The end of the Boris cult His audience wanted jokes not politics

He says he’s sorry he’s late, but it’s not his fault this time: “I understand everyone was being frisked for handguns”. They laugh: that’s not their England. The interviewer offers a trivial question first, for the fans. It’s about the zipwire at the London Olympics 2012, when he dangled with a Union Flag: the Johnson stunt by which all others are judged. “Although I was held to global ridicule,” he says, “it had exactly the effect I wanted: not for the first time!” The next day, he says, Britain “began to win medals”. This is Johnson the magician who expresses, entirely unconsciously, a universal boredom with conventional politics. It is also Johnson the Fisher King. His wounds mirror ours — that is his peculiar power — but neither are healed.

He is asked about the Brexit bus and its promise of £350 million a week for the NHS. “It’s the bus of truth!” he cries, even now. This is not a place to analyse the rotting political discourse, and what part he may have played in it. Such agonies are for Leftists. “It’s a significant sum,” he says, “people were right to ask what they were getting for it.” He adds, “Being unleashed from the EU gave us the freedom to do things differently,” and if they weren’t better, that is not his fault. Brexit saved lives during pandemic, he says. She asks about other “concrete dividends”. He looks nervous, cites giving lethal weaponry to Ukraine, makes a joke about William Hague’s baldness, and I remember that there are at least five different people inside him.

Johnson is happiest on diversions: Nicola Sturgeon, for instance. “Princess Twinkle-toes investigated by the fuzz for possession of a campervan. The Nationalist dog barked while the campervan moved on”.  It’s a mash-up of metaphor and slang: and it’s meaningless. His serious point, when he gets there, is this: Reform polled low when he was prime minister. He kept us “bubble-gummed together”. But he didn’t.  Rather, he opened the doors to them.

He is asked about his Covid. “A lot of people say I was shamming,” he says. But he was ill, he insists. And he realised, “I’ve done some pretty worthwhile things. I need to keep going. I thought I had a lot to live for and I had a country to look after”. Now I think: if he’s telling us he loves us, he wants to come back. He’s waiting for the party to fall so low they take him back.

The audience is restless. It wants Johnson the avatar of joy, and he’s talking about the nearness of Death, and defending his government. “We acted as vigilantly as we could, given what we knew”. He thinks Covid-19 came from a laboratory: “Do you really believe that this was the result of the love that flowered accidentally between a small slice of pangolin and a bat?” He doesn’t despair about a Trump presidency, even if he hated the Capitol riots: “He is not going to spend the first few months of his presidency trying to make the Soviet Union great again”. He says this last part in an accent thieved from Paint Your Wagon.

But then he reveals something. Being mayor of London was “great” because “I was a monarch”. And that’s it. Johnson was always more suited to absolute monarchy than parliamentary democracy, and, like an absolute monarch, he doesn’t think he did anything wrong, because an absolute monarch is the law. To Tory voters who hated him because he betrayed them, and, worse, made them betray themselves, he offers nothing. To the Tory romanticism he destroyed while pretending to share it he says nothing. The wine in the suitcase was a Downing Street ritual that long preceded him. His defenestration was all, “a bit of a put-up job”.  His advice to the audience – a response audience question, they still think he has something to offer, is: “there’s no earthly point in being too self-deprecating”. Is that what he thinks he was?

At Cheltenham, Johnson offers us, as ever, a mirror, because that is what he is. He mirrored our hope. Now he mirrors our confusion. The Tory Party is in ruins — he essentially endorsed Truss, his closest allies voted for her — and it had nothing to do with him. He doesn’t talk about the leadership contest. He talks about himself.

At the end, there are no cheers, as if he has disappointed them, but the disappointment should be with themselves. Johnson was our first modern populist politician and his danger was always in his precedent: now there will be other, less charming populists walking the paths he made. His damage to the polity was incalculable — the prime minister who lied to parliament — and they don’t even mind. Nor, it seems, does he. Out they go, holding copies of Unleashed. It wasn’t what we — or even he — thought it would be. It is something infinitely sadder, and that, of his legacies, will endure.

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Tanya Gold is a freelance journalist.

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