Opinion

Mary Kelly: Johnson finally forced out of his Downing Street bunker by his own lies

Boris Johnson has been forced to resign as prime minister.
Boris Johnson has been forced to resign as prime minister. Boris Johnson has been forced to resign as prime minister.

NUMBER 10 was beginning to look like it was transforming into Hitler's bunker, with the crazed leader refusing to accept the advice from his generals who filed in, one by one, and asked him to surrender.

At one point it looked like it wouldn't be the men in grey suits who were going to force him out, but the men in white coats.

The game was up on Tuesday and not even a photo-op with Zelensky could save him. But arch-narcissist Boris Johnson tried to hang on, despite droves of ministers resigning and government ceasing to function.

Deluded and desperate, he kept harking on about his massive majority, clearly believing he was a president, not a prime minister bound by a parliamentary system.

But before he started daubing on the blue warpaint and the horned helmet to lead a mob of Proud Boy Tories in an assault on Westminster, the penny finally dropped. It took three days, but eventually his fingers were prised off the seals of office.

A week might be a long time in politics, but the speed of events in the past few days has been dizzying. If you studied the photos from Tuesday's cabinet meeting, before Javid and Sunak exited, it should have been clear that things were not going well. No-one could meet his eye.

Gove was looking like he regretted not following his earlier instincts about Johnson, when he'd decided to jump ship as his campaign manager because he wasn't fit to lead the party. But BoJo got his retaliation in first, and fired him in a phone call from the bunker.

Then there was Nadine Dorries, staring into the middle distance as she contemplated whether she could go back to eating ostrich anus on a remote island. Nope. Maybe better tweet 100 per cent support for the boss. Who else would give her a job?

Rees-Mogg was squinting anxiously over his imaginary pince-nez, trying to work out which centuries-old precedent he could dig up to defend the lying toad.

Back in the day, Sir Alan Duncan, Johnson's one time deputy when he was at the Foreign Office, was dubbed 'Monsieur Le Poop Scoop' by EU ministers because he had to frequently clear up the diplomatic mess left by his lazy and unscrupulous boss.

Now the mess needs a skip, not a scoop, so the entire government rushed for the exit en masse.

Funnily, they were able to ignore all the previous scandals - partygate, tapping Tory donors for £840-a-roll gold wallpaper, plans for a £150k treehouse for his son, a peerage for his Russian mate against Foreign Office advice and his attempts to re-write the standards system to defend Owen Paterson. The list goes on.

But Johnson was finally undone by lying over his failure to discipline the sex pest Chris Pincher. The problem this time was that he lied to his colleagues; it was OK when he was only lying to the country.

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AND where is the leader of the opposition in all this? He scored a few hits at a rowdy PMQs, though in fairness, it was an open goal.

The bon mots didn't quite drown out the groans from the left after his badly-timed speech outlining his cunning plan to win the next election.

Just when people in Britain were gradually realising Brexit was a disaster - a recent YouGov poll showed 49 per cent thought it was wrong to leave the EU - the bold knight announced he will "Make Brexit work'.

Is it a stroke of genius? A pragmatic response to the status quo and recognition that Britons voted to leave the EU, so we just have to make the best of a bad job – or, to use local parlance, just thole it?

Maybe so. But it's hard for politicians to do quite such a dramatic U-turn, without making voters look at what they used to say, and wonder if they truly believe anything.

I would have preferred if Labour had tried to reason with the lost Red Wall voters and instead educate them that Brexit has not achieved anything they were promised by the lying Tories, nor will it in the future.

"Make Brexit work" is a natty slogan, straight out of the Dominic Cummings playbook. And it's designed to play well to those who deserted Labour in 2019 because Boris promised to Get Brexit Done. It's all about using three words, like 'take back control'. Here's another: 'Kiss my arse.'