Boris Johnson bottles it – again – clearing the way for Rishi Sunak

Do not fall for the former prime minister’s self-serving spin

It was all too predictable. Indeed, it was predicted, because Boris Johnson has done it before. In 2016, winded by his betrayal by Michael Gove, he pulled out of the leadership election rather than risk humiliation.

This time, the humiliation was – if anything – more certain. Johnson sometimes takes risks, and likes to portray himself as up against impossible odds. He did manage to break the deadlock in parliament and to get Brexit done when it didn’t seem likely that he could. But he has a surer grasp of reality than Liz Truss, his chosen instrument for stopping Rishi Sunak.

He must have worked out that he was likely to fall short of the 100 names needed to get on the ballot paper. Ignore his claim that he had 102 MPs already signed up. It is not that it is necessarily untrue, although that is possible. But it is likely that it is an expression of hope, boosterism and interpretation; and that, if Johnson had pushed ahead, large contingents of his ghost army of supporters would have failed to turn up for battle at the appointed hour.

The one thing Johnson was always afraid of was Sir Graham Brady, the chair of the 1922 Committee, reading out the results of the nomination procedure: “Johnson, Boris, 98 nominations.”

Even if he had made it on to the ballot paper, he would have lost the indicative vote of MPs between him and Sunak, and probably quite badly, by about two to one. That vote; the defections of Kemi Badenoch, Suella Braverman and Steve Baker; and the response of the markets, pushing up interest rates again; all could have been enough to sway the party members in the final online vote. The idea that Johnson was a shoo-in if he made it to the members’ stage was always overstated: Sunak won 43 per cent against Truss and is respected by some of her supporters.

But even if Johnson had prevailed among the members, his second premiership would have been broken from the start. His statement tonight was candid and truthful on this point: “You can’t govern effectively unless you have a united party.”

It would not have been possible to run a government without enough supporters among MPs to fill all its posts. Every vote in the Commons would be an uphill struggle against internal rebellion. And he would either be as much a prisoner of Jeremy Hunt at the Treasury as Truss was, or the markets would punish him (and the country).

I wonder if Johnson ever really thought he could do it. Perhaps the boosterish, seize-the-day side of his nature told him that there was a chance it might work, so why not fly back from the Caribbean, as the holiday was almost over anyway? The more calculating part of his nature (recalling Dominic Cummings’s taxonomy of the two Borises) must have thought that it would be worth making himself the centre of national attention for several days, reminding everyone that he could still exert a gravitational pull on British politics – something many people forgot in the final months of his premiership, when he seemed to have gone absent without leave.

He certainly thinks he can defy the big change in politics that happened around the time of Thatcher’s fall. Before then, prime ministers occasionally had another go. Johnson’s hero Churchill did, although it wasn’t much of a model to follow, and Wilson’s second ministry was the last gasp of a pattern that had been almost the norm in the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, when MacDonald and Baldwin alternated for 14 years. Now, the expectation is very much that an ex-PM stays ex.

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He didn’t really think he could overcome that expectation this time. But he still harbours the belief that his time will come again. “I believe I have much to offer, but I’m afraid this is simply not the right time,” he said in his statement tonight. It is not clear when the right time might be. I doubt if he really wants to be leader of the opposition after the next election if the Conservatives lose, but his way of doing politics is to charge forwards, stir things up, retreat tactically and see what happens.

He has made himself the story over the past few days, but we shouldn’t take his self-serving public relations at face value. He has withdrawn because he would be the wrong choice for the country, at this time and any other foreseeable time. He has finally been forced to accept what he has tried to deny for over a year now – ever since he over-promoted Truss to foreign secretary in an attempt to build her up against Sunak.

Sunak is better qualified for the top job than he is – and now even Johnson has told us so.