Given the challenges he faced – and knowing, as we do, those character flaws he’s never sought to hide – could Boris Johnson really have done any better than he did?

So, there he sits alone, sinking deeper into his ostentatiously expensive Lulu Lytle sofa (bought as part of a £200,000 refurbishment funded by a controversially undeclared donation), staring at the Espalier Square wallpaper that cost him so much and yet cost him nothing at all.

Perhaps he mumbles something to himself about missed opportunities and the treachery of his closest colleagues, as he ruffles his unruly mop of trademark straw-blond hair. 

He looks to all the world like a scarecrow, dishevelled and broken, a bleary-eyed wreck of a man and a warning to his successors against the follies of hubris. (Or he would look like that if anyone were looking.)

He’s probably wondering if he’ll get the keep the furniture. The festering of his resentment is almost audible. 

On the rattan bookcase (that set his businessman benefactor Lord Brownnose back nearly £4,000), a pristine copy, bound in sumptuous Italian calfskin, of that classic Roman chronicle, The Twelve Caesars, will never ever be read. 

It’s probably a good thing that he’d not ploughed through Suetonius’s depictions of the orgiastic excesses of the ancient emperors. It would only have given him ideas.

The traces of claret stains are all that remain of the revels he’d hosted here in better times. The taints of certain pleasures can never be erased.

The ‘Nureyev’ drinks trolley boasts a range of boutique gins that he’s barely had the chance to taste. Just one little sip, he thinks, just one tiny nip. He reaches out to pour himself a large one. 

He’s always known that life was for the living. He has always known how to have fun. ‘Ample’ is a word for lesser men.

He’d expected his last days in power to be garlanded with celebrations of his triumphs and the gratitude of his peers. He’d never imagined it was going to be like this.

Even Carrie’s popped out for one last night out with the girls. They’ll be at some karaoke bar by now, working their way through Abba’s greatest hits.

‘Finally facing my Waterloo,’ he chuckles sadly to his reflection in the antique mirror. He looks washed out. Must be the age of the glass, he reasons. That wasn’t worth four grand.

‘Thank God I didn’t have to pay for it’. And then: ‘Of course, I did. I paid’.

All alone now. For once and forever, all alone.

‘Mission largely accomplished,’ he mutters to himself. 

But who, he wonders, will be left to laud and guard his legacy…?

It is a pertinent question. With Boris Johnson set to leave Downing Street at the start of next month, who might there be, among the thronging authors of his political obituaries, to reflect fairly and impartially upon the highs and lows of his three years in office? Even one of his most steadfast loyalists, and the favourite to succeed him, last month scored his performance as Prime Minister at only seven out of ten. 

(Ms. Truss also dismissed the idea of having him in her Cabinet. But at least she’s more loyal than her opponent, the former Chancellor, whose resignation brought his old boss down. Indeed, having comprehensively stuffed Mr. Johnson, Mr. Sunak might have considered affording his old boss pride of place in his own cabinet. His trophy cabinet. Canis major: the big dead dog).

But, given the challenges he faced – including Brexit, Covid-19, climate change, economic meltdown, crisis in Afghanistan, and war in Europe – and knowing, as we do, those character flaws he’s never sought to hide – could Boris Johnson really have done any better than he did? 

Five months into his premiership, he had won a landslide victory in a snap election with the promise that he would ‘get Brexit done’. A brilliant campaigner but a man lazy and uninterested in the effort, nuance and detail of actual government, his attempts to wriggle his way out of key aspects of the withdrawal agreement he’d brokered with the European Union, and the ongoing legal challenges which have resulted, suggest that he did not in fact manage to fulfil even that core manifesto commitment. 

With calls for independence growing in Scotland and Northern Ireland, ‘get Britain undone’ might have been a more realistic pledge.

Under his stewardship, the UK’s union has increasingly seemed to be heading towards the point of collapse. But could we ever have expected anything more? Probably not. Well before his 2019 triumph at the polls, Boris Johnson had already earned a universal reputation for the flexibility of his relationship with such concepts as trust and truth. 

