Boris Johnson: "They Were Looking at Engineering the Virus” & “The Government Tried To Bribe Me!"

He describes a loving but turbulent upbringing: frequent moves, a busy and often absent father, his mother’s OCD and eight-month psychiatric inpatient stay when he was 10, and his parents’ divorce at 14. He says children in that situation tend to blame themselves, and that his response was ‘self-defense’ through academic competition and losing himself in work to rebuild self-esteem. This same mechanism appears later in his tendency to bury himself in political projects rather than dwell on emotional pain or grief.

Pressed repeatedly on whether his bumbling, high-energy persona is a calculated marketing device or a psychological defense, Johnson insists it stems from a family culture that abhorred dullness and demanded everyone be entertaining. He accepts that he uses humor and storytelling (‘sugar the pill’) to get people interested in politics and make complex arguments readable, particularly in his book. He rejects Jeremy Corbyn’s description of him as a calculated intellect hiding behind a buffoon act, but acknowledges others perceive it that way.

His scholarship to Eton convinced him that intelligence and drive are ‘evenly distributed’ across the UK, while opportunity is not. He cites his time as London mayor, pointing to crime reduction and improved outcomes in once-dismissed boroughs, as evidence that culture and aspiration can be changed. He defends Conservative reforms on school standards and academies but accepts levelling up has happened ‘nothing like fast enough’, emphasizing infrastructure and education as key levers.

Johnson concedes there were ‘good arguments both ways’ and that his unpublished pro‑Remain article was a deliberate exercise to stress-test his thinking. He says the decisive factor was a conviction that EU membership meant an inexorable drift toward a ‘United States of Europe’ with unaccountable lawmaking. He admits the Leave campaign had no governmental plan for negotiations because it was a referendum, not an election, and he expected the sitting government to implement the outcome. He rejects economic forecasts of Brexit damage, contending the UK has outgrown some EU economies and attributes major economic hits to COVID instead.

Johnson argues that regulatory freedom post‑Brexit allowed the UK to authorize vaccines faster, vaccinate high‑risk groups by early 2021, and exit restrictions ahead of European peers, which he says boosted economic recovery. However, he admits he’s unsure how much lockdowns themselves reduced deaths versus the virus’s natural trajectory, and openly asks whether the benefits outweighed the long-term harm to children’s education and life chances. He still concludes, cautiously, that the government ‘did the right thing’ on lockdowns, while emphasizing he followed SAGE’s advice rather than pre‑empting scientists.

He recounts early calls with Xi Jinping, when the working assumption was a ‘wet market’ origin in Wuhan. He now believes it was ‘almost certainly’ a lab accident involving engineered viruses, though he denies thinking it was a bioweapon. He suggests WHO and many scientists were hesitant to ‘cheese off’ China because of funding and political sensitivities, and notes Trump’s early skepticism about China’s transparency. This is a marked shift from the initial ‘conspiracy theory’ framing of lab‑leak ideas.

Johnson insists he was fined only for briefly entering the Cabinet Room during his birthday, denies seeing cake, music, or dancing, and says the famous ‘cheese and wine in the garden’ event was work-related and cleared by police. He now thinks his early ‘blanket apology’ was a strategic mistake because it appeared to validate every allegation, including those he says were false (vomiting, fights). Yet he concedes he should have explicitly told staff to not only follow rules but be seen to, acknowledging that in a national tragedy, Number 10 needed to be the hyper‑visible example of restraint.