“I think he honestly believes that it is churlish for us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation which binds everyone else,” wrote Martin Hammond, Boris Johnson’s teacher at Eton, in a letter to Johnson’s father Stanley, as Andrew Gimson’s biography records. When historians make the first stab at Johnson’s political legacy, the words will not be very different.
Some Tories judge what they called their “deal with the devil” worth it. After all, Johnson did “get Brexit done” (apart from the bits, such as the Northern Ireland protocol, that are still not “done”). Yet his political epitaph will not just be about Brexit, because he was driven out of Downing Street in ignominy after repeatedly breaking the rules on standards in public life. The characteristics that appealed to his party and many voters – as an anti-establishment figure who bulldozed Brexit through – became his achilles heel when both groups tired of rule-bending to protect friends such as Owen Paterson and Chris Pincher, and denying things that were true, such as Downing Street parties during lockdown.
