HarperCollins bags ex-prime minister Johnson's memoir

HarperCollins has acquired former prime minister Boris Johnson’s memoir. 

David Roth-Ey, executive publisher at William Collins and Fourth Estate, and Arabella Pike, publishing director at William Collins, bought world rights to the untitled project from Natasha Fairweather at RCW. HarperCollins US will publish simultaneously under the Harper imprint.

No publication date has yet been set. The financial details of the deal have not been disclosed.

Pike said: "This will be a prime ministerial memoir like no other. I look forward to working with Boris Johnson as he writes his account of his time in office during some of the most momentous events the United Kingdom has seen in recent times."

HarperCollins has a history of publishing prime ministers’ memoirs, having snapped up the rights to David Cameron’s For the Record (William Collins), published in 2019. 

Johnson has written almost a dozen books, including a biography of Winston Churchill, The Churchill Factor (Hodder and Stoughton) and the self-illustrated children’s book The Perils Of Pushy Parents (HarperCollins). He has sold 612,960 books for £6.3m via Nielsen BookScan TCM, with The Churchill Factor his bestseller, on 155,903 copies sold in hardback and 128,382 copies sold in paperback. 

In 2019 Hodder and Stoughton announced it had shelved plans to publish Johnson’s long-delayed book on Shakespeare “for the foreseeable future” after he was announced as prime minister. Last summer, after stepping down from the top job, agents predicted he could earn “north of £1m” for a memoir, due to international interest as well as success at home.