Biden refused to board aircraft carrier owing to ‘too many steps’, suggests Boris Johnson

Ahead of his memoir Unleashed, here are 10 new things the former British PM’s book reveals

As Boris Johnson’s book, Unleashed, is soon to hit bookstores, here are 10 new things his autobiography reveals.
Joe Biden refused to board the UK’s new £3.3 billion aircraft carrier because it had too many steps for him, Unleashed claims.
The “vast” HMS Prince of Wales had been “proudly stationed” in Carbis Bay, Cornwall, as the then prime minister and American president held a meeting before the G7 summit in 2021.
After questioning whether Mr. Biden was “really as elderly-seeming as his detractors sometimes said,” Mr. Johnson explained how the president’s first foreign trip did indeed raise questions about his health.
“His staff told us that he would not in fact be boarding our vast aircraft carrier — which we had proudly stationed in the bay — because it had so many steps; and we wondered what that meant about his physical fitness,” Mr. Johnson wrote.
His fears that Mr. Biden would fall asleep during meetings proved unfounded, in part because he appeared to “take a bit of shine” to his new wife, Carrie.
Mr. Biden, who attended the summit with his wife, Jill, admitted that both he and Mr. Johnson had “married above ourselves” before suggesting he and Carrie have a secluded walk on the beach.
“‘Why don’t you and I go down to the beach,’ he said to Carrie a bit later, while Jill Biden rolled her eyes, ‘and leave this guy here?’”
When Mr. Biden went on a fact-finding mission to a remote settlement in Afghanistan, local tribesmen offered to shoot some passersby as a mark of respect for their American visitor.
Mr. Johnson recalled how the president had told of a trip to a “remote mountain fastness” in 2009 when Mr. Biden was vice president.
The American said the local tribe was “thrilled to welcome such an important guest” and tried to find a suitable way to “honor him.”
Apparently they spotted “some distant people” on the far side of a valley before “taking out their six-foot jezzails” [weapons] and offering to shoot “these stick-like figures as a mark of respect.”
Mr. Biden was appalled and successfully urged restraint.
As London Mayor, Mr. Johnson was summoned to a meeting with Prince Andrew in his “cluttered” apartment in Buckingham Palace.
In 2009, Battersea Power Station had “loomed uselessly for decades over the London skyline” and was good for just a “final shoot-out-and-torture scene” in a “noir-ish” gangster movie.
“The prince had another idea. ‘Why don’t you just tear it down?’ he said.”
Sir Simon Milton, the deputy mayor who attended the meeting, replied: “Why don’t we just knock down Buckingham Palace? There is a huge old space here. We could build loads of affordable housing.”
Mr. Johnson recalled how the “duke/prince/Randy Andy” simply “goggled” at his colleague.
Mr. Johnson defended Brexit by telling John Kerry, then U.S. secretary of state, that leaving the European Union was no different to the American Revolution rejecting foreign rule.
As the then foreign secretary, Mr. Johnson was taken on a boat trip into Boston Harbor by Mr. Kerry, along with their counterparts from France, Germany and Italy.
“We did Afghanistan, we did Syria, and then the subject of Brexit came up. Kerry turned to look at me and said, with a sudden air of conspiracy, ‘Can’t you walk that thing back?’”
Explaining how “all eyes” focused on him, “it occurred to me that this might in fact be the purpose of the gathering.”
He wrote that he “had to make it absolutely clear” to Mr. Kerry that he was “deluded” if the referendum decision was going to be reversed.
Mr. Johnson gestured towards the harborfront explaining how in 1773 the Americans “threw our tea into the sea,” a reference to the Boston Tea Party, adding how “you guys… decided that you did not want to be ruled from overseas by a government over which you had no control.”
He concluded it was a “pretty sizzling return serve” which meant his fellow guest “goggled” at him.
He later wrote how the UK must be more American, asking: “How dare the Americans tell us to keep limping along in the slow lane, with the EU, when they have a wholly different approach?”
He concluded that it was time to talk to Trump, who was beginning to dominate the U.S. political landscape.
The British Government “kow-towed so abjectly” to China during a state visit that Xi Jinping’s personal security guard managed to “scramble uninvited” into the Queen’s Gold State Coach.
In 2015, Xi Jinping, China’s president, made his first state visit to the UK while David Cameron was prime minister.
