Boris the cat with nine lives has

finally been neutered

July 09 2022, 6.00pm

A few months ago, when people first started speculating that Boris Johnson
might be ousted, the prime minister revealed how he would respond to such
a challenge. “The PM told a group of us a story about a relative of his,” a No
10 adviser said. “A great-uncle, I think. For some reason this person was on
the run from the authorities and holed up in a town hall, surrounded by
police. He also had a flame-thrower. I’m not sure how the incident ended but
that was the metaphor the PM used when talking about the leadership. He
said it would take a flame-thrower to get him out of there.”

As Johnson’s rollercoaster career came to a shuddering halt last week, I

remembered the words of someone else who used to work closely with him,
who once told me: “Forget the cat with nine lives — Boris seems to have 99
lives.” For years, Johnson defied political gravity. Every time he fell upside
down out of a skyscraper, he landed on his paws.

Last week he finally plummeted to earth. The shock of the realisation that his
mercurial political powers had deserted him left him holed up in No 10, a little
like that great-uncle.

It was the most drastic reversal of fortune in modern political history. As

recently as October, Johnson looked unassailable, a leader with a huge
majority whose brand of big-spending economics and robust cultural
conservatism had left Labour unsure whether to attack him from right or left.

For years Johnson had prospered with a blustering style of near-demented

optimism and, when the going got tough, a steadfast refusal to answer
uncomfortable questions about his behaviour. Barrelling through, and
doubling down was combined with speaking simultaneously out of both
sides of his mouth. It was what “got Brexit done” and what enabled him both
to win the “red wall” and to swathe southern England in blue.

Yet in the past nine months, that belief in his own invincibility and the sense
that the rules do not apply to him effectively turned a flame-thrower on his
own administration. The skills that helped him rise were the reason for his
fall. Having been central to the demise of David Cameron and Theresa May, a
former No 10 official wryly observed, as the week ended: “Boris Johnson is
the third prime minister to be brought down by Boris Johnson.”

It came after months of scandal and sleaze and the sense that his operation
had only a passing acquaintance with propriety or the truth, a charge long
levelled at the man himself.

His decision to try to tear up the anti-sleaze rules to help Owen Paterson, a
former cabinet minister, escape censure for lobbying last autumn was the
first shot in the foot. Revelations about the funding of a £112,000 renovation
of his Downing Street flat were followed by revelations about extensive
lockdown-busting parties. On each occasion, the No 10 press operation, in
keeping with Johnson’s career-long strategy, resorted to denial, obfuscation
and outright lies, before the truth was dragged from them.

A few weeks ago, Johnson’s political aide David Canzini sat in a London
coffee shop and said: “There can’t be any more f***-ups.”

Yet another was just around the corner. When Chris Pincher, the deputy
chief whip, got drunk in the Carlton Club in St James’s and was accused of
sexually assaulting two men, Downing Street took more than 24 hours to
strip him of the Tory whip. No 10 then denied that Johnson knew of any
specific allegations against Pincher when he appointed him. Pincher denies
the allegations.

That claim was to kill him. At 7.30am on Tuesday, Lord McDonald, who
retired from the Foreign Office in 2020 when Johnson combined the Foreign
Office and the Department for International Development, broke cover and
tweeted: “I have written to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards —
because No 10 keep changing their story and are still not telling the truth.”
He published a letter revealing Johnson was personally briefed on a similar
investigation that upheld a similar complaint against Pincher in 2019 while he
was a foreign office minister.

A few weeks ago, Johnson’s political aide David Canzini sat in a London coffee shop and said:
“There can’t be any more f***-ups”
TAYFUN SALCI/ZUMA/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK

On the face of it, this looked like an attempt to wound by an ex-mandarin

who was accused of being a vocal remainer. In fact, it was yet another
pratfall from No 10. McDonald had privately contacted senior civil servants
last Sunday to tell them No 10’s “line to take” was a lie. This was
communicated to members of the Downing Street communications team —
but nothing changed. “It was another totally unforced error,” a senior civil
servant said.

McDonald’s intervention persuaded Sajid Javid, the health secretary, to

jump. He had discussed resignation with his aides last Sunday. Javid was
also incensed by a briefing to The Sunday Times last month that a cabinet
presentation on the NHS was “a job application for a sacking”. No 10 officials
hit back, saying Javid was “out of his depth” and also “felt the health job
beneath him”. They say he repeatedly lobbied Johnson to make him foreign
secretary.

