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

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Did the problem run deeper? Johnson’s shape-shifting as he climbed the political ladder led some to question whether he knew what he wanted to achieve with high office. In his university days, he ran twice to be Oxford Union president, the first time displaying Tory views (and losing), and a second time aligning himself with the Social Democratic Party. That time around he won. Then, as mayor of Labour-voting London, Johnson projected a liberal vision, advocating an amnesty for illegal migrants and championing gay marriage. But as chief Brexiteer, he threw in his lot with the Tory Right. To critics, the clearest thread running through Johnson’s stances was saying what was needed to advance. 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. The Fall of Boris Johnson is the explosive inside account of how a prime minister lost his hold on power. From Sebastian Payne, former Financial Times Whitehall editor and author of Broken Heartlands.

This might have been award winning but it is certainly not, as the blurb claims, "explosive" nor is it, by any means "the full story." As Johnson liked to remind aides when things got turbulent, almost every Tory MP has half an eye on becoming prime minister. He spoke from personal experience. Those reasons could be accurate or could be nonsense, but combined they make up almost as much analysis as Payne offers in an entire book. Lots of his analysis also relies on the usual tropes about Johnson and his character, rather than events as they happened.

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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. 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. His limited interest in Parliament, while not uncommon for prime ministers, could be an issue too. He had a massive majority in the Commons, but not in the House of Lords. ‘Can’t you just bosh this on?’ an exasperated Johnson would ask Lords Leader Baroness Evans as legislation stalled there. ‘That’s not how it works,’ she would reply. Payne’s thesis is that these one-off factors – the wrong Brexit policy, the wrong leader (and the charismatic appeal of Boris Johnson, who Gray believes is forging a new politics combining one-nation Toryism and old Labour values) – map on to a deeper problem that should have Labour deeply worried. Structural, economic and societal changes, he writes, have changed the makeup of constituencies such as North East Derbyshire and North West Durham. The old industrial way of life – steel, coal, ships and the rest – inculcated a sense of communal pride and mutual dependency. The Labour party was its political expression. But Payne suggests that this collectivist culture has been replaced in many areas by relatively prosperous commuter belts and more individualistic lifestyles and forms of work. The “Barratt Britain” of private housing estates and comfortable homeowners has crept up on the red wall, and superseded old loyalties in the postindustrial age. Significant parts of Labour’s lost England are becoming more middle-class and therefore more well-disposed to the Conservatives. “Many of the places that voted Conservative for the first time,” Payne writes, “are content, and the dystopian version of society painted by Labour in 2019 was sharply out of kilter with the world they know. This suburban lifestyle is where future elections will be fought.”

Others considered Johnson had been treated somewhat harshly. Elaine Lee, 66, a lifelong Conservative voter from Ampthill, said: “He was up against it as prime minister with Covid and I think he did a good job. I think they have been out to get him. I like him.” Sunak and his allies played a part in Johnson’s downfall, but that should not be mistaken for swallowing the narrative – pushed by Team Boris – that his premiership only ended because of Sunak 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. The contempt was all the more serious because it was committed by the [then] prime minister, the most senior member of the government. There is no precedent for a prime minister having been found to have deliberately misled the House. He misled the House on an issue of the greatest importance to the House and to the public and he did so repeatedly.” 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.

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, leaving the country in crisis. Payne's account reads well but it tells us nothing followers of the story did not already know. Indeed it is more "revelatory" about the workings of the Westminster lobby than of its subject.

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. 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. John Fitzgerald, 63, a building contractor and a Labour supporter, said: “What has happened has been blown out of all proportion.” Johnson, he believed, “should have held up his hands at the time and said: ‘we had a stressful day, and we had a drink’. I don’t think he’s been a good leader, but I think he is still well liked by the nation.” 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 has not gone unnoticed that Johnson’s shame will be rubber-stamped on his 59th birthday – three years after a birthday gathering and the production of a controversial cake in No 10 caused much of the strife in which he now finds himself. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. A spokesperson for News UK, Murdoch’s British publishing company, declined to comment, while a Johnson spokesperson said he did not recognise the account.