The ancient Greeks believed that before a man could be reincarnated he had first to drink the amnesiating waters of the Lethe, one of the rivers of the underworld. Only by completely obliterating his past life could he embark upon another.
So ostentatious a classicist as Boris Johnson doubtless knows this – and to read his letter announcing his intention to resign from parliament, he seems to have wasted no time taking the obliviating plunge.
“We need to cut business and personal taxes – and not just as pre-election gimmicks – rather than endlessly putting them up,” writes the man who broke a manifesto commitment to increase national insurance.
“Why have we junked measures to help people into housing?” asks the prime minister who scrapped his government’s bold plans for planning reform and sacked the minister who had been taking them forward.
And attacking Rishi Sunak and Kemi Badenoch for rowing back on plans to “scrap EU directives” is a bold move from someone who never actually got around to introducing any legislation on the subject – especially given that Liz Truss found time to table the retained EU law bill, and she had little time to do anything.
Yet there is a market for this. Johnson may not be the darling of the Conservative party that once he was, but there remains a substantial minority for whom the former prime minister can apparently do no wrong.
Absurdly, given his actual record, this tendency styles itself as the party’s right wing. Johnson’s pitch – “We must not be afraid to be a properly Conservative government” – is aimed squarely at Tory activists and voters frustrated at how little 13 years in office has moved Britain in a conservative direction.
Such complaints are not unjustified: consider how much change New Labour effected in the same time. But Johnson, a prevaricating liberal who invited comparisons to Roosevelt and won the red wall with the promise of a new, more spendthrift conservativism, is much more to blame for that than his successor.
We shouldn’t overstate his powers, as his supporters are wont to do. Johnson’s hold on the parliamentary party, where as recently as October he could rally almost 100 MPs prepared to reinstall him as leader, has palpably waned.
And while his cheer chorus among the grassroots may be noisy, they are not a majority, at least according to our surveys at ConservativeHome.
What this base does represent, however, is an audience, and Johnson is if nothing else a natural showman. It would be very surprising if he is not swiftly furnished by the rightwing media-entertainment complex with a column, and perhaps even a television show, from which to hurl grenades at his successors and burnish the myth of Boris – all at a safe remove from the compromises of power, for which he had neither the taste nor the talent.
Part of that mythic role as king over the water is his possible return, and his letter holds out the possibility: “It is very sad to be leaving parliament – at least for now.”
But barring truly extraordinary circumstances, it is hard to imagine the Conservative hierarchy being fool enough to allow him to stand again or it being in his interests to do so. Much more comfortable, and more profitable, to be the right honourable member for the Vale of Lethe.
Henry Hill is the deputy editor of ConservativeHome