Javid’s tweet dropped at 6.02pm on Tuesday. Nine minutes later, Rishi

Sunak, the chancellor, followed suit. Both sides say the resignations were not
co-ordinated, though Sunak moved quicker than he had planned. Javid
warned Johnson before he quit. The chancellor tried to call him “but he
didn’t answer” and pressed the button on his own announcement.

When they had dined together on the Sunday, the chancellor had made clear
to Johnson that the running sore of the Pincher affair needed to be dealt
with. “This is not tenable. We need to deal with it fast,” he told him.

But Johnson’s behaviour in cabinet on Tuesday, when there was a discussion

of the economic strategy due to be unveiled with the chancellor in a joint
speech, convinced him the prime minister was not serious about a
responsible fiscal stance. Johnson, who once famously declared that his
“policy on cake is pro having it and pro eating it”, launched into a
“boosterish” speech about “how everything’s going to be brilliant”. Sunak
and Michael Gove both said the government would need to be honest with
the public that soaring inflation would mean the next year or two would be
painful. “Boris’s response was to say something like: ‘Yeah, yeah, we’ll do all
that as well,’ ” a cabinet source said. “But it was perfectly obvious he is not
prepared to make difficult choices.” The two were at loggerheads over when
the government could afford to cut tax.

Sunak was also in despair about Johnson’s governance more generally. One
close ally said: “The thing that gets his goat most, and what he said most, is
that the government was not delivering on the things it said it would. Take
the Covid backlogs: we gave the NHS lots of money and took the political
pain for the tax rise — but there was no grip. Why weren’t we having a
weekly meeting about the backlogs? Why wasn’t there a data dashboard
making this a priority? Where are the 40 hospitals and the thousands of new
nurses? That’s the thing that’s truly unforgivable.”

Rishi Sunak became increasingly despairing of Johnson’s leadership and governance

JESSICA TAYLOR /UK PARLIAMENT/GETTY IMAGES

Another minister contrasted this record with the Downing Street parties:
“Boris couldn’t run a piss-up in a brewery, but he did run a piss-up in
Downing Street.”

Sunak was also clear that he would not go out and defend Downing Street
disinformation on Pincher — a view widely shared by cabinet ministers. A
cabinet source said: “The Tory party has finally come to the realisation that
it’s in an abusive relationship with the prime minister.”

Another minister said: “The problem with Boris is his personal pronouns,
which are me, me and me.”

When I interviewed Johnson in 2016, during the referendum campaign, he

said two things that have always stayed with me. He admitted he has few
friends and that he has always believed he can extract himself from crises of
his own creation. His way with words, he said, “has got me into a lot of
trouble and also got me out of it again”.

This last week, the gift betrayed him. Making a rare foray into the Commons
tearoom on Tuesday evening, Johnson appeared to blame the seven MPs
who were also present at the Carlton Club at the same time as Pincher for
not sending him home. This provoked a stand-up row with Gary Sambrook,
the MP for Birmingham Northfield, who won a round of applause in the
Commons the following day when he called on Johnson to resign during
prime minister’s questions. He was far from the first to observe that Johnson
“always tries to blame other people for mistakes”.

Sajid Javid was the first to go, followed by many more

JESSICA TAYLOR/PA
Gove had got wind that Sunak and Javid were contemplating resignation on
Tuesday evening, before bumping into Theresa May at the opera. He
returned home and called other cabinet ministers, and it was clear Johnson
was facing a slew of resignations. As early as Monday he had pondered
telling Johnson to resign but felt constrained by the psychodrama that
unfolded after the 2016 EU referendum, when he declared Johnson unfit to
be prime minister, ending his first bid for No 10.

He was due in No 10 to help Johnson prepare for PMQs on Wednesday

morning. Now he called and asked No 10 for five minutes with the PM. In a
one-to-one meeting, Gove told Johnson: “I’m terribly sorry about this prime
minister, but I think you have to go.” He told the PM he was not going to
resign but made it clear that Johnson was facing an onslaught and “will not
be able to fill a government”.

