The last days of Boris Johnson

A liar until the end, even now Johnson struggles to suppress a smirk

A liar in the throes of being laid low by his lies. Britain may at last be rediscovering that honesty and integrity matter in politics. My sense is that Conservative MPs have already made up their minds that Boris Johnson must go. The remaining hesitations are about timing and the succession.

By the account of some who work closely with him in Downing Street, the prime minister actually feels aggrieved by the latest furore. Truth after all was the first casualty of his premiership. Whether personal life or politics, lying in the cause of self-advancement is part of his very being - rooted in an over-weaning sense of entitlement. And the lies during the past several years have been unabashedly blatant. 

Now, though, Johnson considers he is being hounded in the House of Commons for what, by his lights, was no more than a “piffling fib” about a few harmless parties in Downing Street during the Covid lockdown. He feels rather like the mafia mobster arraigned for fiddling his taxes. Even as he goes through the motions of apologising, he struggles to suppress a smirk.

In one narrow respect he has a point. The other lies - and they are too numerous to count - have certainly been big. They have sought to deny the calamitous costs of Britain’s departure from the European Union, have played politics with peace in Northern Ireland, and covered up his attempts to extract cash from Tory donors to meet his personal expenses. The effect has been to debase standards in public life and hold up the nation to international scorn.

During 70 years as constitutional monarch Queen Elizabeth has seen her share of venal prime ministers come and go. None, so far as anyone can tell, has lied to her face as did Johnson when he sought to shut down parliamentary debate about Brexit.

The prime minister has never believed in anything but his own advancement. Being “King” is all that matters. He has no vision or ambition for his tenure save that he remain in Downing Street for as long as it suits him. No 10 officials say he rarely reads official papers and pays careless attention to policy decisions.

He is animated only by ideas that might shore up his support on the Tory back benches. The plan to render unwanted refugees to camps in Rwanda was just a particularly egregious example. The latest threat to tear up the Northern Ireland Brexit agreement he negotiated and signed with Brussels is a measure of how far he is prepared to go.

For all his privileged education (and he really hates to be reminded that he was awarded a second class degree at Oxford) Johnson lacks intelligence. He is quick - clever even - but he mistakes tactical swerves for strategy. The lies, one senior official says, are in part a lazy substitute for thinking things through. 

This may explain why Johnson has never grasped the strength of the popular anger at the No 10 lockdown parties and his attempts to deny them. In his mind, Covid rules, like truth, were always for the “little people”. The fact that they gave up the chance to nurse their families or to say goodbye to dying loved ones has no read across to the partying of the privileged in Downing St. 

Yet in blatantly flouting the rules - and then lying about it - Johnson put up in lights the arrogant entitlement that has defined his premiership. Many voters have been ready to overlook what they regard as “political” lies about Brexit and the rest. But Johnson’s behaviour during lockdown held up these same voters to contempt and ridicule. There is lying, you see, and there is lying about things that really matter to people. The Tory MPs now preparing to defenestrate him have understood this. They chose him because he could win. Now they see a loser as well as a liar.

Johnson, of course, will fight for his job until the end. He still practises his Churchill mannerisms when he passes a mirror. Craving adulation, his only option now is to believe his own lies. He has nothing else. No friends to speak of, nothing by way of a reputation to burnish. 

We are now in the dying days of his premiership. Predictions are always risky, but I would be surprised if Conservative MPs humour his delusions much beyond May’s local elections. The chancellor Rishi Sunak’s self-immolation makes it hard to forecast a successor. The certainty is that the longer they wait, the more damage the Tories inflict on their future electoral prospects.