After Salzburg Theresa May's leadership is weaker than ever, and Boris Johnson has cunningly positioned himself as her antithesis

People sometimes ask, 'What is Johnson’s game plan?' It seems to me that although not the kind of person for whom detailed planning has any attraction, he has now found a policy which is distinct from May’s, and which could prove a gift to himself

Boris Johnson has the gift, vital for success not only in journalism but in politics, of seeing what the story is, and knowing how to dramatise it.

Almost 30 years ago, he made his name as The Daily Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent by seeing that the story, so far as he and his readers were concerned, was the attempt by Jacques Delors, president of the European Commission, to drive forward the process of European integration. Johnson reported that Delors’s henchman, Pascal Lamy, “runs the upper echelons of the commission like a Saharan camp of the French Foreign Legion”, and lamented that British officials are “limp-wristed” and “impotent” by comparison: “With their shy grins and corrugated-soled shoes, they are no match for the intellectual brutality of Lamy and his stooges.”

Johnson today sees that the story, so far as he and his supporters are concerned, is Theresa May’s failure to make a success of the Brexit negotiations. The British press reported she was humiliated at the European summit in Salzburg. Johnson himself says, in a long piece for Thursday’s Daily Telegraph, that “from the very beginning of Theresa May’s government ... the UK was in the grip of a fatal uncertainty about whether or not to leave the customs union”. He goes on to lament “a conspicuous infirmity of purpose”, “basic nervousness” and “utter lack of conviction”, with the result that after “two years of dither and delay”, we are heading for “enforced vassalage”, “a democratic disaster” and “a moral and intellectual humiliation for the country”.

People sometimes ask, “What is Johnson’s game plan?” It seems to me that although not the kind of person for whom detailed planning has any attraction, he has now found a policy which is distinct from May’s, and which could prove a gift to himself. He proposes a quite different way of dealing with Brexit, with an intrepid team of British negotiators, led by himself, pushing forward with the speed, daring and clearness of purpose needed to obtain at the 11th hour a “super-Canada” deal, as he terms it.

Policymakers generally throw up their hands in horror at the idea of proceeding in this manner. They offer technical reasons why it is simply impossible. In Half In, Half Out, Andrew Adonis’s recent volume of essays on the European policies of prime ministers since Winston Churchill, Ivan Rogers describes, in the course of an admirable but dispiriting account of David Cameron’s renegotiation of the terms of British membership, the difficulty, or in most cases impossibility, of obtaining legally binding change from the EU.

But to such technical objections, Johnson replies that where there’s a will, there’s a way. Let mandarins such as Rogers, who served as Britain’s permanent representative to the EU from 2013-17, cope with the technicalities. In his interview with Laura Kuenssberg, Johnson insisted the problem of the Irish border – often cited as a reason why the Canada option will not work – is “eminently fixable”. The task of the prime minister is to provide political leadership, so Britain becomes once more a free and independent nation. The whole point of Brexit is to run our own show, and that means we must find the energy and courage to “chuck Chequers”, which would leave us taking rules from Brussels.

May has so far called Johnson’s bluff, has refused to let herself be bounced into the arms of the Eurosceptic wing of her party, and has insisted that her own compromise offers a more practical way forward. But the rebuff in Salzburg, which took her and her closest advisers by surprise, has weakened her, and raises the question of whether Chequers will in practice end up leaving just about everyone feeling let down. And in political terms, it is open to the grave charge that the government never even tried to get a clean break.

Which is why some Tory Remainers now want Johnson to take over. They would like him to take the blame if things go wrong, and do not want to spend the next 20 years dealing with the complaint that if only we had negotiated with more flair, we would have got a better deal. It is true that many other Tory Remainers would be appalled if Johnson were to be put in charge. They cannot abide his style of politics, and are determined to come up with a Stop Johnson candidate, who on present showing might be Jeremy Hunt.

The front-runner has not won a Tory leadership race since 1955, when Sir Anthony Eden, crown prince since 1942, succeeded Churchill without a contest. So there are evident dangers for Johnson in being the front-runner. But the dangers of not being the front-runner are even greater, for it would then be much easier for Tory MPs to keep him off the shortlist of two candidates which will be presented to the party membership for the final decision. And Johnson hopes that by presenting himself as the outsider, the man prepared to defy official wisdom and to go for it when others hang back, he can avoid the dismal charge of being, like Hunt, May and indeed Cameron, the voice of the British establishment.

Andrew Gimson is the author of ‘Boris: The Adventures of Boris Johnson’, ‘Gimson’s Kings and Queens: Brief Lives of the Monarchs Since 1066’ and ‘Gimson’s Prime Ministers: Brief Lives from Walpole to May’