In a surreal twist, Gove then attended PMQ prep. Another source in the
meeting said it was “completely mad” and that the team was openly “game-
planning” what to do if cabinet ministers resigned in the chamber or MPs
defected to Labour while Johnson was on his feet. The prime minister was
defiant: “We fight on whatever,” he said. “I have a mandate from 14 million
people. If people quit, we can replace them.”

In the chamber, Sir Keir Starmer dismissed Sunak and Javid as “the first case
of sinking ships leaving the rat” and wavering ministers as “the charge of the
lightweight brigade”. Johnson’s lines died on his lips.

From 3pm, he endured a surreal session answering the Commons liaison

committee’s questions about his policies while a delegation of ministers
gathered in No 10 to call for him to go.

When he returned to Downing Street, Johnson huddled in his office with

uberloyalists Nadine Dorries, the culture secretary, Ben Elliot, the Tory
chairman, and Alister Jack, the Scottish secretary. Dorries told him: “You
send them packing.”
Johnson then received the rebels one at a time. Kit Malthouse, the policing
minister, was “hostile” and called for him to resign.

In the white room upstairs, Nadhim Zahawi, who had been made chancellor
only the day before, paced up and down muttering to himself: “He’s got to
go, he’s got to go.” In his meeting with Johnson, Zahawi seemed hesitant.
“He was reluctant to wield the knife,” a source said.

The two found common cause when Zahawi told Johnson that, in his first
hours in the Treasury, he had learnt that Sunak had been blocking viable
policies for helping combat the cost of living crisis.

Zahawi then emerged from Johnson’s study and ran into another cabinet
minister, telling them he was “tremendously excited” about the economic
plan he and the PM were going to announce. It was the first of two U-turns.
The second came the following morning when he issued a letter publicly
calling for Johnson to quit.

By then, Sunak’s allies were already aghast that Zahawi, in his first broadcast
interview as chancellor, had advocated a fiscal loosening of almost £40
billion by abandoning a rise in corporation tax, bringing forward an income-
tax cut planned for 2024, and accepting pay rises for public sector workers
recommended by pay-review bodies.

Michelle Donelan, appointed education secretary to replace Zahawi, handed

in her resignation after 35 hours in the job. Simon Hart, the Welsh secretary,
arrived with a resignation letter in his pocket and said he would make it
public the next morning if Johnson didn’t quit.

By now Johnson’s position was in freefall. Grant Shapps, who kept the
spreadsheet of supporters during the 2019 leadership election and helped
shore up the PM earlier this year, had grave news. “Grant told him he could
only guarantee him 28 votes if there was a new vote of no-confidence,” a
minister said. “He and the whips said the ceiling was 60 votes.” Shapps also
called for him to go.

Larry the Downing Street cat ponders the events of the week
LEON NEAL/GETTY IMAGES

But Johnson remained defiant. In that 2016 interview he told me: “I think I am
built for combat.” There were some now who thought he wanted to die in
battle. “He wants to be a martyr and go out like Mussolini or Ceausescu,”
said a minister who saw him that day.

In the No 10 bunker, both Guto Harri, Johnson’s director of communications,

and other close aides, including Declan Lyons, the political director, chief
whip Chris Heaton-Harris and party bigwig Ross Kempsell, made clear that
they would stand with him if he wanted to fight, but few privately thought it a
good idea.

Johnson was being egged on by Nigel Adams, a cabinet office minister, and
Andrew Griffith, the policy director, who is wildly unpopular with fellow MPs.
“The most toxic members of the cabal had blinkers on,” said one insider.

Several senior ministers are understood to have contacted Simon Case, the
cabinet secretary, asking how Johnson could be removed. “They thought he
had gone mad,” said one ministerial aide. Among their concerns were
rumours that Johnson might ask the Queen to dissolve parliament and call
an election. Those in the room say the prime minister never supported this
idea or actively floated it. Griffith had, though. “Andrew is a creative thinker,”
one said.

Case was in touch with Buckingham Palace, where there was concern the
Queen might be dragged into a constitutional controversy. He took it upon
himself to tour No 10, pointing out to Johnson’s political aides that under the
so-called Lascelles principles, which dictate when the monarch can refuse a
dissolution, there could not be an election.

A dissolution is banned if parliament is still viable, an election would be

detrimental to the economy and if an alternative prime minister could
command a Commons majority. Case pointed out that all three criteria were
met. Insiders say the Palace did not stage an intervention to force Johnson’s
hand, but were relieved when Case did.

