Nicola Sturgeon felt ‘affinity’ with Johnson on Covid after reading his new memoir

Nicola Sturgeon has said she felt a “sense of affinity” with Boris Johnson while reading his memoir.

In what was otherwise a scathing review of the former prime minister’s new book, Unleashed, Ms Sturgeon said she had similarly felt an “unbearable burden of responsibility” over Covid deaths.

Writing in The New Statesman on Thursday, Scotland’s former first minister said the memoir contains “surprising moments of candour”.

But she added these are “swept away on a tide of shameless self-justification”.

The 784-page book looks back on Mr Johnson’s time as prime minister – from 2019 to 2022 – including Brexit and the Covid pandemic.

Ms Sturgeon, who stood down unexpectedly last year, said while an “unthinkable hatchet job” was “tempting”, she wanted to review the book fairly.

The ex-SNP leader said that much to her surprise, “it’s not as bad as I first thought”, adding that “if the book surprises at all, it is on the positive side”.

She said she related to Mr Johnson’s feelings about the pressures of being in charge during the pandemic.

She wrote: “As I read his account of the almost unbearable burden of responsibility he felt for every Covid decision (so did I), or the devastation of having to ‘cancel’ Christmas in 2020 (one of my own lowest points), I felt a sense of affinity with him.”

But she added: “Then I remembered that this was rarely how he seemed at the time.

“In a section of the book about his early days as London mayor, he talks about feeling as though he was ‘skating over the intricacies of the job’.

“To be frank, that is how he always seemed to me, even during Covid.”

She accused the former Conservative leader of “displaying something of a messiah complex”, claiming he had failed to take responsibility for his own failures.

“He is always the sinned against,” she said, “never the sinner”.

She added: “His resignation came about not as a result of anything he did, but because everyone had it in for him.”

She said the book overall is an “easy” and “snappy” read, despite its length, and “dare I say, it enjoyable”.

But she said of the memoir: “He doesn’t take anything entirely seriously – not even the issues he claims to be deeply serious about.

“There is nothing that he won’t make a crass joke about if it serves his narrative purpose.”

She cited examples of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer being labelled a “pointless traffic cone” and Mr Johnson’s predecessor Theresa May being named “old grumpy knickers”.

She said he had attacked Mrs May’s appearance and at another point in the book, he attacked her own appearance too.

“When he has a go at me over Covid, it is my supposedly pursed lips and furrowed brow that get the treatment,” she said.

“Perhaps he thinks I should have created more of a party atmosphere.”

Ms Sturgeon said Mr Johnson deserved praise over his support for Ukraine following Russia’s invasion, saying he “writes powerfully and movingly” but added it was “hard to square his stance on Ukraine with the support for Donald Trump that creeps into the text”.

She concluded: “While this one wasn’t quite the ordeal I feared, I wouldn’t want to make a habit of reading Boris Johnson.”