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

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Brendan Clarke-Smith, a Johnson loyalist elected in his 2019 landslide as MP for Bassetlaw, tweeted that he was “appalled at what I have read and the spiteful, vindictive and overreaching conclusions of the report”. 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.

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If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. 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.” 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.

There were policy successes during the Johnson premiership, including the vaccine booster programmes and his robust support of Ukraine faced with Russian aggression, both thanks to the use of small expert teams. The pace at which the air has leaked out of the Johnson balloon will be evident for all to see on Monday when the Commons will be asked to vote on the privileges committee’s damning verdict and approve the sanctions it recommended. Payne points out that throughout his premiership Johnson was usually absent overseas during key moments of crisis. Out of country and out of touch he was unable to read the atmosphere and react decisively. Payne argues that Johnson was unable to survive the “three P’s” which cumulatively destroyed his premiership: the Paterson affair which dealt a fatal blow to relations with his MPs; partygate, which Johnson tried to brazen out; and finally the Chris Pincher affair which displayed his poor judgement. 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.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.

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.” 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. What brought him down within six silly months? “The three Ps”. Owen Paterson, who Boris unwisely tried to protect in wake of a lobbying scandal; Partygate, which he brazened through and almost survived; and Chris Pincher, the whip whose wandering hands goosed a government. Westminster is a place of outsized egos, something Johnson could be forgiving about, according to allies. After all, he had always been an obsessive competitor himself. When playing one Cabinet minister’s nine-year-old son at tennis, he insisted on marking the score after every point. Aides who had played on the court at his Oxfordshire cottage joked that he used old balls scrubbed of fuzz to obtain an advantage. And he had once been so determined to gain the upper hand as London mayor that he snatched David Cameron’s notes off the table during talks, prompting a schoolboy-like tussle. 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).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. 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. 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.

Jeremy Corbyn with former Blyth Valley MP Ronnie Campbell at a 2017 election campaign event. Campbell lost his seat in 2019, having been Blyth’s MP for 32 years. Photograph: Scott Heppell/AFP/Getty Images 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.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. 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.