It may just be that the biggest strategic error the Conservative Party made was to choose Boris Johnson as its leader. Out of the Blue and The Fall of Boris Johnson are the chronicles of all that goes wrong. As I had appreciated from a 30000 ft height, there were a lot of issues that finally brought him down, but they all speak to his apparent belief that no rules applied to him and he could act with egregious self interest without suffering any consequences at all. It is fortunate that his party finally came to an end when his party finally had enough of this vile leader. However, I give them no credit since they were the most craven apologists for his shenanigans for far too long and really only decided to call time on him when it became clear he was an electoral liability rather than an asset. This mirrors the cravenness of GOP in regards to Trump although they still haven't broken with him in the US for the most part. A firm friend of Johnson, who in public would be considered one of his most prominent allies, reached a bleaker conclusion: ‘He’s a columnist, right? Columnists are used to writing their column, forgetting it and moving on to the next one. And you can’t as a national leader operate in that way. You have to follow through… He never made a transition from being someone who could entertain and attract attention and emotionally connect to the hard work of being Prime Minister. He was ill-disciplined.’ Boris Johnson was touted as the saviour of the country and the Conservative Party, obtaining a huge commons majority and finally getting Brexit done. But within three short years, he was deposed in disgrace, leaving the country in crisis.

The author is clearly a member of the Boris Johnson cult, and throws several attempted smokescreens in an effort to mitigate his hero's dishonesty and moral dereliction. The catalogue of horrors overseen by him and his regime are well documented here: trying to change the rules of ministerial conduct for Owen Paterson who was unapologetic in his flouting of them for personal gain, the "partygate" scandals where he and others gleefully broke the COVID rules that they had put in place then repeatedly lied about them to the apparent final straw for his party when he again lied about and sought to protect Chris Pincher ("Pincher by name, pincher by nature" apparently falling from his lips as he joked about this serial sex predator). The fact that it took so long for enough to be enough is appalling, as is the fact that the most odious and fawning apologists for him (Jacob Rees-Mogg et al) never got there at all. Johnson always acted in his own short-term interest. Every time a scandal blew up, his strategy was to just keep fighting until the next day. This allowed the narrative of a scandal-ridden government to gain momentum. If each scandal had been dealt with immediately, in a single swoop, then it would have been harder for such a narrative to dominate. The Fall of Boris Johnson is the explosive inside account of how a prime minister lost his hold on power. From Sebastian Payne, former Financial Times Whitehall editor and author of Broken Heartlands. With unparalleled access to those who were in the room when key decisions were made, Payne tells of the miscalculations and mistakes that led to Boris Johnson's downfall. This is a gripping and timely look at how power is gained, wielded and lost in Britain today.

Parliaments, which are supposed to hold governments to account on behalf of the public, need to assert their power. The British parliament may have acted to remove a prime minister who looked like an electoral liability but a more important role for parliament to play is to challenge policy proposals that are clearly not thought through or are offered as mere crowd-appeasing gestures. With unparalleled access to those who were in the room when key decisions were made, Payne tells of the miscalculations and mistakes that led to Boris’s downfall. This is a gripping and timely look at how power is gained, wielded and lost in Britain today. Easy to read account that is very straightforward in it's telling and allows the narrative to speak for itself without too much commentary and it succeeds I think but given my abhorrence for the man, I am predisposed to find this account particularly damming. I would perhaps have preferred some more depth but that wasn't really what the book was aimed at providing. I do question the editing to an extent since Guto Harri's name was mis-spelled on at least 2 occasions (writing "Hari") and whenever I see this in professionally put together books I wonder if there are other editing errors.

In the early evening of Tuesday, July 5 this year I was walking to a beachside restaurant in Porto Soller, Mallorca when my daughter texted me — “Javid and Sunak have resigned!” I hate predictions, but this one was easy. I tweeted out that Boris Johnson would be gone tomorrow or the next day. It was obvious to me and many others that he couldn’t stay. Extraordinarily, though, it wasn’t obvious to him. For the next day and a half we sat under the shade of a huge fig tree listening to Times Radio as minister after minister resigned until eventually there weren’t enough left to staff a government. On Thursday he eventually went.

For much of his premiership Johnson saw his relationship with Sunak as one of ‘mentor’ and ‘mentee’, according to one Boris aide Before starting this book I thought that it might have been published too soon. Unfortunately, I was proven partially correct. It is clear that Payne doesn’t quite believe in his own project. By the epilogue he is still oscillating between tragedy and thriller. He concludes that “few anticipated just how chaotic it would be”. I’m afraid that simply isn’t true. That was, indeed, the principal objection to Johnson. Payne then fizzles out in a series of lengthy anonymous quotes and concludes lamely that Johnson’s fall was not inevitable although it was always quite likely.