When the Prime Minister muttered “forgive me...forgive me...” during a visit to the North East, he probably had little idea how soon the forgiveness would run out.
That speech to business leaders in South Shields - famous for its rambling about Peppa Pig, comparing himself to Moses, pretending to be a car and losing his place twice - was not what brought him down in the end, though in many ways it did foreshadow his political demise and encapsulate many of the things that were wrong with his premiership.
Arriving unprepared, Mr Johnson tried to fall back on his humour and trademark positivity to win over the room. The politicians, business leaders and heads of universities eager to hear some substance about his much-vaunted levelling up agenda were not fooled. When some hostile questions came his way about the disastrous Integrated Rail Review, he called an end to matters and left, sharpish.
Read more: Live updates and reaction as Boris Johnson resigns
Mr Johnson’s long-held desire to emulate his political heroes, Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher, as a fixture in 10 Downing Street, has evaporated. Instead he has (so far) served less time than his predecessor Theresa May, whom he helped bring down to gain the job he had so long coveted.
And that speech in the North East, plus a trip to Hexham General Hospital - thought by many to escape difficult questions in Parliament and instead sparking a whole new row over his failure to wear a face mask - summed up Mr Johnson’s rapid political fall.
It was only six months earlier that he had come to the North East in triumph, standing in front of a huge inflatable Boris Johnson to celebrate a once-thought impossible Conservative victory at the Hartlepool by-election. In similar circumstances, he had been just up the road in Sedgefield in December 2019 to toast his party taking Tony Blair’s old seat in the North East.
That election win, and the size of the majority he delivered, showed how Mr Johnson could tap into popular sentiment like no other politician of the current age. He won in all parts of England but it was arguably in the North East that the Tory victory was most noticeable.
Political commentators in London were probably a bit out-of-time in calling Blyth a former mining town - its last pit closed in 1985 - but it was still a political earthquake when Blyth Valley deserted Labour to elect the Conservatives’ Ian Levy. The same could be said of the Tory win in North West Durham, and the North East won more Conservative MPs under Boris Johnson than it has done for many decades.
What no-one could foresee then was that Mr Johnson’s Premiership would be dominated by the coronavirus pandemic, and when the worst of the outbreak was over, it would lurch from one disaster to the next, mostly self-inflicted. For many, his early mis-steps in dealing with the pandemic - shaking hands on a visit to a hospital, telling This Morning viewers that we might ‘take it on the chin’ - were unforgivable.
When he was struck down with the virus himself, some wondered if he would ever return. The pandemic put his chief advisor Dominic Cummings under the spotlight too after an ill-advised trip to Barnard Castle started talk of there being ‘one rule for us, another for them’. Mr Johnson stood by Mr Cummings, only to jettison him eight months later, in the process making a dangerous enemy who would come back to haunt him continually.
Parties in Downing Street (and other parts of Whitehall) could have brought him down, and though he survived being fined and the damning Sue Gray report that followed, Partygate lost him much support in the country and within his own party. Downing Street’s botched reaction to the Chris Pincher affair, when Mr Johnson’s well-known tendency to tell lies came to the fore, was the final straw. Cabinet Ministers were paraded in front of TV cameras as Minister after Minister resigned in real time, scenes that would have seemed unlikely in even the most deranged of political satires.
Despite his - for him, anyway - early exit from Downing Street, friends of Mr Johnson will say that his political career is not without its achievements. He was probably the politician most responsible for securing victory in the Brexit referendum and also agreed Britain’s exit from the EU after the issue paralysed the country under Theresa May. To win two terms as mayor of left-leaning London also speaks to his abilities as a campaigner.
Mr Johnson was also the main author of the Government’s levelling up agenda, which has arguably put the focus on areas like the North East like never before. Whether that mission will survive him is unclear, though the political imperative to make the country more equal should be blindingly obvious to whoever succeeds him.
But the boring business of governing was always likely to appear too mundane for Boris Johnson, and an Eton school report from 1982 that accuses him of being “one who should be free of the network of obligation that binds everyone else” appears equally true 40 years on. He has not gone yet, and his resignation statement from Downing Street was very ‘Boris’: short on contrition, long on what he felt were his achievements and blaming Conservative MPs for succumbing to the ‘herd instinct’ in being so ‘eccentric’ as to want rid of him. There was no mention of Downing Street parties, the mistakes of the pandemic, asking Conservative donors to pay his DIY bills, joking about having a sex pest in a senior party role, trying to overturn rules on lobbying or potentially breaking international law.
“I want you to know how sad I am to be giving up the best job in the world, but them’s the breaks,” he said, looking forward perhaps to a future where he can presumably take as many trips to Peppa Pig World as his heart desires.
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