He’d never tried to persuade us otherwise. He didn’t fool the British public. We fooled ourselves.

He had enjoyed a highly privileged education and upbringing – making friends at school and university with a dazzling array of future colleagues whom he would one day go on to betray, including Prime Minister David Cameron, Chancellor George Osborne, and professional backstabber Michael Gove. Upon graduation, his family connections had then secured him employment at The Times newspaper, from which he was soon fired for fabricating a quotation. 

The Daily Telegraph had no such qualms about his series of highly disingenuous reports from Brussels, stirring up xenophobic feeling by proliferating, propagating and inventing myths about the excesses and insanities of EU bureaucracy. Among his many misleading claims at that time (including European plans to ban prawn cocktail crisps and straighten bananas), one seems especially memorable: the tale of a Commission proposal to prohibit the production of the great British sausage. It so resonates today because it closely echoes the plot of a 1984 episode of a BBC sitcom: a scenario in which a similarly opportunistic politician exploits that same myth to build sufficient popular support to become Prime Minister.

(Of course, those early self-serving fictions now seem modest when compared with what was to come. They also appear rather less offensive than the sexist, racist and variously hate-fuelled slurs he has published over the years, replete with their references to ‘totty’, ‘tank-topped bumboys’, burka-wearing women as ‘letterboxes’, and Africans as ‘piccaninnies’ with ‘watermelon smiles’).

Johnson continued to earn quarter of a million pounds a year for writing his regular columns for the Telegraph even after he had become Mayor of London. Faced with criticism for maintaining this income stream, he told the BBC in 2009 that these princely sums were merely ‘chicken feed’. He added that he made a ‘substantial donation to charity’ from these payments, although this claim has not since been verified.

He returned to parliament in 2015, and early the following year announced his support for the campaign for Britain to leave the European Union. His jovial manner and his talent at Eurosceptical confabulation proved a godsend for the Brexiteers. Their subsequent victory prompted the resignation from Downing Street of his old friend David Cameron; but Johnson’s own bid to succeed him was scuppered by the scheming of his duplicitous ally Michael Gove (a man he would sack from government six years later for a similar act of disloyalty), who publicly declared that Johnson could not provide the leadership the country needed.

When Theresa May then became Prime Minister, she shocked the nation and the world by appointing Boris Johnson to the position of Foreign Secretary. He was recently quoted as comparing the constraints upon his conduct in that role to working inside a steel prophylactic. One can only imagine how crazed the tenure of this undisciplined maverick would have been if his officials hadn’t tried to restrain his anarchic and undiplomatic tendencies. He’d probably have ending up marrying one of the Queen’s granddaughters to a Saudi prince or declaring war on the Channel Islands.

Mrs May had doubtless hoped that his appointment to this great office of state would offer some form of reconciliation to a party and a country deeply divided by the traumas of Brexit and put an end to those cycles of betrayal and retribution. It did not.

Two years later, Johnson betrayed May’s faith in him, just as he had betrayed her predecessor’s friendship, when he announced that his boss’s roadmap for Brexit would consign the UK to ‘the status of a colony’ of the European Union. May’s administration struggled on, mortally wounded, for a further twelve months, but was never the same again.

Boris Johnson became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in July 2019. Despite his repeated protestations to the contrary, it was a job he had wanted since he was a boy. To be precise, he’d proclaimed his desire to be ‘world king’, but the position of British Prime Minister would have to do, for the time being at least. (Those wishing to be king of the world might do well to recall Leonardo DiCaprio laying claim to that title at the prow of the Titanic, and to be reminded exactly where that got him.)

Having been born in New York, Boris Johnson could also have chanced his hand at the American presidency, and he may yet do so. Stranger things have happened. Even stranger incoherent fair-haired promiscuous narcissists have managed it.

But let us return for a moment to his pre-Downing-Street days. Alongside his penchant for professional mendacity, Boris Johnson’s various marital infidelities had been well-known years before he assumed the UK’s most exalted office. Indeed, rumours abounded as to the career favours he’d used his positions of power to grant his plethora of lovers. Reports were also rife as to his laxity in completing statutory declarations of his own financial arrangements and interests.

