The volley of boos that rang out as he headed into St Paul’s Cathedral to celebrate the Queen ’s Jubilee last month were the beginning of the end for Boris Johnson.
Savaged by revelations he had partied while people were barred from seeing dying loved ones and heavily wounded by the perception he was too aloof to grasp the severity of the cost-of-living crisis, he had been a dead man walking for months.
But in truth, anyone who had followed his career knew it was only a matter of time before the people who needed to trust him would lose patience with this serial liar and shameless rule-breaker and dump him.
The indefensible can only be defended for so long and the lies over deputy chief whip Chris Pincher that finally led to his downfall typified his contempt for the truth.
It’s been the story of his life.
Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson was to many Tories a charismatic, vote-winning breath of fresh air, but to most observers outside that circle he was a shallow, disloyal, deceitful, narcissistic phoney, utterly convinced he was born to rule and prepared to crush anyone and anything, including his nation’s best interests, to achieve that goal.
As Conservative Party grandee Michael Heseltine famously said of the lifelong chancer. “He is a man who waits to see which way the crowd is running, then dashes in front and says ‘follow me’”.
When Johnson was elected to lead the Tories back in 2019 after the turgid reign of Theresa May, those who had followed his career understood why the party faithful had fallen for his well-practised charms and overlooked the fact he was the laziest and most duplicitous Foreign Secretary in living memory.
But we wondered if there would be enough removal vans to carry all of his baggage into Downing Street. This was, after all, a man who had been sacked twice for lying. As a Times journalist for inventing a quote from his godfather in a front-page article and as Shadow Arts Minister by Tory leader Michael Howard for describing an extra-marital affair with Spectator columnist Petronella Wyatt as an “inverted pyramid of piffle.”
Howard also sent him up to Liverpool to grovel to the people when, as Spectator editor, he published an obscenely inaccurate article accusing drunken Reds fans of causing the Hillsborough disaster.
As the Daily Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent he invented malicious half-truths about the EU to, in his words, “create a new reality”.
He attacked climate change and the minimum wage and once promised to give convicted fraudsters the address of a journalist so he could be beaten up. He also called Labour ’s repeal of Section 28 “appalling” and joked about “tanktopped bum-boys.”
He used his £275,000-a-year Daily Telegraph column (a sum he derided as “chickenfeed”) to play to the racist gallery by likening Muslim women in burkas to bank robbers. He called Africans “piccaninnies” with “water melon smiles”, claimed apartheid was a “minor tyranny” and referred to Barack Obama’s “part-Kenyan ancestry” as some sort of stigma.
Small wonder that his one-time editor at the Telegraph, Max Hastings, said when he became Tory leader: “There is room for debate about whether he is a scoundrel or mere rogue, but not much about his moral bankruptcy, rooted in a contempt for the truth. He is unfit for national office because he cares for no interest save his own fame and gratification.”
The Old Etonian likes to cite his time as London mayor as one of unbridled success but his one achievement, so-called Boris Bikes, were Ken Livingstone’s idea. His plan for a garden bridge was dropped before it started, costing rate-payers more than £50million. And after the Grenfell Tower blaze, footage surfaced of him telling a politician who challenged the wisdom of his fire service cuts to “get stuffed.”
His two years as Foreign Secretary were an embarrassing shambles. His maiden speech urged people to march on Russia ’s London Embassy in protest at Syrian air strikes. Moscow called him a clown.
He made a joke about “dead bodies” in Libya, insulted people in Myanmar by reciting an “inappropriate” colonialist poem, and wrongly called imprisoned British-Iranian mother Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe a journalist, leading to her jail sentence being prolonged.
It was over Brexit that the shameless opportunist, who as London mayor was a staunch Remainer, eyed a chance to swifty ascend the greasy pole. Prior to announcing where he stood on the referendum he wrote two newspaper columns, one against Brexit, the other for it, and only sided with Leave after calculating it was best for his leadership credentials.
During the campaign he lied about repatriating £350milllion a week to the NHS, accused EU leaders of wanting a Hitler-style European superstate and bragged about Brussels having to “go whistle” for any divorce bill payment because he was “pro having cake and pro eating it”.
From brushing off fears of the impact of no-deal with the words “f*** business” to saying he knew more about the effect of Brexit on car sales than the head of Jaguar Land Rover and comparing the Irish border issue with London’s congestion zone, Johnson was exposed as being dangerously out of his depth.
But the blue-rinsed party faithful loved his anti-European belligerence, as did much of the Leave-voting public and the boy who once vowed to one day be King of the World was soon running the country.
Yet, despite having a thumping majority and getting Brexit over the line, the self-inflicted wounds kept coming, culminating in his inevitable resignation.
He was accused of lying to the Queen over the advice he gave her on suspending parliament for five weeks and a repeated pledge to build 40 new hospitals was shown to be false.
He deceived the people of Northern Ireland over the protocol agreement with the EU and misled the UK’s fishermen over Brexit winning back our waters. He promised to “take back control” of our borders, but tens of thousands of migrants arrived in boats.
His flagship levelling-up policy amounted to nothing but soundbites, especially when he scrapped major transport schemes set to benefit the north.
His initial handling of the Covid pandemic was viewed as shambolic and cost thousands of unnecessary deaths as he repeatedly missed Cobra meetings and arrogantly refused to follow scientific guidance.
He was mired in sleaze over multi-million pound contracts handed to Tory donors and his catastrophic attempt to get his lobbyist pal Owen Paterson off the hook.
He was twice forced into u-turns by footballer Marcus Rashford over giving free school meals to the poorest kids, repeatedly appointed third-rate colleagues to his Cabinet so he would not be overshadowed, and oversaw a costly Test and Trace disaster.
Then there was the Daily Mirror’s revelation of Downing Street parties held at a time when the rest of the country was being told they could not socialise with friends or visit dying relatives.
How ironic that the brains behind him winning the referendum and a general election, Dominic Cummings, should be the man behind the drip-drip campaign to oust him. The adviser Johnson defended when he served up a fantasy about his Covid rule-breaking trip to Barnard Castle, who destroyed his former boss by repeatedly exposing his own lies during the pandemic.
So how will Johnson be remembered? By many Tories and Vote Leavers as a hero who took on the might of the European superstate and liberated his country by delivering Brexit.
But by most of the country as a lying, self-serving charlatan who squirmed into the highest office due to the cowardice of weak Tory leaders and disillusioned Brussels-haters.
A con-artist whose every political decision was taken not in the interests of his country but himself.
