When Boris Johnson bellowed “Hasta la vista baby!” at the end of his final prime minister’s questions in July, how many realised it was no empty flourish but rather a statement of intent? His unspecified “mission” was, he told those who were listening carefully, “largely accomplished for now”. We were treated to one more Johnsonian jape – the taxpayer-funded self-promotion exercise in an RAF Typhoon fighter jet – but thereafter the blond titan of British politics subsided into relative and unfamiliar obscurity.
No doubt the crowd of American insurers who gave him a standing ovation the other day and a $150,000 cheque were a rollicking lot, but with all due respect to them Johnson will have been privately thinking: Is this really it? Even worse surely was the fact that no one bothered to mention his name as one of the 31 Conservative MPs who abstained on Ed Miliband’s fracking amendment last week. Boris who? Politics now moves at breakneck speed, particularly when someone even more incompetent is busy wrecking the nation.
