The Guardian view on Boris Johnson: once he was his party’s future – not now | Editorial

The former Tory leader hopes his memoirs will keep him in the political spotlight, but he is no longer the Tory asset he once was

There is no great mystery about why Boris Johnson chose to release his Unleashed memoir this week. He wants the attention. He always does. More than that, though, he wanted to overshadow the Conservative party conference. He hoped the rib-tickling yarns and ebullient, confident language of his memoir would remind the Tory faithful of all they were missing. He intended to show the four leadership candidates that he is the election-winning Tory colossus that they can only dream of being.

Mr Johnson also wants to be thought of as a current player, not a former one. His book is explicit about this. He is blithely confident – no surprises there – that if he had been Tory leader he would have won this year’s general election. “If we had all stuck together I would have no doubt that we would have gone on to win in 2024,” he writes. Rishi Sunak’s mistake in July was to ignore the Johnson legacy: “We never mentioned any of the good things that had been done in the period 2019-2022, when I was PM.”