A day in the life of Boris Johnson

His premiership is over........the outstanding question is how much more damage he can do

“Where are we heading”?  Boris Johnson is hardly out of bed before he is ruffling his hair, rolling up his shirt sleeves or donning a “high-vis” jacket for his daily excursion. A hospital or vaccination centre, a factory or building site? It doesn’t matter. Anything to escape the detailed policy papers, difficult meetings and hard grind that come with the job of running a country.

Past prime ministers have had to be prodded and pushed to forsake the grandeur of Downing Street for these meet-the-people photo-opportunities. Party advisers would complain they were too busy looking after affairs of state to remember they were also politicians. Johnson, today’s No 10 insiders say, is nothing so much as a puppy straining at the leash for its morning walk.

If the jaunts are a measure of natural idleness, they also show unintended self-awareness. Britain has a prime minister devoid of principles or policy. His political philosophy has never reached beyond personal advancement. Johnson has his supporters, but no real political friends.  Most importantly, he is no good at being prime minister.

His rise, he knows, was propelled by the populist’s capacity to connect with voters beyond the Tory party’s natural boundaries. He has learned how to shed his privileged background. The disgruntled and angry voters he has gathered to the cause have been willing to overlook his manifest character flaws.  The big lie was that he was on their side against the  elites.  

Meeting “the people” is Johnson’s way of reminding himself why he is prime minister. This is what he is good at. A clever politician, he lacks intelligence. The man-of-the-people bonhomie is a cloak thrown over the absence of serious ideas or purpose. To the extent he has a set of political instincts, they are those of the reactionary English nationalist. 

In the description of officials who have worked with him closely, all this adds up to a front-rank ego and second rate mind. Quick he may be, but he lacks the capacity to think strategically. And the vaulting self-regard of the narcissist has persuaded him he can afford to be lazy. 

Now, the spell  has been broken. What’s left is weakness, exposed again at the weekend by  Brexit minister David Frost’s decision to jump from the sinking ship. He understood he could no longer rely on Johnson’s support for his hard-line Brexit strategy. Frost needs someone to blame for his own dismal failures. Who better than the prime minister?  

The voters have tired of Downing Street’s disregard for truth and contempt for the rules that govern their own lives. Things happen gradually and then suddenly, runs a famous line in Hemingway’s The Sun also Rises. The lifetime liar Johnson suddenly has the look of a loser.

It is no accident that the government’s defeat at the hands of the voters in the former Conservative stronghold of North Shropshire came in the same week as the biggest rebellion of backbench Tory MPs Johnson has faced during his time in Downing Street. Engulfed by scandal and sleaze, the prime minister has lost his capacity to persuade the people he is on their side and his own party that he remains a winner.

The proximate causes of the crisis were Johnson’s attempts to defend the former Tory minister Owen Patterson for breaking parliament’s anti-corruption rules and the disclosure of a spate of Downing Street Christmas parties that mocked Covid lockdown regulations imposed a year ago. Of themselves. these were containable squalls. The prime minister’s problem was that they illuminated the bigger story.

The thread running through his premiership is that of impunity: the assumption he is exempt from the norms and rules that apply to others. Whether it is soliciting cash to upgrade his Downing Street flat, hustling expensive holidays from wealthy Tory donors or lying to the Queen in an attempt to force through Brexit, the prime minister has shown contempt for anything by way of ethical standards. The only limit has been what he can get away with. Caught out, as he has shown during the furore over Downing Street parties, his impulse is to lie.

Beset by another wave of Covid, by falling living standards and a gloomy economic outlook the voters of North Shropshire called time on the mendacity and hypocrisy. It is one thing for a prime minister to bend the truth, another for him to live it up with chums while telling everyone else  they must stick to the rules.

There should be no surprise Tory MPs they have put Johnson on notice. His relationship with his party has always been strictly transactional. Just as there is no political philosophy that could be given the name Johnsonism, so there is no Johnson gang on the Conservative benches. He is not much liked, and that is a polite way of putting it. The bargain is a simple one: The party will back him for as long as it thinks he is a winner. And not a minute more.

He knows this. No 10 aides say Johnson’s present mood veers from rage to paranoia - rage because he has lost his touch, paranoia because he now believes, and rightly so, that cabinet colleagues are actively preparing for the leadership contest that would follow his defenestration. A former journalist, he fulminates against the media. The government is in trouble because the people are being given the wrong story he protested in a damning interview with Sky News. Donald Trump must be proud of his pupil

Johnson has always been unfit for high political office, as incompetent as he is dishonest.  Beyond Brexit - an exercise in self-harm set to make the UK at once poorer, less secure in its own union of nations, and weaker abroad - he has nothing to say. By reneging on the Brexit terms agreed with Britain’s neighbours he has shattered the nation’s international standing. Now he is too weak to force a confrontation with Brussels and simultaneously too weak to defy his party’s Brexit ultras and strike a pragmatic deal.

Johnson has been found out.  The citizens of North Shropshire voted in favour of basic decency as much as against the Conservative party they have backed for the past 200 years. Johnson may hang on to office for a while. Not least because those who want rid of him are uncertain about the succession. They recoil from the possibility of prime minister Liz Truss or, heaven forfend, Priti Patel. What’s clear though is that the Johnson premiership is over. The only remaining question is how much more damage he does before he departs.