The prime minister’s exit not only disgraces him and his party – it indicts the fast-unravelling project that brought him to No 10
So Boris Johnson is a remainer after all. Clinging on in No 10, he has, it turns out, the same view of leaving as he does of the rules: that that’s for little people. The one consistent principle of his career has been cakeism, his ardent belief that he alone should be able to have his cake and eat it. And so, true to that spirit even to the last, he has decided both to resign and to remain in office.
Of course, it’s an outrage that he’s still there. Defenders of the Downing Street squatter say it’s no different from the way David Cameron and Theresa May stayed in post while the Tory party – not the country – handpicked a new prime minister. But this situation is wholly different. Johnson has been rejected because his colleagues decided that he lacked the basic integrity to do the job, that he could not be trusted with the keys to the house. By allowing him to stay there, possibly until October, Conservatism’s most senior figures are required once again to parrot nonsense in public, contradicting the words they had uttered no more than a day earlier, just to accommodate him (literally so). Like a vaudeville hypnotist who can make his subjects launch custard pies into their own faces, Johnson’s ability to mesmerise his subordinates into idiocy – even now – is a spectacle to behold.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
Guardian Newsroom: Boris Johnson resigns
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