The Fall of Boris Johnson: The Award-Winning, Explosive Account of the PM's Final Days

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With unparalleled access to those who were in the room when key decisions were made, Payne tells of the miscalculations and mistakes that led to Boris Johnson’s downfall. This is a gripping and timely look at how power is gained, wielded and lost in Britain today. I loathe everything that Boris Johnson is and stands for. Bombastic, narcissistic, arrogant, convinced the rules only apply to others, self serving and utterly convinced he is right as well as being an opportunistic serial liar. It speaks a lot to the current state of political reality that someone like him, and Trump, were able to rise to the top of the power tree in their respective countries. Given that, it is unsurprising that I read this with a great deal of schadenfreude as well as interest in how events unfolded. One peerage went to a junior aide, 29-year-old Charlotte Owen, who will become the youngest ever life peer to enter the second chamber. There were also eight other names on his peerages list that were rejected by the House of Lords appointments commission. The committee was so enraged with Johnson’s behaviour that it even recommended he be stripped of the right to a former MP’s pass, for life.

Photographs and video of Johnson jogging round the grounds of his new Oxfordshire mansion in garish floral shorts, and heading through airports after lucrative overseas speaking engagements, had already underlined his dramatic exit from Westminster politics, even before the privileges committee report was published. It is not just Partygate and Johnson’s clashes with the privileges committee that have damaged the former PM’s reputation in the minds of MPs. So too has his resignation honours list, in which he rewarded a host of allies and acolytes, many of whom helped him during the scandals over Covid rule-breaking events at No 10.As I had appreciated from a 30000 ft height, there were a lot of issues that finally brought him down, but they all speak to his apparent belief that no rules applied to him and he could act with egregious self interest without suffering any consequences at all. It is fortunate that his party finally came to an end when his party finally had enough of this vile leader. However, I give them no credit since they were the most craven apologists for his shenanigans for far too long and really only decided to call time on him when it became clear he was an electoral liability rather than an asset. This mirrors the cravenness of GOP in regards to Trump although they still haven't broken with him in the US for the most part. Despite the absence of proof, the idea of great forces thwarting him – money, a rival and a former adviser turned nemesis all wrapped up together – somehow appealed.

His latest (but not necessarily final) tome is almost as elegantly written as its predecessors, even if his hero’s forced resignation must have messed with the publishing schedule. If Johnson had been a historical figure, a cavalier whose antics did no harm to the people around him, I would have enjoyed reading this homage almost as much as Gimson seems to have enjoyed writing it. An interesting explanation for Johnson’s popularity with the Conservative party’s grassroots – those 170,000 mostly elderly people who nowadays elect our leaders – is that Johnson brought them “freedom from the reign of virtue”. They were “grateful” for the “frivolous” and the “fantastical” or, as Gimson once ventured to me on the radio, they “ wanted to be lied to”. In this strange world, virtue and the virtuous lurk as constant enemies, and any notion of public life as a bastion of morality is dismissed as dull and “goody-goody”, or even sadistic. Where once swivel-eyed schoolmasters beat their pupils to feel virtuous, Gimson recalls, perhaps from his own experience, now “such punitive urges” can be indulged by denouncing Johnson.Nadine Dorries, the former culture secretary who has vowed to resign as an MP after being denied a peerage in Johnson’s honours list, described the report as “quite bizarre” and said it showed inbuilt bias on the part of its chair, the former Labour deputy leader Harriet Harman, and the Tory MP for Harwich and North Essex, Bernard Jenkin. The act would cast a long shadow over the Conservative Party. ‘Boris betrayer’ would be the tag stapled on to Sunak, with consequences in the leadership race that would follow. A year on, Johnson allies would still be pointing the finger of blame his way when explaining Boris’s ‘ouster’. He could stay in office for some time. The Conservative Party is considered ruthless when it comes to disposing of its leaders, but the next general election is still almost three years away. Theresa May, Johnson’s predecessor, lost her political authority many months before she announced her resignation, in the spring of 2019. Most recently, the political gossip was that Johnson might be given a last chance to redeem himself, at a set of local elections in May. Rishi Sunak, Johnson’s chancellor—and possible successor—was noticeably absent when the Prime Minister apologized in the Commons. Like other prominent Tories, Sunak has said that a civil-service investigation of the Downing Street parties must be allowed to run its course. The investigators are expected to report by the end of the week.

