The Prime Minister has resigned. He has, finally, accepted the inevitable, that it is impossible for him to continue as head of government when so many of his colleagues have left. He has done the right thing and is departing with some dignity, without having forced his party to defenestrate him or worse, forced the Queen into an impossible constitutional position. There was, by the end, no real possibility that he could continue. While Julius Caesar was assassinated by 23 stab wounds from disaffected senators, Boris endured far more ministerial resignations. He has, by stepping down, served the best interests of his party and, more importantly, the country.
He has also shown quite extraordinary resilience in the crisis of the last few days. No one who witnessed his performance yesterday in the Commons chamber and before a select committee can fail to have been impressed by his eloquence and equability under unprecedented pressure. These qualities are not of themselves enough to keep him in office, but they are remarkable. And indeed brilliance, eloquence and resilience have characterised him as Prime Minister. Unfortunately, they were accompanied by other defects of character which brought about his downfall, chiefly an inability to tell the truth which would be fatal to any individual, let alone a head of government.
The priority now is to establish the succession quickly and decisively. So many ministers have resigned, there are many departments left without a minister; indeed there are whole nations left without Cabinet representation: Northern Ireland and Wales. The civil service can function effectively for a time but government proper must be led by ministers.
Ruthless
The Tory party is, as Michael Heseltine reminded us recently, a most ruthless machine for preserving power; once it was apparent that Boris was an electoral liability rather than a vote-winner, his days were numbered. The party’s MPs now have the task of providing a new prime minister. But they cannot now fail to recognise Boris’s achievements as Tory leader: he was the one man who promised to make Brexit happen, and he did. Even those, perhaps especially those, who regarded it as a mistake, must acknowledge that no one else could have done it.
In Boris Johnson, the country has had a remarkable Prime Minister with an unsurpassed capacity to communicate effectively with the electorate. No one else had quite that ebullience, that ability to appeal directly to people. He was populist in the sense that people felt that they knew him; he spoke human in a way far too few politicians do. And that charisma will be difficult for any replacement to match; for better or worse there is no one like Boris.
Tragedy
The real tragedy in all this is that his fate was avoidable. It was not his policies, his agenda for government, however inchoate that seemed in recent months, which was his undoing. It was his failure to own up to mistakes, to admit wrongdoing, to speak the truth when the truth would in fact have served him well. And he has now paid the price for those faults. British politics has been more engaging and fascinating, if sometimes exasperating, for the presence of Boris Johnson. He has done well finally to have left office as he has done. And he will go down in history as one of the most memorable prime ministers.
