Such a development would have been disastrous for Johnson – if the Chancellor was quitting over the fine, why wasn’t the Prime Minister? Allies rejected the idea of getting him driven back to Number 10 because there was a broadcast helicopter hovering overhead – they did not want an ‘OJ’ moment, with Boris’s car tracked as it sped along – so joined him there instead. He admits from the start that it would be a “vain endeavour” to seek new recruits to Johnson’s fan club – and that one of his own children described his subject as a “vile, disgusting human being”.

The second incident came on 12 April 2022, the day both Johnson and Sunak were fined for breaking Covid laws over the PM’s birthday gathering in the Cabinet Room. In this strange world, virtue and the virtuous lurk as constant enemies, and any notion of public life as a bastion of morality is dismissed as dull and “goody-goody”, or even sadistic. When playing one Cabinet minister’s nine-year-old son at tennis, he insisted on marking the score after every point.Rishi Sunak, Johnson’s chancellor—and possible successor—was noticeably absent when the Prime Minister apologized in the Commons. To critics, the clearest thread running through Johnson’s stances was saying what was needed to advance. They also bring out the talent in Payne, who is no longer writing about what a Tory MP might have said to an anonymous aide who was a bit miffed. On November 30th, about seven weeks ago, the Daily Mirror, a left-leaning tabloid, published the first stories about parties taking place at No.

Whether tragedy or thriller, the fall of Johnson heralded the single-act farce of Liz Truss and her comic sidekick Kwasi Kwarteng. Sunak had been a lowly local government minister when Boris reached the top as Conservative Party leader back in 2019. It is only five months since Boris Johnson was defenestrated as prime minister and just over a month since Truss herself imploded in office, but we already have two accounts purporting to detail their demise. He is also the author of Gimson's Kings and Queens, Gimson's Prime Ministers and Gimson's Presidents.A former cabinet minister argued that only Boris could've pulled it off: "He took on the blob" of policy orthodoxy "and won, it was a shame he could not do it on other matters, too. But if the demise of Boris Johnson was inevitable, because it was rooted in his character flaws that precede and will outlast the events in this book, then the answer does not lie in these pages. Most recently, the political gossip was that Johnson might be given a last chance to redeem himself, at a set of local elections in May. The Thatcher government of the 1980s, Tebbit confesses, could and should have run down the mines “much more slowly” and done more to bring new work to the north-east. The Green Transition Weekly analysis of the shift to a new economy from the New Statesman's Spotlight on Policy team.

There was a total failure to understand how the rules they enacted actually affected people, and a total failure to realise how their messaging would go down with voters. So too did Partygate, the defining scandal of his tenure, which drained support from voters and MPs.

He was thrown straight into an economic challenge of mind-spinning proportions: the biggest drop in national output for three centuries as the first country-wide lockdown was announced to tackle Covid-19 six weeks later. They were “grateful” for the “frivolous” and the “fantastical” or, as Gimson once ventured to me on the radio, they “ wanted to be lied to”. Stephen Coleman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment. On a visit to a hospital in north London on January 18th—his first public appearance in almost a week—Johnson hung his head when he was asked about the party on the night before the Duke of Edinburgh’s funeral. But to put his downfall down solely to an ‘ouster’, or rebels who played a part during the slide, would be remiss.