Them’s the breaks. This wasn’t quite the exit Boris Johnson had in mind. He had imagined three days of national mourning. Punctuated with several leaving speeches that left them laughing, left them crying. A nation prostrate with grief.
Instead he had to make do with a perfunctory 10 minutes first thing in the morning, when many people were still in bed. The only thing the day had going for it was at least the rain held off. Small mercies. Sometimes you have to learn to take what you can get.
Still, The Convict’s departure didn’t go entirely unnoticed. A large coterie of Johnson loyalists emerged from their bunker to witness the short goodbye. Even though they had only been invited to make up the numbers, they all looked thrilled to be there.
Jacob Rees-Mogg appeared with his son. Michael Fabricant appeared with his hair. Grant Shapps appeared with Michael Green. Michael Ellis appeared without his self worth. That went long ago during one of the many times he was asked to defend Johnson in the Commons. Nadine Dorries appeared with her coronet. After a nano-second’s fight with her conscience she had decided to accept a peerage and leave cabinet.
Downing Street fell silent as Johnson and Carrie, who looked as if she had just come from Coachella, came out of the front door of No 10. The Convict looked vaguely disturbed, as if he couldn’t quite believe his reckoning was finally at hand. Somehow he had clung to the hope it had all been a bad joke and that the Tory party would come to their senses and beg him to stay. His eyes darted around, searching for a saviour to rise from the streets. None came.
“This is it, folks,” Johnson began. It was time for him to pass on the baton. Even though no one had told him it was a relay race. And someone had changed the rules halfway through. They hadn’t of course. No one had changed any rules. Though The Convict had certainly broken enough. Meet the new Boris. Exactly the same as the old Boris. A whining, bad-tempered, self-pitying narcissist. Playing the victim card to the last.
There was no expression of remorse. No empathy for people wondering how they were going to pay their bills. No apology for having done nothing for the past few months.
Je ne regrette rien. No recognition that he and he alone was the architect of his downfall. It had been he who had repeatedly broken the law. It had been he who had lied and lied and lied. It had been he who had tried to cover up financial and sexual misconduct by MPs in his own party. The only real question he should have been asking himself was why it had taken so long for the Tory party to get rid of him. But no. He had been grievously wronged and revenge would be his.
Johnson wittered on in his boosterish fashion, listing his triumphs. Mostly imagined. Brexit. Because that’s gone so well. He had single-handedly saved Ukraine. He had built nurses, doctors, hospitals and nuclear reactors. He had fixed social care. Just by having mentioned it once. To be fair, it was more of a speech than Liz Truss had made the day before – this one had a recognisable beginning, middle and end – but it was still piss poor. At best delusional. And then only if you reckon The Convict no longer knows when he is lying.
The deceit was maintained to the end. He would be giving Truss his undivided support. That would be a first. Loyalty is a one-sided concept for Johnson. He would, like Cincinnatus, return to his plough. Though, like Cincinnatus, he would also be happy to return as a dictator. He concluded by thanking Dilyn the dog. Presumably for shitting all over the carpets and waiting for staff to clean up after him. Like dog, like owner.
After the Queen had done her bit in Balmoral – Liz, meet Liz – Truss flew back down to London to install herself in Downing Street. Like most things Radon Liz touches, it proved to be totally underwhelming. Still, at least we now know she wasn’t saving herself for the main job during the two-month leadership campaign. She had been hiding in plain sight. She really is as useless as she had first appeared. What you see is what you get.
Later than planned, Nadhim Zahawi, James Cleverly, Ben Wallace and a whole raft of sycophantic backbenchers filled the street. Only to disappear indoors when they got soaked by torrential rain. Truss’s motorcade was left to circle pointlessly around Westminster. Write your own jokes here. Eventually the rain held off and Radon Liz and her husband, Hugh O’Leary, spilled out of the back seat of a Range Rover.
Then Truss delivered her first address to the nation as prime minister. It’s going to be a long couple of years until the next election. We’re going to have to endure a lot of tedium to go alongside the sheer terror of not being able to afford to heat or eat. On the plus side, Librium Liz might prove to be a cure for the country’s neuroses. She is a woman who mainlines a permanent state of detached boredom.
Here was her bold new vision. “Um,” she droned in her familiar emotionless delivery. First she wanted to pay tribute to Johnson. Why? The Tory party had gone to great lengths to remove him, having belatedly realised a line had long since been crossed. Why try to reinvent him as some kind of hero? This though turned out to be the highlight of a desperate speech.
Truss wanted to make us an Aspiration Nation. The same meaningless, dreary soundbite she had used at the hustings. She also wanted to do something about energy bills, do some building and keep an eye on the NHS. Though she didn’t sound that bothered about any of it. There was no sense that she cared or understood people’s desperation. She just looked and sounded like one Tory prime minister too many. Out of ideas. Out of time.
There was just time for her to pose awkwardly on the doorstep with her husband – O’Leary looked as if all his worst nightmares had come true – before Librium Liz went inside. Somewhere in the UK, Johnson put his feet up with a large glass of wine. The day had ended a great deal better than it had started.