For the first time in the 260-year history of the Gold State Coach being used by the monarchy for special events, the Chinese leader’s “personal security guard” managed to “defeat all the equerries, to elude the royal protection squad and to scramble uninvited into the Gold State Coach.”
However, Mr. Johnson notes how the Queen was “made of sterner stuff,” explaining how the “goon was ejected” after she said: “Get orff.”
China’s determination to obtain an economic grip in the UK saw them even offer to rebuild Crystal Palace, what Mr. Johnson described as a “super-colossal greenhouse, once the greatest wonder of Victorian Britain.”
Mr. Johnson concluded: “It was going to be a gigantic effulgent symbol of the new China, and the tables had now been turned on Britain.”
Dominic Cummings leaked stories about the “morals and habits” of Dilyn the Downing Street dog, Mr. Johnson claims.
The Jack Russell was adopted by Mr. Johnson and Carrie in 2019 but newspaper stories began to reveal that Dilyn was proving a handful.
Mr. Johnson said the canine, who was in the habit of “sniffing away at senior advisers, including [Dominic] Cummings,” “didn’t deserve” one “well-sourced attack” in The Times.
“I discovered to my amazement that Cummings, my senior adviser, and [Lee] Cain, the media spokesman, had actually been to see the editorial staff of The Times the previous day.”
When he asked Mr. Cummings if he had been the source, his adviser replied “loud and clear” that he was not.
“Funny, I thought; it must be a coincidence,” Mr. Johnson says in the book which features a number of family photographs of him with his wife and children.
He claims Mr. Cummings was the source of speculation that he was “too knackered” to do his job as prime minister after suffering Covid.
He records how the “genial fox-hunting baronet” Sir Humphry Wakefield, who is Mr. Cummings’ father-in-law, was quoted in Tatler as telling a guest to his Northumberland castle that Mr. Johnson would step down in six months after suffering Covid.
“If you put a horse back to work when it is injured, it will never recover,” the baronet said.
Mr. Johnson is convinced “he was surely only repeating what he thought he had been told, on good authority by his son-in-law viz. my advisor Dom Cummings.”
As London Mayor, Mr. Johnson reveals that he was “mortified” as a number of international Olympic teams struggled to navigate the transport network at the London 2012 Summer Olympics.
He reveals how the Australian team “got lost, because the bus driver had never been to London before and didn’t know how to use a sat-nav.” Then, the American team “took four hours to get from Heathrow to Stratford” before eventually arriving “thoroughly out of sorts” after the driver confused Stratford with Southend.
Mr. Johnson was “on friendly terms with the Marxist conspiracist Piers Corbyn” who claimed climate change was a hoax.
He explains how he even visited Mr. Corbyn’s Weather Action meteorological unit in Bermondsey, East London.
He explained that despite his green credentials, he temporarily “strayed” as he believed climate change was a hoax, in part down to his conversations with Piers Corbyn, the brother of Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour Party leader.
He said he gave Mr. Corbyn “airtime” in his Telegraph columns before going on to collaborate with “skeptics and climate deniers in making fun of green power.”
While at primary school, a young Mr. Johnson decided that his unique skill may have been his impressive physical strength.
He described himself as a “pre-pubescent Chuck Norris,” the American martial arts expert and actor. As a result, he decided “insanely” to challenge fellow pupils to fights.
Although most children laughed at him, an older child called Tracy, who had “large and knobbly” fists, took up his offer.
Before Mr. Johnson, whose hero was Muhammad Ali, had time to clench his fists, he was lying on his back “legs waving feebly in the air” as Tracy loomed triumphantly over him.
He said he learned the important lesson that “we are not as good as we think we are, and other people often turn out to be better at something than you predict.”
In his afterword, Mr. Johnson encourages would-be politicians not to be deterred by the threat of the very personal attacks that can come with the job, particularly during the age of social media.
“Don’t be fooled into thinking that any of it is personal. It’s part of the job,” he writes. “As Her Majesty the Queen once said to me in one of our sessions, ‘It’s not about being popular, it’s about being useful.’”
He claims the useful things he has done during his “15 years at or near the top of UK politics” include introducing hire bikes, leveling up and creating new nuclear reactors, new bridges and new railways.
Unleashed by Boris Johnson will be published by William Collins on October 10 (£30); books.telegraph.co.uk