There are words and phrases that do some heavy lifting in British politics – “populism”, “Brexit”, “legitimate concerns”, the ‘“red wall”. Watch out for them, as in the next few weeks they will be unsparingly deployed to explain how the hell someone like Boris Johnson ever came within sniffing distance of Downing Street.
An exercise in orphaning Johnson that has been afoot for a few months will now reach its sad conclusion. His failure will have no fathers and his success will be attributed to an abstract set of conditions that conspired to make his premiership inevitable. Like a monster released from enclosure in an iceberg as it is thawed by a warm weather front, Johnson arrived in Westminster to wreak havoc, until finally the Swat team of British democratic norms and institutions took him out. His critics will issue plaintive laments about the tragedy of a Brexit that carried him into No 10 with a huge majority, and say that he only has himself to blame for coming undone.
