BORIS: I don't know exactly why Gove did me in

Incurably fond as I am of Michael Gove, I think I speak for several Tory ex-PMs if I say it is always a good idea to watch him in the wing mirror.

He and I came across each other at the Oxford Union, and I admired his brilliantly improvised Scottish orotundity. He was owlish, tweedy, often quite drunk, and then, as now, wonderfully polite. He had hung around at my college, and from time to time we would go to the same preposterous debating club dinners.

Some people have claimed that neither Michael nor I really intended to win the Brexit referendum campaign, which is transparent rubbish. Others say that we were not really motivated by arguments over the EU but by a desire to overthrow the Cameron government. Again, that is patent rubbish.

I was not fighting that referendum campaign thinking, ‘Cor – this is going well. In a month’s time I could be prime minister’ and nor, I am pretty sure, was Michael.

Never at any point in that campaign did we discuss a future Leave-based government, because the Cameron government’s stated policy was to implement the referendum result. So when David Cameron flounced off the stage rather than deal with the logical consequences of the events he had set in motion, we were wrong-footed.

If we looked pretty shell-shocked a few hours later, when we finally claimed victory, it was not, as everyone on Twitter immediately pronounced, because we were downcast at having won (we weren’t). It was because we suddenly had a lot on our plates.

We had Remainers shrieking outside our houses, calling us c***s and banging on our cars. We had to deal with the anger and bewilderment of colleagues in Parliament.

It was barely a year since Cameron had won an absolute majority, and now he had thrown himself spectacularly on the funeral pyre of UK membership of the EU.

And now who? The general consensus was that the next prime minister should be from the Leave team. That meant either Gove or me, since we had been the most prominent Tory campaigners. Michael had undoubtedly been brilliant in the campaign, but there were plenty who asserted (on what basis I am not sure) that I had been reaching an even wider group of voters, and there was a view that I might be even more successful than Michael when it came to fighting and winning any future general election campaign.

Gove and I went into a tiny office – perhaps even a broom cupboard or other janitorial facility – to try to thrash it out. We emerged with a tentative deal, and the following day he rang to confirm it 100 per cent. He would be my chancellor and effective number two.

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I was so exhausted, and so relieved to have something like a plan – even the beginnings – that I underestimated the perils of the days ahead, and the immense complexities entailed in trying to become prime minister of the UK. As soon as he announced he was off, Cameron fired the starting gun on a vast orgy, across Westminster, of plotting and machination.

What was I doing, that all-important Saturday? I went off to play cricket.

For years Charlie Spencer, Earl of, has invited the Johnson family to field an XI, and every year we have turned to the most ridiculously talented ringers – one year we had Kevin Pietersen, another year we had Brian Lara – and even so we always lose. I really didn’t want to cancel.

I can see in retrospect how frivolous it looked. The country was in tumult; we had voted to embark on a massive geo-strategic realignment and constitutional change, which I had encouraged, and I was at my old mucker’s stately home, larking about in cricket whites and knocking back the Pimm’s. For the next few days, the Johnson-Gove alliance bashed on. We enjoyed working together, we had the mandate to deliver a full Brexit. We could have been unstoppable.

Alas, it was not to be. On Thursday morning – just as I was due to go out and launch my campaign – Michael had decided to blow me up on the launchpad.

My campaign manager Lynton Crosby rang me at the crack of dawn and tersely brought the bad news. ‘Gove’s running, mate,’ he said. (I didn’t hear from Michael himself at all, I think.)

He was my campaign chair and effectively my running mate, and in a position of great power and trust. So I was taken aback.

If I had been preparing to run for months, if I had a list of supporters and a well-oiled machine of my own, I suppose I might have pushed on.

But Gove had chosen the perfect moment to strike – to throw me off my balance. I knew it was essential that my team should look strong from the outset, and should present a united front. Gove scuppered that completely.

To this day I don’t know exactly why he did me in. He had all sorts of voices in his ear. George Osborne was certainly urging him to run.

It so happened that Michael, as campaign chair, had appointed a bright, young Brexiteer MP to be my minder as I made my pitch to colleagues and make a note of what was said.

He was called Rishi Sunak. Much later Rishi told me: ‘You were far too trusting of those people. A lot of them really weren’t on your side.’

Six years later I was to remember that remark – and the historical irony it contains.

I, of course, was sad at Michael’s behaviour. I particularly disapproved of the way he started slating me publicly in order to justify his own decision. What I resented most was the sheer stupidity of what he had done.

I felt he had been used by Osborne and co, who had wound him up and radicalised him to do the dirty on me, when I didn’t really think he would win himself; and he had made it much less likely, therefore, that Brexit would be delivered by someone who actually understood or cared about what we were trying to do;. And there was a real possibility that Brexit would not be delivered at all.

My fears were well founded. Gove himself blew up shortly thereafter, as he failed to get enough votes from MPs to stay in the race – and Cameron texted me, saying: ‘I bet that felt sweet.’

Actually, it didn’t. It just made me even gloomier.

Not long after the opening of the Olympic Games in London, I went down to Victoria Park in Hackney to inaugurate the zipwire.

We were worried, in the first few days of the Games, that our “live sites” were a bit sparsely attended. We had set up huge TV screens, in parks across London, so that people without tickets could watch the athletics - but the crowds were staying away.

What we needed was some buzz, some excitement. Having recently used one in India I decided that the answer was a zipwire. After some delay, caused by anxieties over health and safety, such a device was duly constructed.

I climbed to the top of the scaffolding tower, connected by a steel hauser to another tower about a hundred yards away. It all looked a bit ramshackle. ‘Am I really the first person to try this?’ I asked. ‘You are!’ they beamed.

I strapped on the harness, put on a blue helmet and, waving two plastic Union Jacks, I launched myself into space. I immediately swivelled round and found myself travelling backwards. Having begun by going worryingly fast, I now found that I was going rather slowly – until I came to a stop, suspended in mid-air, about three-quarters of the way along.

I shifted in my harness to try to alleviate some pretty extreme discomfort in my groin. I waved the Union Jacks and tried to jolly along the crowd. There was no disguising the truth. I was stuck, 40ft up, and no one had a clue how to get me down.

Then I saw Carl, a Metropolitan Police protection officer who had been assigned to me for the Games. ‘Carl,’ I said, ‘can you get me down?’ Slowly he reached into his breast pocket, as if preparing to draw a gun and shoot the wire in two; and then took out his mobile to take a photo of my humiliation.

About half an hour later, after they had found a rope to drag me to the far tower, I was driving away with my political adviser. It did not seem that the episode would burnish my credentials as an all-round homme serieux and world statesman, and I wanted some reassurance.

‘I shouldn’t think the media will make much of that, will they?’ I asked. ‘I don’t think they will have any pictures, will they?’ ‘No’, he said, ‘I am sure it will be fine.’ He was looking at his mobile phone, where the news was popping up, and laughing.

It was a fiasco - but it certainly brought the crowds to the Live Sites; and from the very next day Team GB started to win an unbelievable torrent of gold.

• Adapted from Unleashed, by Boris Johnson (William Collins, £30), to be published on October 10. © Boris Johnson 2024. To order a copy for £25.50 (offer valid until October 12, 2024; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.