He was, in short, a celebrated cheat and a chancer, an opportunist who had first become famous for his self-effacing tomfoolery as a frequent guest on a popular BBC panel show. That’s what had turned him into the mononymous figure of ‘Boris’, Britain’s first leader since ‘Maggie’ Thatcher with whom the British public had come to be on almost exclusively first-name terms. (Or, in the case of this great pretender, on second-name terms. ‘Boris’ is not in fact his first name).

He was funny and fun and appeared harmless enough. Yet here was a man of ruthless ambition and treacherous appetites wrapped up in the guise of a cuddly teddy bear: BoJo the clown, the big old dog, the blond buffoon.

He was what we like to call a likeable rogue: the type who seems always game for a laugh, a party, and a pint, but not to be trusted with your wallet or your wife. And not (most definitely not) to be trusted with your country’s sovereignty, economic security, healthcare system, or nuclear codes. (‘Too late,’ the people shrug. ‘Oops’). 

Like Donald Trump and his fellow Brexiteer Nigel Farage, his popularity appeared to stem from his ostensible un-electability. He was always the opposite of what a politician was supposed to be. He lacked that veneer of sincerity. He was so brazenly untrustworthy – so genuinely so – that he gained the affection and confidence of an electorate which had grown weary of the conventions of democratic politics.

It took a while for the scales to fall from the British public’s eyes, but it had to happen eventually. There are only so many lies a country can take. When we see the emperor’s new clothes for what they are, the revelation is stark and irreversible: the image of a nation’s leader laid bare in all his pallid and flabby absurdity.

He had been churning out his rambling nonsense for decades before the moment last year when he lost his place in a speech to British business leaders and went off on an improvised tangent in which he likened himself to Moses, made motorcar engine noises and enthused about Lenin and a cartoon pig. No one who’d followed his career could have seriously expected him to do otherwise; but it still came as a shock to many that this yattering fool was the country’s Prime Minister.

Yet perhaps Johnson’s greatest failing was also his greatest strength: his irrepressible (and perhaps pathological) self-belief. It is difficult to say whether he knowingly misled parliament about his lockdown parties, and told intentional lies on so many other occasions, or whether he sincerely thought he was speaking the truth. Even in his final weeks in office, it was reported that he blamed ‘flaky’ and ‘neurotic’ colleagues for his downfall. He never accepted he had ever done anything wrong. He was the victim of the fickle whims of what he described as the Westminster herd.

Inevitably, he still has his fans, though they are far fewer than before. There are those who continue to praise his leadership of the nation during the peak of the Covid-19 crisis. It is certainly true that his administration oversaw a hugely successful roll-out of its vaccination campaign. This was of course helped by the fact that one of the first coronavirus vaccines was created by British scientists. It was not however helped by the fact that Mr. Johnson himself had insulted their initiative when he chose to identify the profit motive as the dynamic behind this British scientific effort, even though the company holding the rights had resolved to sell its product at cost price.

The early months of the pandemic had seen a series of disastrous decisions, and delays in taking decisions, which cost the country billions and resulted in tens of thousands of avoidable deaths. The Prime Minister had famously carried on shaking hands in apparent denial of the gravity of the situation. His government came late to accepting the need for national lockdowns, resisting the urgency of those measures on several occasions, and failing to close the nation’s borders, despite all the clear medical evidence and advice.

Wastage and fraud had become commonplace. His cronies’ friends profiteered from sales of unfit and unusable protective equipment. A former pub landlord (a friend of the Health Secretary) won a £40 million contract to deliver vials for Covid testing kits, despite – as The Guardian newspaper put it – ‘having had no previous experience of producing medical supplies.’ At the same time, Johnson’s government acted unlawfully in discharging vulnerable patients from hospitals into care homes without the required coronavirus tests.

