Boris’s historic humiliation: the fatal flaws that made a wannabe Churchill unfit to be PM

With a historic majority and the full support of his party, the former PM had all the political momentum in the world. So how did he manage to squander it? Andrew Grice explains

Boris Johnson’s apparent belief that rules apply only to other people is a recurring theme in his life (Getty)

Boris Johnson always wanted to be a history maker. “No one puts up statues to journalists,” he once said. He constantly invited comparisons with Winston Churchill, who led the UK through the Second World War.

When Johnson wrote a book about his hero, The Churchill Factor, it was as much about his own ambition and desire to emulate him. Although Johnson’s finest hour came during the next war on European soil – in the strong, decisive leadership he showed on Ukraine – it was eclipsed by a series of self-inflicted disasters that stemmed from the fatal flaws that made him unfit to be prime minister.

Those flaws were laid bare in the excoriating report by the Commons privileges committee, which found that Johnson had deliberately and repeatedly lied to parliament over Partygate. There is no precedent; no British prime minister has ever suffered such a humiliating verdict. It will ensure that Johnson enters the history books, not for the reasons he wanted but for a very different one.

• Read our live coverage of reaction to the Partygate report here: Ex-PM’s final disgrace as lies finally laid bare

The comparisons will not be with Churchill, but with David Lloyd George, a prime minister as unscrupulous as Johnson, who was accused (among other things) of misleading parliament about troop numbers in the First World War, and with Anthony Eden, whose resignation was officially blamed on ill health, though in reality it came about after he misled MPs over the Suez disaster in 1956.

Johnson’s career has always been a rollercoaster. The highs were very high: leading the Leave campaign to an unexpected victory in the 2016 EU referendum, and winning the Conservatives’ biggest majority since Margaret Thatcher at the 2019 election. But the lows were very low, as he squandered the huge opportunity, afforded him by that 80-seat majority, to remould British politics permanently in his party’s favour.

Now he has reached his nadir, with the privileges committee’s demolition of not just his actions but his character. This is the most dramatic act in the Johnson psychodrama.

The rollercoaster travelled at breakneck speed. It is easy to forget that Johnson was still walking on political water at the Conservative Party conference in Manchester in October 2021, a celebration of his election victory delayed by the pandemic. Johnson hoped for 10 years in Downing Street, and it seemed a reasonable proposition. But he would soon run into trouble of his own making.

As he departed a successful Cop26 conference in Glasgow the following month, Johnson asked his aides: “Have we got O Patz sorted?” His fellow Brexiteer Owen Paterson had been found guilty of breaching Commons rules on lobbying. Johnson foolishly tried to “sort” it by rewriting the parliamentary rulebook to save his friend, but a mass rebellion by Tory MPs forced him to back down.

Paterson was first of the “three Ps” that caused Johnson’s downfall. The second was Partygate: the consequences of the lies he told parliament provoked his resignation as an MP last Friday. The third was Pincher – Chris Pincher, his former deputy chief whip, and like Paterson a close ally. Again, Johnson tried to save his friend’s skin (as a Tory MP) after allegations surfaced of a groping incident at the Carlton Club.

Johnson’s latest refusal to uphold the normal standards of public life was the final straw for many Tory MPs. Sajid Javid told the PM he was resigning as health secretary. Minutes later, Rishi Sunak quit as chancellor, without telling Johnson first – one reason for Johnson’s antipathy towards the current prime minister, and why he encourages the myth that Sunak brought him down. After more than 50 other ministers resigned, Johnson reluctantly admitted the game was up.

The joke in Toryland is that Johnson has brought down three PMs – David Cameron (via the EU referendum), Theresa May, and himself. It is right. As the historian Anthony Seldon concluded in his book Johnson at 10, he had “the potential, the aspirations and the opportunity to be one of Britain’s great prime ministers. His unequivocal exclusion from that club can be laid at the feet of no one else, but himself.”

When Johnson resigned as PM 11 months ago, the Partygate affair still hung over him. His allies privately feared that his comments about No 10 lockdown parties at two sessions of Prime Minister’s Questions in December 2021 would return to haunt him. But even their worst nightmares did not anticipate the privileges committee’s scathing verdict at the end of its 14-month inquiry. Like Johnson himself, his friends did not realise the depth of his hypocrisy in allowing a drinking and partying culture to prevail in Downing Street as his aides ignored the lockdown rules the government had imposed on everyone else.

His apparent belief that rules apply only to other people is a recurring theme in Johnson’s life. The signs were there at Eton College, where his housemaster Martin Hammond wrote that Johnson “honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation which binds everyone else”. Perhaps we should not have been surprised at his efforts to bulldoze convention, first by the illegal prorogation of parliament, and then by ripping up his own agreement with the EU in defiance of international law.

Johnson never had a plan for tomorrow, let alone the day after. After he “got Brexit done”, the mood in his team was “What do we do now?” They admitted to me at the time that they didn’t know what his flagship “levelling up” pledge meant. Then Covid arrived, and Johnson’s government lurched from one crisis to the next.

His default response was to tell close advisers that any media storm would soon blow over. If he had to have a casual relationship with the truth, so be it. Like Lloyd George 100 years ago after he was accused of selling titles to rich businessmen, Johnson’s instinct was to deny and bluster. (Last week he joined Lloyd George and Harold Wilson in provoking honours -related controversy, by rewarding close allies, including several embroiled in the Partygate scandal, in his resignation list.)

Lying has been a constant theme: Johnson was sacked by The Times for making up a quote, and sacked from the Tory frontbench by Michael Howard for lying about an affair. It is all of a piece with his insistence that there were “no parties” during lockdown, and his wholly counterproductive, Trump-like attacks on the privileges committee, which were also an assault on our democratic system. Despite the best efforts of his remaining disciples to talk up Brexit and the 2019 election, the word “liar” will now surely be his political epitaph.

True, there were times when even his critics had to admire Johnson’s strengths. An unconventional politician, unusually known by his first name, his appearances on TV’s Have I Got News for You displayed a reach that most in his trade could only dream about. He twice won the mayor’s job in the “Labour city” of London. Leave could not have won the 2016 referendum without him, and no other Tory would have captured Labour’s red wall in the North and the Midlands.

But his brilliant campaigning and turns of phrase were not enough when it came to the hard 24/7 slog of government, which requires the dogged attention to detail that Sunak affords it and Johnson never did. In last week’s resignation statement, he somehow managed to blame Sunak for not “making the most of Brexit”, when it was his project and his missed opportunity.

There was no vision, no plan; it is hard to avoid the conclusion that he saw Brexit primarily as a vehicle for his own advancement. Michael Gove got it right in 2016 when he stabbed Johnson in the front to end his Tory leadership campaign, saying: “Boris cannot provide the leadership or build the team for the task ahead.”

Johnson’s allies, who even today cannot accept that his political career is over, remind us that Churchill made a remarkable comeback: although he lost the 1945 election, he returned to Downing Street in 1951. After Lloyd George lost power in 1922, he hoped for a return and was often tipped for one, but it never came. Now Johnson will surely suffer the same long goodbye.