Revealed: the person responsible for the fall of Boris Johnson

Of the many strange things that  happened in the last few weeks, while I was away in Italy, perhaps the strangest thing of all was the publication of a string of reports suggesting Boris Johnson will be back in Number 10 as Prime Minister before the year is out. Cripes. Just when you thought the old boy was a goner, back he springs to life, as if in a scene from Stranger Things, the Netflix science fiction series involving monsters, lies, parallel universes and the Russians.

It was reported this week that a petition demanding a vote on Johnson’s return has attracted many thousands of signatures from Tory members. Boris, it was said, supported the efforts of campaigners seeking his reinstallation. Lord Cruddas, a Tory donor and friend of Johnson, is leading the campaign. My old friend Christopher Hope of the Telegraph has reported all this.

What was going on here? Is a return of Boris credible?

No, it is not. The Westminster establishment enabled, or allowed, through a series of accidents and misjudgements, the unthinkable to happen. Johnson became Prime Minister when the parliamentary system – which in 2018-19 was captured by those trying to reverse the Brexit referendum – had got stuck. Once in office in 2019, he drove his opponents round the twist (a key Boris skill) until they could not think straight and then gave him what he wanted, and they had originally set out to deny him, a general election in late 2019. With sufficient numbers of voters, almost 14m in the Tory case, having had enough of the efforts to block Brexit, and fearing the election of a Marxist maniac Jeremy Corbyn as PM, Boris won a majority of 80. Britain left the EU.

The Westminster establishment having allowed Johnson to become PM once is not about to make the same mistake again. The investigation by MPs into whether or not he misled parliament looks like a classic grandee operation. The result will be, presumably, that he has behaved appallingly and will have no choice other than to leave the Commons or face sanctions. Short of starting his own party to win a new seat, which is far too much like hard work, or standing as an independent, he will not have a constituency and cannot be Prime Minister. They’ll get him. And he’ll go off to make many millions.

But that the fantasy of a return to Number 10 is even being talked about by his friends tells us how Boris, a journalist and popular historian with a sketchy grasp of the facts, will attempt to reframe the story of his own fall as an injustice. His hero Churchill said history is written by the winners, and after 1945 he said he intended to write it, establishing his version as the standard narrative.

Boris, once a winner, now a loser forced out, is constructing his own loser’s version of history in which he, the self-styled great man, was removed unfairly in the middle of his great work, by a combination of the nasty media and dreadful plotters, and jealous fools, among them Remainers who see it as an essential first step to rejoining the EU.

The Cruddas campaign to bring back Boris fits the revisionist pattern. They had lunch and it is said that as the conversation flowed, Cruddas explained to Boris how badly he had been treated. The members were furious at being denied his leadership, he said. Boris did not resist when told how great he supposedly is and how horribly he had been treated. If he could wipe away his resignation he would, said Boris. Cruddas then told Hope of the Telegraph. It continued building from there.

The grown up approach by Boris (yeah, right) would have been to discourage Cruddas. He did not, and now Cruddas, a determined and wealthy man, is pursuing the Conservative party with questions about its constitution. This will not end well, for the Conservative party.

Simultaneously, some of Boris’s friends and most loyal advisors bruised by the defenestration of their boss have been saying MPs have made a mistake and will come crawling back to Johnson once they realise the extent of their folly. People experiencing political trauma – the destruction of an enterprise, the brutal reordering of power – often say such stuff, to give expression to their hurt feelings as colleagues lose their jobs and the superstructure collapses. You’ll miss us when we’re gone, and all that.

As ever with Boris Johnson, the aim of all this theatre is to create maximum confusion, a rhetorical smokescreen distracting his critics and pursuers, in the hope no-one notices the truth.

The truth is there is only one person to blame for the fall of Boris Johnson. That is Boris Johnson.

This must be said firmly every time he claims otherwise. It was not Rishi Sunak, or the newspapers, or Remainers. Not the BBC either.

