Boris Johnson: Shapeshifting politician now short of allies

• Boris Johnson’s luck appears to be running out after a string of high-profile resignations from his government.
• Rishi Sunak as finance minister and Sajid Javid as health secretary quit on Tuesday.
• Some have drawn parallels between his governing style and his chaotic private life.

Boris Johnson has ridden his luck throughout his career, overcoming a string of setbacks and scandals that would have doomed other politicians.

But a man’s luck, once compared to a “greased piglet” for his ability to avoid controversies, appears to be running out, following a slew of high-profile resignations from his government.

The departure of cabinet big hitters Rishi Sunak as finance minister and Sajid Javid as health secretary on Tuesday weakens the under-pressure prime minister just as he needs all the allies he can get.

Pessimism about whether he can survive comes just three years after he took over from Theresa May in an internal Conservative leadership contest.

He called a snap general election that December, winning the biggest Tory parliamentary majority since the heyday of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.

That allowed him to unblock years of political paralysis after the 2016 Brexit vote, to take Britain out of the European Union in January 2020.

But he has faced a tidal wave of criticism since then, from his handling of the coronavirus pandemic to allegations of corruption and cronyism.

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Some have drawn parallels between his governing style and his chaotic private life of three marriages, at least seven children and rumours of a host of affairs.

Sonia Purnell, Johnson’s former Daily Telegraph colleague, suggested that Sunak and Javid may have realised what she and others have before them.

“The closer you get to him, the less you like him, and the less you can trust him,” she told Sky News.

“He really does let everyone down, at every point he really does mislead you.”

Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson had a conventional rise to power for a Conservative politician: first the elite Eton College, then Oxford University.

At Eton, his teachers bemoaned his “cavalier attitude” to his studies and the sense he gave that he should be treated as “an exception”.

Johnson’s apparent attitude that rules were for other people was amply demonstrated in 2006 when he inexplicably rugby tackled a young opponent in a charity game of football.

His elastic relationship with the truth was forged at Oxford, where he was president of the Oxford Union, a debating society founded on rhetoric and repartee rather than mastery of cold, hard facts.

His privileged cohort in the backstabbing den of student politics provided many leading Brexiteers.

Soon after Oxford, he married his first wife — fellow student Allegra Mostyn-Owen — despite her mother’s misgivings.

“I didn’t like the fact he was on the right,” Gaia Servadio, who died last year, was quoted as saying by Johnson’s biographer Tom Bower.

“But above all, I didn’t like his character. For him, the truth doesn’t exist.”

After university, he was sacked from The Times newspaper after making up a quote, then joined the Telegraph as its Brussels correspondent.

From there he fed the growing Conservative Euroscepticism of the 1990s with regular “euromyths” about supposed EU plans for a federal mega-state threatening British sovereignty.

Exasperated rivals charged with matching his questionable exclusives described some of his tales as “complete bollocks”.

Johnson capitalized on his increasingly high profile from Brussels, with satirical television quiz show appearances, newspaper and magazine columns.

Much of his journalism has since been requoted at length, particularly his unreconstructed views on issues from single mothers and homosexuality to British colonialism.

He became an MP in 2004, with the Tory leader at the time, Michael Howard, sacking him from his shadow cabinet for lying about an extra-marital affair.

From 2008 to 2016 he served two terms as mayor of London, promoting himself as a pro-EU liberal, a stance which he abandoned as soon as the Brexit referendum came about.

According to his former editor at the Telegraph, Max Hastings, Johnson’s ambitious grab for power and shapeshifting should not have been a surprise.

Johnson was witty, he said, but “unfit for national office because it seems he cares for no interest save his own fame and gratification”.

The “leave” campaign’s success was largely a result of Johnson’s relentlessly upbeat “boosterism” on key issues such as immigration rather than facts.

Johnson has been characteristically unrepentant, particularly for falsely claiming that Britain could save £350 million a week by leaving the EU.

It also explains his stubborn resistance to the mounting calls for him to go.

According to The New York Times, when asked if he would resign Tuesday night, he replied, “F*ck that.”

On Wednesday, he used more formal language to reiterate his refusal to resign. However, the Conservative Party may have other plans.

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