Boris Johnson chose to finish his last Prime Minister’s Questions with a quote from Terminator 2 – “hasta la vista, baby” – but let me remind you of something else the Terminator said in that movie: “It’s in your nature to destroy yourself”. It was Boris Johnson who caused all this, wasn’t it? No one else. It was the Prime Minister who terminated the Prime Minister.

In the olden days, the phrase people used to describe the effect was the “witch’s gift”: that hidden but unavoidable character trait that a witch would secretly drop into a baby’s cradle and from which there can be no escape. You have it, I have it: a quirk or seam in your personality that’s always there wherever you go and whatever you do. Without knowing it, the gift can work against you to turn disaster to success or success to disaster or in the case of Boris Johnson, both.

In some ways, it’s hard to pick out just one witch’s gift in Johnson’s case. Supreme confidence perhaps. Lack of self-awareness. A certain charm and easy-going manner. Or – because Shakespeare was quoted several times during his last PMQs – maybe the worst of his traits was vaulting ambition which o’erleaps itself.


Some of his more positive gifts are undoubtedly hard to deny and were on display in the Commons yesterday. There he was, on one side, leaning on the despatch box as if leaning on the bar at a rugby club, easy-going and amusing, while on the other side Keir Starmer stuttered over jokes like a dying stand-up reading gags off his shirt cuff. There’s no doubt Johnson has charisma; perhaps that’s what the witch slipped into his cradle.

But if so, it wasn’t enough.Some people still appear to be impressed though: people like Nadine Dorries who gazed at the PM in the Commons in a loving but disturbing way that put me in mind of a teenage girl looking at her Sylvanian Family figurines or that woman in Misery who told her hero she was his number one fan before breaking his legs with a sledge hammer. But Nadine, and Jacob, are the only two left, the only two who can’t see it.

Or should I say three, because Johnson still has faith. His mission in government had been “largely accomplished”, he said, which perhaps indicates the worst of the gifts the witch bestowed on him: his apparent inability to criticise himself, combined, I think, with something even worse. I’ve spoken to people who worked with Johnson when he was a journalist and their conclusion was that, although he was talented in some ways, he was a skimmer, a coaster, someone who would do the minimum amount of work for the maximum amount of praise. To put it another way: he was lazy.

This – quite apart from his colossal policy failures – seems like the worst fault of all to me, especially for someone like Johnson whose hero is Winston Churchill. As child, when he wasn’t dreaming of being world king, Boris and his brother Leo would apparently pore over pictures of Churchill to the point where they had memorised the captions. Their father would also recite some of the great man’s most famous lines.

However – even though Johnson himself wrote a book about Churchill – I wonder how good his research was? In the book, Johnson says he saw Churchill as “funny, irreverent, and … politically incorrect”. But Churchill was also hard-working – indeed, his work ethic was extraordinary and his daily slog prodigious. The same could never be said of his number one fan.

In the end, perhaps the conclusion should be that it wasn’t just laziness which the witch slipped into the Johnson cradle: it was a devastating combination of personality traits and character flaws that made him ideally unsuited to the job of Prime Minister. Indeed, dipping into his book on Churchill again today, it would seem that Johnson knew it himself. Churchill, he wrote, had a certain something in his personality, a quality, a special factor that made him successful. “Character is destiny,” wrote Johnson, “and I agree”. So do we, Prime Minister, so do we.

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