Boris Johnson and My Part in his Downfall

The story of the Johnson disaster is ultimately a story of journalistic failure

In the end he brought down himself. Despite all his tinfoil-hatted protestations about a Remain-supporting blob conspiring to remove him from office, it was Boris Johnson who ultimately engineered his own downfall.

The roots of that downfall run deep into his own character. As his Eton master once famously wrote of him, Johnson always believed that it was somehow “churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation that binds everyone else."

For decades this belief paid off. Whether it was the editors or politicians who continuously promoted him, or the commentators who made excuses for him, Johnson’s belief in his own invincibility was repeatedly validated by the seemingly endless indulgences of the world around him.

Yet like most confidence tricksters, Johnson eventually ran out of marks.