If you ask, “Why is Boris Johnson not still Prime Minister?” the only answer I can come up with is that there were these personal failings. I mean, how do you go from having an 80-seat majority to going in three years?!’ How indeed. During the countless internal debates about pandemic policy that followed, the pair were often of similar mind. But as the crisis eased with the mass rollout of vaccines in early to mid-2021, the focus turned to how to manage the post-pandemic economy. Johnson, with his populist instinct, was a big spender, having vowed to end austerity and seeing pound signs as the easy way out of many political binds. Sunak had a firmer ideological commitment to traditional low-spend, low-debt and ideally low-tax Tory economics, seeing fiscal prudence as the way forward. After reading the first volume of Margaret Thatchers biography, I thought I'd read a more modern book concerning a Prime Minister. I must admit I got this book purely on the basis that it was about Boris Johnson. Yes, it's not a book that is from his better days but it is a necessary read. A spokesperson for News UK, Murdoch’s British publishing company, declined to comment, while a Johnson spokesperson said he did not recognise the account.

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This book points to the main reasons why Boris fell before he should have. There seems to be a finality to his tenure as soon as the book starts. I did find it very informative and it does give a good timeline of the scandals that but Boris. I think all the swearing could have been toned down though. Yes people swear but blimey... Boris Johnson was touted as the saviour of the country and the Conservative Party, obtaining a huge commons majority and finally 'getting Brexit done'. But, within three short years, he was deposed in disgrace and left the country in crisis. With unparalleled access to those who were in the room when key decisions were made, Payne tells of the miscalculations and mistakes that led to Boris’s downfall. This is a gripping and timely look at how power is gained, wielded and lost in Britain today. Did Dowden quit to help ease Sunak’s path? He has vehemently denied it and Sunak allies insisted there was no ‘co-ordination’. But Johnson thought otherwise, even then. ‘Rishi will be next,’ Jake Berry, an MP loyal to Johnson, recalled telling the PM. ‘One hundred per cent. They’re working together on it,’ came the response, according to Berry. The downside of concentrating on the last few months of Johnson in office is that it minimises those qualities that propelled him into national politics and pulled off Brexit when the elite declared it impossible, making those who remained loyal to him to the bitter end look like fools. Yet Payne recently published another, very well received book on the Red Wall that adds vital context. Johnson was more than a man; he embodied a movement. Euroscepticism confounded its opponents because it managed to ally southern Thatcherites and northern socialists, and even if this confederacy seems bizarre on paper, it cohered through the personality of a witty patriot whose abiding concern was to make Britain feel better about itself. When I voted Conservative in 2019, it was more for Boris than for the Conservatives – and with his brand of populism out of the picture, I’m not sure I’ll do the same again.

The catalogue of horrors overseen by him and his regime are well documented here: trying to change the rules of ministerial conduct for Owen Paterson who was unapologetic in his flouting of them for personal gain, the "partygate" scandals where he and others gleefully broke the COVID rules that they had put in place then repeatedly lied about them to the apparent final straw for his party when he again lied about and sought to protect Chris Pincher ("Pincher by name, pincher by nature" apparently falling from his lips as he joked about this serial sex predator). The fact that it took so long for enough to be enough is appalling, as is the fact that the most odious and fawning apologists for him (Jacob Rees-Mogg et al) never got there at all. The story is still passed on by Johnson’s allies. However, a Sunak source said Rishi did not get a direct call or text from Murdoch. His long-term adviser and later lead Brexit negotiator, David Frost, has his own take: ‘I think his big problem as PM was that he wasn’t clear enough on what he thought himself about problems. Sometimes no decision was really final. It was often said Johnson is not a ‘details’ person. That is too simplistic, according to those interviewed. When he needed to, on an issue of pressing importance or personal political risk, he dove into details. On the intricacies of the Brexit deal during talks, or Russian incursions in Ukraine, he would consume information. He could surprise ministers by drilling into unexpected details. ‘Nobody can go into a room and assume you can bluff with Boris,’ said Michael Gove.Boris Johnson was prone to believing in political conspiracies. Many friends and former advisers attest as much. One wild and unsubstantiated rumour he voiced was that Sunak’s father-in-law, Indian billionaire Narayana Murthy, had Dominic Cummings on a retainer. There is no suggestion it was accurate. Yet ‘Boris believed it to be true’, said the senior Johnson Cabinet minister who relayed the story. Are the Tories better off since Johnson resigned? No. The economy is terrible; their polling is far worse; Labour’s victory seems all but guaranteed. Brexit is questioned again. We have gone from tax cuts, under Truss, to tax rises, under Rishi - and all without the consolations of good humour. A reasonable account of Johnson's fall, as told by a journalist/think tanker/hopeful MP. As a 'first draft of history', it works well as a blow-by-blow account of the events leading up to Johnson's resignation (the postscript, on the leadership election that followed, is weaker). Labour is not expected to try any political antics, such as attempting to make the punishment for Johnson more severe. In fact, Keir Starmer’s team will try to create a contrast with the chaotic Tory civil war by concentrating on its “energy mission” to invest in green technology.