Early in May last year I had dinner with a Cabinet Minister, who was extolling the political brilliance of his Prime Minister, confidently pronouncing he would reign for 10 years. The Tories had won the Hartlepool by-election by a landslide. The Red Wall had turned blue, and the Tory party was newly shaped by Brexit, Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson. More sagely, another senior Tory present noted that if Johnson did remain that long, the fallout would ensure the Tories would be in the wilderness for years, because the party would have been so strongly bent to the character of their leader it would need time to re-form. The former prediction has been averted; the latter might still come true.
A week later, that same minister resigned, something to do with a video and illicit kissing. And a little over a year on, his former boss has crashed and burned too. But only after we endured the most unedifying 36 hours in political history. For Tory politicians, when the end comes it is rarely pretty — this is a party that knows how to brutally defenestrate its own. David Cameron won a sizable and impressive Tory majority in 2015, only to lose the EU referendum a year later, as Johnson, Dominic Cummings and Michael Gove took back control. When I was asked to write for the Spectator shortly after Theresa May took charge in 2016, I warned her to tread carefully. Her time would also come, I said. And it would be at the hands of the same.
