As much as we might love to be done with Boris Johnson, sadly he is not done with us

There is no doubting that he has his eye on a possible vacant leader-of-the-opposition slot in 18 months or so’s time. And who knows, he’ll probably get it, writes Tom Peck

Would everything be better if we just ignored the man? (PA)

Boris Johnson likes to have a Big Week. In his first proper week as prime minister, he called the cameras in to Downing Street and then forgot to threaten to call an election. Then he kicked Ken Clarke and another 20 of his own MPs out of the party. Then his own brother resigned from the cabinet. And then he forced 40 junior police officers to stand in full sun behind him for so long that one of them fainted on live TV and the chief constable lodged a formal complaint.

That was considered a big deal at the time. Then, about six months later, he nearly died, came back to work, and announced he’d had a baby. (It was, in fact, an even bigger week than was realised at the time, for while he’d been in intensive care, Dominic Cummings had been in Barnard Castle.)

So how does this one compare? You wake up in Las Vegas to find out the police are investigating you, yet again – this time for yet more alleged illegal parties while you were prime minister, and another one at Chequers, so it’s definitely not just the No 10 press office getting a bit rowdy.

They’ve only got wind of it because you won’t pay for your own lawyers to defend you over the very obvious lies you told the House of Commons – about the parties you didn’t know had happened even though you were at them – and the taxpayer-funded ones are duty-bound to tell them. You’ve sacked those lawyers, and you, an actual former prime minister, are now threatening to sue the civil service for having the temerity to do what is very plainly its job.

You’re also refusing to hand over evidence to the official Covid inquiry into what you did while prime minister. Oh, and there’s another baby coming, and you’ve spent a lot of money on a very big house with a moat, but at least, according to the local newspaper, you don’t appear to be able to walk down the high street without angry residents telling you to please go and live somewhere else. (Your response, by the way, is to tell them to “go and have a drink”.)

Does any of it matter? Do we perhaps just have to wean ourselves off our addiction to the rolling Johnson soap opera? Would everything be better if we just ignored the man?

No, sadly not. As much as we might love to be done with Boris Johnson, sadly he is not done with us. It is well known that Johnson has no actual “friends” in Westminster, principally because anyone loyal to him is, by necessity, extremely stupid, and he, for all his faults, is not stupid, and so he quietly loathes them (see: Nadine Dorries).

But these friends are still very happy to, for example, hold deranged fan conventions in his honour, to which he is happy to donate signed bottles of wine, and which constitute his first certain steps back to what he still thinks is going to be the big time.

And when, for example, Daniel Hannan writes such things as “a sitting prime minister was removed over uneaten cake on the advice of a civil servant who, it later emerged, was planning to work for the leader of the opposition”, it is obviously complete garbage, but it is a true reflection of how Johnson feels.

The fact that said civil servant, Sue Gray, didn’t even investigate the most damning aspects of the Partygate saga – namely the parties in the Downing Street flat – is not a truth that he is capable of hearing. That he was removed as prime minister for one reason and one reason only: that his party correctly calculated that he had very publicly told so many very obvious lies that there was simply no way any sane voter could ever again believe a word he said, and that therefore he was no longer an electoral asset but a complete liability.

But he doesn’t see it that way. He’s already said, on many occasions, that it was only after they got rid of him that the polling collapsed, though he carefully omits the rather important detail that it was largely through his connivance that he was replaced not by Rishi Sunak, who is doing a passable job, but by Liz Truss, who did not.

No, there is no doubting that he is not done, that he has his eye on a possible vacant leader-of-the-opposition slot in 18 months or so’s time. And who knows, he’ll probably get it. The Tory party only really knows one thing to do in an emergency. It did it in 2019, and there’s no reason to think it wouldn’t consider doing it again.

There will, no doubt, be other Big Weeks to come, from the man who still, even now, cannot be ignored.