Boris Johnson has said he would have become prime minister regardless of whether he backed Brexit, pushing back against the long-running charge that he chose Leave for political advantage. In a new two-part documentary, he says he supported Leave from principle rather than personal ambition, reopening one of the defining arguments of the referendum era ten years on.
The timing matters because the first episode of A Very British Civil War is due to air on Two on June 8, and Johnson's decision to join the Leave camp is again being picked over as a moment that helped swing the country toward departure from the European Union. For readers still searching for the answer to why he made that call, the documentary puts his own account back in play at the same moment as a fresh round of criticism from his old allies and opponents.
Johnson also says David Cameron threatened to “f*** you up forever” if he campaigned against staying in the EU. Cameron says he does not recall using that language, but he goes further than a simple memory dispute. He says he did not think Johnson really believed in Leave at the time and that Johnson believed it was going to lose.
George Osborne offers the sharpest version of that argument. He says it had “nothing to do with the EU, Britain’s place in the world,” and compares Johnson's calculation to a dash for power, saying he could “see the Iron Throne right there about to be vacated.” The line lands because it cuts directly against Johnson's insistence that principle, not ambition, drove him.
That is where the account becomes harder to settle. Marina Wheeler KC says her worries about the encroachments of EU law affected her husband's thinking, and Rachel Johnson says she personally pleaded with him on the eve of his decision to back Remain. She says the pro-Remain version of his article was “much the more powerful,” while the pro-Leave draft was “all about” how the EU meant “we couldn’t determine the height of wing mirrors on our trucks. I was, like, is that it?”
What emerges from the documentary is not a neat memoir but a familiar Westminster argument with fresh witnesses attached. Johnson says conviction guided him. Cameron and Osborne say the Brexit bet looked like a route to the top. The documentary will not settle that question on its own, but it does place the dispute exactly where it has always belonged: at the center of how one of Britain's most consequential political choices was made, and at the point where a family member says she tried to stop him.
