Boris Johnson’s No10 memoir crushed in charts by books on intestine well being and penguins

Boris Johnson’s hopes of having a bestseller have been dashed – by a guide to cooking for good gut health. The former PM spent days touring TV studios and hosted a glittering launch for Unleashed, telling the inside story of his premiership.

But in a huge blow for the ex-Tory leader, his No 10 memoir quickly slid from first to seventh on Amazon’s bestseller list, losing out to the gut health recipe guide and even a children’s picture book about a penguin.

A source said: “Clearly, people are more interested in their grub and cartoon penguins than they are in reliving Johnson’s political blundering.” The title had been tipped to be a big seller, promising an “honest” and “deeply revealing account of a politician who has dominated our times”.

But, after Mr Johnson’s battles with epidemiologists during the pandemic, he lost out to another one – specifically Prof Tim Spector and his Food for Life Cookbook. Gruffalo author Julia Donaldson also triumphed over Mr Johnson with her tale of adventurous penguin Jonty Gentoo.

The ex-PM – who quit as an MP in June last year amid a probe into his Partygate lies – was given a £510,000 advance for his book. But he will still have beaten Liz Truss’ Ten Years To Save The West, which had just 2,228 UK sales in its first week, and former Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries’ book The Plot – about Johnson’s own downfall – which had 2,000 fewer first week sales than her debut romance novel.