Boris Johnson got a lot of things wrong – but there were some things he got right as prime minister

John Rentoul asks how the outgoing prime minister will be remembered. Brexit is key to the answer

‘Getting Brexit done’ was Boris Johnson’s major project (Getty/PA)

One observer surveyed the wreckage of John Major’s government after Tony Blair swept to power: “Politics is a constant repetition, in cycles of varying length, of one of the oldest myths in human culture, of how we make kings for our societies, and how after a while we kill them to achieve a kind of rebirth.” So wrote Boris Johnson, The Daily Telegraph’s star columnist, on 25 June 1997.

That reference to “cycles of varying lengths” has come clanging back to ring in his ears, as he has been pushed out of office years before his time – in his opinion at least. But the Johnson of a quarter-century ago had no sympathy for his later self: “Some of the kings are innocent; indeed, some of them take away the sins of the world.” A shockingly Christian sentiment, that.

“Some of them are less innocent, like Mr Aitken,” he went on, alluding to Jonathan, the Conservative former minister, whose libel action against The Guardian, which had told the truth about his dealings, had just collapsed. “It doesn’t really matter. They must die,” Johnson concluded.

Now he has died, politically, and he is not happy about it. So unhappy that he seems intent on extending the Lamb of God metaphor, not just taking upon him the sins of the world, but also imagining a second coming to right the wrongs that have been inflicted on him by the traitors among his own followers. Hasta la vista, baby, as the Bible says in the original Aramaic.

He said when he was about eight that he wanted to be “world king” when he grew up, Rachel Johnson, his sister, told us the year before he became prime minister. His whole career has been attended by a sense of destiny, unsubtly encouraged by the destinee himself, who published his The Churchill Factor in 2014, halfway through his second term as mayor of London.

Yet his contribution to world history was completed within six months of his becoming prime minister. Most prime ministers get only a single word or phrase attached to their name in history, and his will be “Brexit”. It was a remarkable achievement, which had seemed impossible for some time, but even for those who believed in it, the reality failed to live up to the promise. The form of hard Brexit that Johnson was forced to adopt has left the UK’s relationship with the EU unfinished; it will probably have to be recalibrated again.

More immediately, Johnson then found himself suffering the opposite of the “you had one job” syndrome that did for Theresa May. She failed to deliver Brexit, so she had to go. He delivered Brexit, but then what was the point of him?

All he had was that he was a vote-winner, with a thin slogan about “levelling up”. He had set out a plausible centrist programme, very Blairite, in his election manifesto: big spending increases on the NHS, schools and the police, but he didn’t particularly believe in it or argue for it.

In any case, his government was almost immediately overwhelmed by the coronavirus. He didn’t handle it badly, deferring to his scientific advisers and approving early big bets on vaccines. In the final analysis, comparing excess deaths, the UK’s record was average, and the reasons for variations between countries are still poorly understood. But the myth formed instantly in March 2020 that Johnson had been “too slow” to lock down, and the nature of Brexit was that half the country was predisposed to believe the worst of him.

He got through it, though, boosted by the success of the vaccines. It wasn’t until the crisis was more or less over that he was caught out by a long-delayed report of a party in No 10 a year before. The feeling that Johnson and his staff thought there was one rule for them and a different rule for the rest of us, which had been primed by Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s chief adviser, when he fled to Durham during the first lockdown, undermined Johnson’s support among the pro-Brexit half of the country. Many Remainers had thought Johnson was untrustworthy, but now a large section of Leavers also felt that he hadn’t been straight with them.

Suddenly, the only reason the Conservative party had for keeping him as leader – that he was an election winner – no longer applied. The idea that he had some special appeal to the British people was in any case overstated. He had the advantage in 2019 that Jeremy Corbyn had become unpopular, and that getting Brexit done was a message that made sense to Leaver and moderate Remainer alike. With those gone, and no great national mission to pursue, he was dangerously exposed.

His attempts in his last few days in No 10 to set out his achievements revealed how short a three-year spell as prime minister really is. “I did deliver what I said I was going to do,” he told the Daily Express last week. “Our goals were to deliver Brexit, unite the party, defeat Corbyn and energise the country and I think we did that.”

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Late in the day, he tried to claim that supplying money and arms to Ukraine was a great moral cause, but however much most voters agreed with it, it wasn’t Britain’s war of national survival. In his final week, he tried to push through a new nuclear power station at Sizewell, but failed to overcome the objections of the Treasury that this would constrain the public finances for his successor. Brexit aside, he has ticked off little substantial from history’s to-do list.

By the end, his lifetime’s assumption that the normal rules didn’t apply to him, which had served him so well, served him badly. He welcomed chaos because he thought it created opportunities. It was, after all, how he got Brexit done. As Tom Peck, my colleague, said at the time: “There was no darkest hour waiting for him, so he switched off the lights himself.”

That should be his epitaph, because despite his belief that he had been betrayed, he was the author of his own downfall. He seemed to relish adversity as if he thought it made him stronger. Instead, the wallpaper, Owen Paterson, the fixed penalty notices and Chris Pincher just helped to ensure his premiership was brought to a premature end.

He still seems to believe that he will bounce back somehow. A bit like Churchill perhaps, who came back as prime minister when he was old and useless, after his opponents had blown themselves out in government. Without anything to match Churchill’s achievement in the first place, however, any attempt at a Boris restoration would be a pitiful thing.