Tory MPs weren’t gleeful. They were so reluctant to commit regicide they took ages to act, even when they knew he was hopeless at the business of government and could not change. Last August I wrote they were thinking about the future beyond Boris, but if he had handled the period from October until last month in an orderly fashion, and not committed lunatic error after lunatic error, he could have prolonged his premiership. 

Johnson was elected with a majority of 80. Having been lucky in facing Corbyn and Labour reduced to a rabble, he should have rapidly realised he needed to get ultra-serious, fast. Instead, he was bafflingly sporadic. In the early days of the pandemic the response was slow, as he first disappeared then scrambled. After nearly dying he caught up with vaccines. Only on Ukraine did he see it all early on and pursue the right policy paying proper attention to detail.

He may, as his supporters have said, got some of the big calls right. Yet it cannot disguise the essential reality that on numerous important day to day subjects his approach was entirely unsuited to high office.

The extent to which Britain under Johnson did not have a functioning government, in a meaningful, traditional sense, is not yet fully understood. Wait for the memoirs of those who witnessed the chaos close up and speak of him as someone with the attention span of a goldfish or a magazine editor looking for the next novelty and arresting headline.

If you doubt this – and you’re crying “yer, but, no, but, what about the Covid vaccines?” – please consider the energy crisis and his epic failure of leadership just this year. It is the perfect example of his idiotic style colliding, with calamitous results, with real world problems affecting the public.

Early this year, it was obvious there was going to be an energy crisis. The bounce back from Covid globally was driving steep price rises and there was a war coming in Ukraine. Boris knew there was a war coming, and that would hit gas and oil prices, because MI6 and the CIA had told him, and rightly he and others tried to warn the EU, which wouldn’t listen. So, he knew and had a head start.

In those early months of the year there were numerous voices telling government in public and private that the crisis merited an emergency approach. The government needed to start immediately and be reorganised around increasing security of supply, beginning work on better storage that might take a year or two, and also getting energy from every source possible. Coal, fracking, put it all on the table. Germany is back to coal. There needed to be public information films prepared on reducing energy use. Insulation. Energy efficiency. Conserve energy. Let’s get the country ready to get through the winter.

In Germany, where the shortages will be most severe, and policy has gone most badly wrong, their government is levelling with the public. The British leadership class has barely engaged with the voters on this, and in the Tory leadership debate it has hardly been acknowledged. With electricity prices heading this winter towards three or four times those last winter, the country will be in social unrest territory. Millions of families will be tipped into fuel poverty.

A Margaret Thatcher or a Gordon Brown would have gripped this in January, February or March, and started preparing, chairing the key meetings, ordering work flows and research, asking the right questions, quickening the pulse of ministers and officials.

Boris was genetically incapable of that, even if he hadn’t been distracted by the war and the mess of Partygate, another product of his slapdash attitudes. On energy, he was basking in the afterglow of the Cop26 summit and going green. Warnings were waved away by ministers who picked up the vibe from Boris that Cop26 had been so cool and that meant energy was sorted, sod the complexities about needing more fossil fuels now, and trying to keep old people heated and alive this winter. In this way, an opportunity to prepare for a crisis, to get ahead of it an organised fashion, was missed. Classic half-arsed Boris. Eventually, enough Tory MPs realised that this is no way to run a country. He had to go and when he tries to rewrite history the response should be swift, polite and robust.

Don’t let him tell you otherwise. “Tough bananas, Julius,” Mel Brooks said when describing the fall of Caesar. Tough bananas, Boris. He destroyed himself.

Boris brought down Boris.

Liz Truss’s secret

One of the rarest qualities in those who pursue public office is the capacity for growth and development, by which I mean most politicians aspiring to the higher offices reach a ceiling of development. And then they’re stuck.

When the Tory leadership campaign began, the Foreign Secretary’s performances were wooden and shaky. It looked as though she might be forced out by the emergence of Penny Mordaunt or another.

