Boris Johnson became prime minister on the back of his personality, and his personality is why he has now been driven from the job. While his image was, to no small extent, a brilliantly constructed artifact, some Falstaff, some Wooster, some skillfully curated erudition, some great jokes, and more than a touch of the card, it worked well in the media where he made his name and, eventually, in the political arena on which this profoundly ambitious man had long set his sights. “Boris” — few British politicians are popularly known by their first name — won election and then reelection as mayor of London at a time when no other Tory could. It is also highly unlikely that Brexiteers would have prevailed in the June 2016 referendum without Johnson having taken the role that he did, a decision that owed as much to his determination to clear the way to Number 10 as to any great distaste for the EU, an institution that he found more ridiculous than oppressive.
Once the hapless Theresa May had been pushed out of the way, Johnson became prime minister and, as in London, quickly showed how he was able to reach across established party lines. “Boris” built an electoral coalition between long-standing Tories in the south and traditionally Labour voters further to the north, winning the Conservatives their biggest general-election majority since Mrs. Thatcher’s heyday and, crucially, seeing off the genuinely dangerous Jeremy Corbyn in the process. He also (more or less: there is the small matter of Northern Ireland) got Brexit done, delivering on the promise that did much to get him elected. He can claim considerable credit for Britain’s successful vaccine rollout. He took a leading role in rallying support behind Ukraine, something for which Volodymyr Zelensky thanked him yesterday. All that matters — and it matters a lot — but it’s still not hard to think that Johnson squandered his majority. Never a convincing man of the Right, his approach to the economy has been interventionist, extravagant, and, for taxpayers, ruinously expensive. By doubling down on his predecessor’s feckless commitment to net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions within an unrealistically short time, he has set the stage for eventual economic and political disaster. No one was better equipped than Boris to take on the woke, but, mostly out of cowardice and laziness, he declined to do so.
His mistaken policies as well as an absence of any obvious administrative skills helped erode his support, but Johnson’s downfall ultimately owed more to his failings than his failures. Self-centered, serenely uninterested in the rules by which lesser mortals are expected to play, and with an attitude to the truth of almost postmodern flexibility, he has drifted into scandal after scandal, none of them of huge significance in themselves, but almost all of them made worse by evasion and deception. Conservative MPs had every reason to expect more of the same, and with hard economic times ahead, and an electorate — having seen too much of the trickster behind the mask — wearying of Boris’s shtick, they decided, understandably enough, that it was time for him to go. However, having dispensed with the knave who was for a while also their ace, the Tories now must find a leader who can revive an electoral coalition that only Boris could ever have built. Good luck with that.