admin
Andrew Rawnsley
The Conservative party deserves not credit for finally ejecting a disgraced prime minister, but criticism for enabling him for so long.
From Margaret Thatcher leaving Number 10 in tears to Gordon Brown holding the hands of his family as he walked down Downing Street into the dusk, the end of a premiership is usually bathed in some pathos.
I have occupied a ringside seat for the involuntary departure of six previous prime ministers and for each of those fallen leaders there were expressions of empathy even from their fiercest opponents.
To this rule as to so many others, Boris Johnson has proved the ignominious exception. His overdue defenestration has been as devoid of dignity and decency as his time at Number 10.
He is the only premier of modern terms to be fired because his lack of basic probity so disgraced the office that even his long-indulgent party could no longer ignore what he was doing to the country, their reputation and their electoral chances.
Tory MPs were aghast, but should not have been surprised, that he sought to cling on even when it was long past obvious that the curtain was crashing down on this tawdry farce. To the last, he had a wanton disregard for anyone’s interests but his own. The result was 40 hours of wild mayhem when he refused to leave even as the government imploded around him. Amidst an unprecedented torrent of ministerial resignations, at one point it looked as though he would try to carry on with Dilyn the Downing Street Dog as chancellor and the rest of the cabinet portfolios shared between Nadine Dorries, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Larry the Cat.
My money was on Larry proving to be the least incompetent. In a final desperate attempt to use a lie to save his own skin, it was put about that he would burn down the house rather than surrender the keys by trying to wrangle a snap election out of the Queen to swerve a fresh no-confidence vote.
At one point it looked as though he would try to carry on with Dilyn the Downing Street Dog as chancellor
When the unspeakable finally bowed to the inevitable, his sour resignation statement contained not a hint of humility, a murmur of recognition that he was the architect of his own downfall.
A bitter address sought to present himself as the victim of bad luck, “relentless sledging” and panicky Tory colleagues.
He and his residual band of apologists are trying to concoct a betrayal myth by depicting him as a titan tragically torn down by pygmies.
The genuine tragedy is that he ever became prime minister in the first place.
When David Cameron and Theresa May announced their resignations, no one questioned their suitability to remain at Number 10 as caretaker premier until a successor was chosen. Mr Johnson has sucked the public trust so bone dry that many in his own party think he is not fit to stay in the building for a day longer.
Character is destiny. As some of us always expected, he was ultimately undone by his amorality, his arrogance, his indiscipline and his duplicity. A career of surviving scandals that would have destroyed anyone else fed his conceit that he was at liberty to break any rule and commit any offence against integrity in public life because he would always manage to blag his way out of the consequences.
Many politicians have a casual relationship with truthfulness, but with him the mendacity was pathologically brazen. One of his former girlfriends, Petronella Wyatt, has remarked: “He can no more help it [lying] than he can help breathing.” His defects were not cunningly masked during his ascent to Downing Street. The Tory party was fully acquainted with his biography of dishonesties and scandal when they handed him the keys to Number 10 three years ago.
They knew who he was. They chose to pawn their party’s soul to the electoral devil to give themselves a better shot at winning in 2019 at the cost to the country of awarding the premiership to a man manifestly unsafe with it. However, they justified themselves then and subsequently, this makes the party collectively complicit in all the squalor that followed.
From the attempt to rig the rules to get Owen Paterson off the hook to the crony express that sped lucrative Covid contracts into the hands of Tory mates, from the flagrant abuse of prime ministerial patronage to rampant law-breaking in Number 10 during some of the most lethal stretches of the pandemic, it has been one abomination after another with the Johnson regime.
From undermining the institutions of democracy to trashing an international treaty that he himself negotiated, his premiership has been characterised by reckless irresponsibility. Tory MPs and cheerleaders in the rightwing media continued to sustain him at the apex of power long after there was no room to doubt that he would explore further depths of degeneracy until he was gone.
◆ Andrew Rawnsley is chief political commentator of the observer.
Online Reporter