SOURCE: “Stink Bomb,” in New Statesman & Society, May 20, 1994, pp. 38–39.

In the following review, Pearce offers a negative assessment of Wake up Britain!

The pity of this book [Wake up Britain!] is not that it is bad (though, curate's egg-wise, parts of it are less bad than grotesque) but that it conveys the heat that extinguishes light. It speaks a strong personality, but a personality at war with the author's intelligence.

Johnson has written on the throwing-away of the British empire, surrender to the Brussels dictatorship, the rise of the criminal and parallel rise of the welfare sponger, the failure of royalty, the hatefulness of the arts bureaucracy and the contemptibility of bishops. A good Conservative critique would be cool about state power, educational theory and the exact workings of the welfare state. But to be good it must be generous, must understand why the status quo came about...