THE busiest person in the UK over the past few months was the one responsible for polishing the Downing Street lectern.
As scandal engulfed Boris Johnson on an almost daily basis and calls for him to resign got louder, behind the black door, out came the polish every day, just in case it was needed.
It was certainly looking shiny and clean yesterday when the PM came out and finally did the decent thing and quit.
Except that he didn’t. Not really, anyway.
As only the outgoing PM could do, the resignation speech did not contain the word resign and was just a shambolic string of words that said absolutely nothing at all.
It was like the captain of the Titanic claiming the iceberg jumped out of nowhere when he was filling in the insurance claim.
Right to the final gasp, Johnson was full of bombast and nonsense as he blamed absolutely everybody except himself for his demise.
Bizarrely, he even blamed it on being trampled underfoot by the herd of his Tory colleagues on the move.
After months of scandal, it could be argued that the Tory herd is the slowest- moving in history - like hundreds of snails moving with the passion of a panda and the enthusiasm of a sloth.
Regardless, they got him in the end, sort of, and he will leave Downing Street sometime in the near future, but seemingly at the same snail’s pace his colleagues used in defenestrating him.
Somebody once said: “Boris Johnson wants to become Prime Minister and he wants to have been Prime Minister, but he’s not interested in being Prime Minister”.
This probably sums his legacy beautifully, as he can hardly be described as busting a gut during his controversial term in office.
This is now the fourth job he has lost because of his mendacity, one of them as a journalist.
Most of us would find our career paths halted for lying, particularly in the media, but instead Johnson managed to climb his way to become Prime Minister. It all seemed to be a bit of a wheeze for him, but while that’s fine at school, it is no way for a man in his 50s to behave when he’s supposed to be running one of the largest economies in the world.
Even Pinocchio got found out for lying all the time, but he got away with as he wasn’t a real boy and was made out of wood.
He also had Jiminy Cricket on his shoulder acting as his conscience, the one thing that Johnson appears to have mislaid, or never had in the first place.
Some 52 ministers quit the government, while others told him to his face to quit.
Longstanding colleague Michael Gove appeared to offer the proverbial bottle of whisky and a revolver, only for Johnson to down the bottle and then turn the gun on Gove.
For months, the public has become more incredulous as yet more scandals have emerged, but many Tory MP’s sat on their hands and did nothing.
It was, the irony of ironies, a sex scandal involving someone else that finally did him in, after he admitted lying once too often.
But in truth, the people who really brought him down were the grassroots Tory party members who were as appalled as the rest of us about what was happening.
Unlike the spivs, goons and perverts that seem to make up the parliamentary party, the grassroots members are, by and large , decent human beings.
Every Tory MP was heading back to their constituencies every weekend to be met with hundreds of furious correspondences with Mrs Angry from Royal Tunbridge Wells.
These are the lifeblood of the party and are the first to be treated with contempt by that party when it comes to power, as they chase votes from everybody but them.
But they delivered their devastating verdict as the Tories were thumped in three separate by-elections – two of which were in seats they had held for more than 100 years.
It is a harsh lesson that every political party learns to their cost over time, but none ever seem to heed the warning.
For Johnson and the Tories, when Mrs Pinkerton-Smythe and her ilk in places like Shropshire, Buckinghamshire and North Devon refuse to back you, then the game is up.
These people are hardworking and decent true-blue Tories that just could not bring themselves to endorse a law-breaking PM who is economical with the truth.
The rest of us should be thankful to them for finally making Tory MPs see the blindingly obvious.
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