The Prime Minister himself also of course acted unlawfully by choosing to participate in a sequence of social gatherings in and around his Downing Street residence, parties which flouted his own government’s lockdown rules. Meanwhile, his ongoing schemes to circumvent aspects of his own Brexit deal, and to deport refugees to central Africa, have caused disquiet across the political spectrum and have prompted accusations that they breach both domestic and international laws.

It therefore came as no surprise that world leaders snubbed the environmental agreements he’d proposed as host of last autumn’s United Nations conference on climate change. A crucial opportunity to prevent global catastrophe was squandered by its association with a man notorious for his own lack of integrity. Nobody, in short, was willing to do a deal with him.

In the meantime, his promises to ‘level up’ deprived areas of the United Kingdom have offered catchy soundbites but have advanced no ideas or resources of any significance or substance. He has done virtually nothing to address the country’s immediate and ingrained economic problems. He leaves the UK struggling with crises in healthcare, transport, and energy. The campaigner who once promised game-changing Brexit dividends – including liberating business policies, lucrative trade deals and a weekly £350 million investment boost for the National Health Service – has, as Prime Minister, delivered nothing of the sort. 

Boris Johnson has taken Britain back to the 1970s, and not in a good way. The national landscape is once more dominated by travel chaos, strikes, inflation and fuel shortages, but with no sign of David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust or Tom Baker’s Doctor Who, the outlandish consolations England knew half a century ago.

He’s even managed this summer to replicate the legendary heatwave and drought of 1976, although that – like pretty much all else he’s achieved – appears to have been a matter of luck rather than judgment.

Last month, the UK arm of McDonald’s announced that it would be raising the price of a cheeseburger by more than twenty per cent. It was the first price rise that Britain’s fine diners had seen on that item of haute cuisine in fourteen years. Consumers had already been hit in July by increased charges for Amazon Prime subscriptions and were still reeling from having to pay more for their KitKats, Marmite and Greggs sausage rolls, those timeless staples of the great British diet. That same week, Nestle and Coca-Cola announced further price hikes. It is these apparently banal everyday symptoms of the country’s economic crisis which have hit the headlines and really started to bite. 

It is predicted that home energy bills may, on average, rise to £500 a month by the end of the year. That’s more than a third of the total monthly income of someone earning the national living wage. Along with the rising prices of food, fuel, and the most basic consumer products, it is hard to see how ordinary people will be able this winter to feed their families, travel to work and heat their homes.

In the final weeks of his administration, Mr. Johnson chose to do virtually nothing about all this, leaving action on this cost-of-living crisis to his successor. The idea that he might meet with the leadership candidates to agree a strategic response was described by the frontrunner as ‘bizarre’. Indeed, like his Foreign Secretary during the Afghan withdrawal crisis, he even went on holiday.

He has of late become so disengaged from his duties that ten days ago the main headline on the front page of the Metro national newspaper simply read: ‘PM turns up for meeting’.

For all this, and so much more, the blame has been laid, rightly or wrongly (but mainly rightly), at Boris Johnson’s door.

Yes, there’s far more, of course. But, as for the rest of it: history will judge him on that. A trend analysis would suggest that he’s made so many mistakes that he’s likely to have messed up pretty much everything else. Yet the law of averages might, by contrast, suggest that even a swaggering, pampered, deluded, insatiably appetitive pigdog of a man-child, if hitting enough random buttons, should – like a monkey at a typewriter – be expected, just once at least, maybe once in a lifetime, to get something right.

Surely, then, time will tell. Earlier I suggested that we might consider both the lows and the highs of his relatively brief premiership, but we’ve not yet witnessed a lot of the highs. In truth, as even those seeking more generous views of his performance might admit, we may have to wait quite a while to see a sincerely positive package of such highlights. 

And on that distant day, when hell freezes over and cartoon pigs soar in the sky, then bad old Boris will doubtless skate back into Downing Street, his frenzied supporters cheering him on, the resurgent messiah of the bumbling, babbling Right.

Al Mayadeen is an Arab Independent Media Satellite Channel.