Three weeks later, she looks like a candidate transformed. It’s not just that she has taken the advice of spindoctors and learned how to appear more at ease. That’s standard issue public relations. It’s much more than that – she’s grown politically sharper by the day, outwitting the theoretically smoother Rishi Sunak and drawing him in to attacks that  backfired. When among Tory members he had a reputation, unfair or otherwise, as a divisive figure due to his campaign against Boris Johnson, he needed to aim high and try to unify. The Foreign Secretary set him up. He attacked. She grew in stature.

Her secret, a secret weapon, is that she listens, learns, adapts and gets stronger.

None of this is a guarantee of success, of course. Anyone coming to office in the midst of the coming economic crisis could be knocked over by inflation or public anger on energy bills, or a government scandal. Formidable forces will be arrayed against her willing her to fail, hoping she can’t grow into the job of PM. The rise of Truss is horrifying, stunning, astonishing to those (many of them men) who have long written her off as a joke. They’re not laughing now.

Hymn to Turin

Having chosen to go to Italy in July on the basis that nothing much happens in July, and it’s too hot there in August, I spent half of our family holiday on WhatsApp and Twitter following the national meltdown. How long ago it now seems that John Baron MP (who?) announced on the BBC’s Politics Live show he was considering a run for the Tory leadership. Is he still thinking?

The revelation of our long postponed post-pandemic grand tour was Turin. After a night or two in crazy Naples, then the idyllic Palazzo Belmonte on the coast south of Salerno, we hopped by train to Florence, and then on for one day to take a look at Turin, always having passed it by.

Wow. It is Italy’s most elegant city. The famous grid system with wide avenues and nearly 20km of porticos means the visitor can walk most of the centre in the shade. There’s the opera house, the Egyptian Museum, and extraordinary food and wine.

A local who works in finance told me the place is, like many cities, trying to reinvent itself post-industrialisation. In its pomp (see the Italian Job caper, filmed there in 1969) the place was powered by the car industry. Now, Milan, less than an hour away by fast train, is preeminent because finance matters more. Turin is trying to do more on the arts, and property is much less expensive than Milan. A young professional can work in Milan and live in the superior, cheaper Turin in the shadow of the Alps. I’m sure someone from Milan will contest this analysis, but from now on give me Turin every time.

What I’m reading

On holiday I found it difficult to concentrate on works of non-fiction. Every time I got going on reading something historical, another person fell over in the Tory leadership race and the contemporary drama pulled me back in. 

The book that made all that disappear, that got me in a completely different head space, in modern parlance, was Love in the Time of Bertie, the latest, the 15th novel, in Alexander (Sandy) McCall Smith’s 44 Scotland Street series that has been going for nearly 20 years. I was part of the team at The Scotsman that first started running Scotland Street as a daily serial novel, in the style of Dickens. Not much has given me greater professional pleasure than being involved in a small way at the start.

The characters live in and around Scotland Street, in the New Town. Young Bertie, with his insufferable mother Irene and put upon father Stuart, is the star, but there is a wide cast of regulars and sometimes new figures arriving. Even in Edinburgh there are sometimes new people. On one level it’s a gentle read, providing a welcome and humorous break from the technicolor vulgarity of digital life. Scotland Street is much more than that though. There are regular diversions in the direction of history, ethics and philosophy, and jokes at the expense of Glasgow and Aberdeen.

Ultimately, Scotland Street is about love, that is love of Scotland and love as the most powerful and important force that shapes our lives. Love in the Time of Bertie closes with a poem at dinner from Angus Lordie. That is Angus Lordie, “portrait painter, citizen of Edinburgh, husband of Domenica Macdonald and owner (custodian, perhaps, according to modern sensibilities) of Cyril, the only dog in Scotland with a gold tooth.” Love, says Angus, is at the heart of the lives of all of us, whether we know it or not.

Having finished listening to his poem, the guests at dinner sit in silence at dusk as a lone piper in the gardens outside plays a final tune. It is the end, writes Sandy McCall Smith: “For the time being at least.”