How quickly those who enabled his reckless and dishonest leadership turned against him. What exactly did they expect?
It was never going to happen. Boris Johnson was never going to walk into Downing Street, tuck in his shirt, brush his hair and retire the qualities that had defined his life and career: dishonesty, a lack of seriousness, laziness and amorality. The fact that he was carried into No 10 on a wave of media and political support is an indictment of a political culture that saw all of those qualities and thought, you know what, he’ll do just fine.
He didn’t, of course. And it has been a surreal experience watching a nation seeing “Boris” unravel before them. It has been like watching a play in which the actors continually switch scripts – one minute they are Johnson lovers, the next Johnson haters. Overnight, the politicians who brought him to power, who stood by him at his absolute worst moments, switched parts and soberly resigned in disgust at his actions. Papers that cheered for him as he flew into No 10 and brushed aside his mishandling of the pandemic, turned too. In his final hours, the Daily Mail called him a “greased piglet”, and asked if he could “wriggle out of this”. A more important question should have been asked: who greased him?
