family and a diary peppered with lucrative speaking engagements, Johnson has a "hungering for political relevance". "He's making a fortune but he's bored," said Jenni Russell in The Times.

Although he may not be in the public eye as much any more, Johnson "wants the attention" and to be "thought of as a current player, not a former one", said The Guardian. A return to journalism, paid speeches and memoirs have kept him occupied since leaving Westminster, but a return to front-line politics is also regularly rumoured to be on the cards. But a former ally told The Times: "It's probably too soon for him. He doesn't want to lead a failing party, he only wants the glory of saving one."

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The memoir

Johnson released his memoir "Unleashed" in October 2024, billed as a chronicle of his time in office. We should all "stand by for my thoughts on Britain's future to explode over the publishing world like a much-shaken bottle of champagne", he wrote in the press release.

Yet the memoir received few bubbly reviews. It was "less an autobiography than a nearly 800-page staircase argument", said The Economist. Johnson "rambles on", making the book, for the most part, "not good at all".

It did briefly top the bestseller charts but is then "understood to have slumped well below expectations" in sales, and is unlikely to justify the "apparent £2 million advance" paid to Johnson by publisher HarperCollins, said The Independent.

To counter the lagging sales, Johnson dressed up as Father Christmas for a video in a "shameless attempt to shift more copies", said The Mirror. The entire "publicity blitz has been a tad unconventional". In December 2024, he cancelled some of his Australian tour dates promoting the memoir, citing "unforeseen circumstances", said The Guardian.

The speaking circuit

"The afterlife of a modern British prime minister can go one of two ways," wrote Simon Kelner for The i Paper in 2021. "You can be defenestrated by the electorate and then go on to make a large amount of money. Or you can be defenestrated by your own party and then go on to make a large amount of money."

Johnson did the latter immediately after leaving No. 10. The MPs' register of interests for 2022-23 revealed that he could command more than £250,000 for a single speech. After leaving No. 10, Johnson undertook a "lucrative tour of the global speaking circuit", said The Guardian, addressing cryptocurrency investors, insurers and investment bankers.

In just six months, Johnson declared earnings of nearly £5 million on top of the basic MP salary (which was then £84,144), according to the Westminster Accounts tool compiled by Tortoise Media and Sky News. About £3.7 million of that was earned in the first three months of 2023.

A return to journalism

Johnson has been writing a weekly column for the Daily Mail since standing down as an MP in a reported £1 million a year deal, but was also allegedly courted for a return, in an executive role, to The Telegraph, where he first "cut his teeth as a deeply Eurosceptic Brussels correspondent" in the 1990s, said Politico.

That return however depended on a successful takeover of the Telegraph by his former minister Nadhim Zahawi – something that is looking increasingly unlikely as a consortium led by RedBird Capital Partners, a UAE-backed, US-based private equity firm, has agreed in principle to take ownership of the newspaper. "Boris still has political ambitions," said one source. "Does he have the attention to detail for a daily editorial role? Probably not."

GB News also announced that Johnson would become a presenter on the channel in late 2023. While he has appeared on GB News since then, he has yet to take up his formal role and it is unclear when or if he will.

A return to politics?

A return to frontline politics has been rumoured ever since Johnson quit as prime minister, and he even received sufficient nominations to contest the Tory leadership after Liz Truss stepped down in October 2022, although he ultimately declined to run.

Much has changed in politics since Boris Johnson won the Conservatives' biggest general-election mandate since the 1980s. There are few, if any, safe Tory seats nowadays. Johnson won the 2019 election with a comfortable majority, but resigned less than three years later, after facing a "mass revolt by ministers" over the "scandals" of his premiership, said the BBC. He soon "cut his losses" and stood down as an MP, before the House of Commons Privileges Committee published its investigation into the Partygate scandal.

Since then, the rise of Nigel Farage's Reform UK party and Donald Trump's spectacular political comeback in the US has made Johnson's "allies wistful for their former leader", said The i Paper. Johnson, though, is "living in domestic bliss and earning far more than he could as an MP", casting doubt on why he would "want to return to the fray".

After the Tory party's poor showing in local elections in early May, The Telegraph reported that Johnson said Kemi Badenoch had "every chance" of turning things around, and that he had as much chance of returning to politics as he had of being "locked in a disused fridge".

However, recently he has raised his political profile by publicly weighing in on issues that speak to the Conservative base: the need for higher defence spending, supporting VE Day commemorations, and calling for an inquiry into grooming gangs.

After the local elections in May, a More In Common poll suggested that, among the likely Tory leadership candidates, only Boris Johnson might be able to win against Nigel Farage's Reform UK. An Ipsos survey put Johnson's favourability as a potential Tory leader at 26%, compared to Badenoch at 17% and her main rival within the parliamentary party, Robert Jenrick, at 16%.