One person who is rather surprised by Michael Cockerell’s documentary about the Mayor of London, The Irresistible Rise of Boris Johnson, is Boris’s biographer Sonia Purnell, author of Just Boris: The Irresistible Rise of a Political Celebrity. The documentary can be seen on BBC2 on Monday.
“I was a bit surprised when they borrowed my title,” says Sonia. Over to Cockerell: “We took our title from the Bertolt Brecht play written in 1941, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, about a Chicago mobster but also a parable for the rise of a populist charismatic strongman.
“We genuinely didn’t notice that the subtitle of the hardback edition of Sonia’s book, Just Boris, is The Irresistible Rise of a Political Celebrity. But the paperback edition is titled Just Boris, with the subtitle A Tale of Blond Ambition. Our programme is by no means based on her book. We talked to many people who did not talk to her.”