Priti Patel, the home secretary, and Anne-Marie Trevelyan, the trade
secretary, both visited Johnson and told him he should go, but made clear:
“If you want to fight, we will stand with you.” Johnson seemed strangely
upbeat. “The PM was in a unbearable mood and was quite perky. He knew
the situation was untenable by then but he hadn’t completely decided what
to do,” a minister said.

Throughout the day, Carrie Johnson had been supportive, urging Johnson to
consider his position carefully. “She was his rock,” one minister said. “She
was a supportive spouse and was prepared to do whatever he wanted.”
Another source in the building said: “She certainly wasn’t urging him to stay,
but she wasn’t telling him to go either.”

Highs and lows of Boris Johnson's reign

For years, Johnson had been the most resilient member of his own teams.
When he was London mayor and one of his affairs had been emblazoned
across the front pages, he walked into his City Hall office and found staff
trying to hide the newspapers. Johnson said: “Don’t worry, I know what they
say. The show, and it is a show, will go on.”

But as the evening wore on, a prime minister who is working on a biography
of Shakespeare was beginning to realise the final curtain was about to fall. All
that was holding him back was the memory of 2016 and his belief that he
dropped out of the leadership contest too soon. “He regrets pulling out in
2016 when Gove chopped his legs off,” a close ally said. “He will wonder for
the rest of his life what would have happened if he had had a go.”

Johnson’s anger at Gove “festered all day” and found voice in one last
theatrical flourish. The idea was floated that he should sack the levelling-up
secretary. “If you’re going to survive, you need to look strong,” one aide said.
Another added: “You must know that everyone in this room is in favour.”

The prime minister called Gove on his mobile at 8.59pm. Gove asked: “Are
you resigning?” Johnson replied: “No, Mikey, mate, I’m afraid you are. I’m
going to have to ask you to take a step back.” Gove, undeterred, sent the ball
back: “Prime minister, if anyone should be stepping back, it is you.”

None of this surprises me. A week after Gove knifed him in 2016, I spent an
hour with Johnson, piecing together what had happened. That night he used
one four-letter epithet about Gove, but he was more shellshocked than
angry. The phrase he kept repeating was: “I just don’t understand why he did
it.” It is the rawest emotion I have ever seen from him. With the boot on the
other foot, Gove understands all too clearly why it happened.

A No 10 official said it was “revenge, pure and simple”. Harri briefed the press
that Gove was “a snake”. Privately he said: “This man subjected us to three
miserable years of Theresa May.”

By 10.30pm on Wednesday, close aides say Johnson had decided he had to

resign. At 11.30pm he went upstairs to talk to Carrie, his mind effectively
made up.
Johnson began drafting his resignation speech at 6am on Thursday and
presented it to aides at 7.30am. It combined scorn for the MPs who had
made the “eccentric” decision to get rid of him, claiming he had been
trampled underfoot by a “herd” of panicking colleagues and concluded:
“Them’s the breaks.” But as a prominent Westminster figure observed: “He
was right. The Tory party has finally developed herd immunity to Boris
Johnson.”

There was no discussion of including an acknowledgement that Johnson

was the architect of his own demise. One aide said: “That’s just not who he
is.”

However, Johnson’s “much punchier” first draft was toned down. One
section that was cut highlighted his belief that he had been brought down by
MPs wavering in the face of media introspection. “There is still part of me
that thinks that if we could have turned off Twitter and sent the MPs off to
the beach, we could have sorted this out and gone on to thrash Labour at
the next election,” he would have said.

A source who is very close to Johnson said: “He hates the Tory party. He
absolutely hates them. He sees them as thwarting him. He’s convinced the
British public is still behind him. He sees everything still through the prism of
Brexit. It’s the centrepiece of his legacy.”

However, it is also true that in quieter moments, Johnson has privately

admitted fault. “He’s not deluded. He dates it from Paterson,” a friend said.
“He has great regrets about Paterson and the handling of partygate.”

By now No 10 was a bear pit of internecine warfare. Canzini, who was not in
the room with Johnson on Wednesday, was accused by others in the inner
circle of urging ministers to tell Johnson to quit. Some think he had been
working with his former business associate Mark Fullbrook, who is now
running Nadhim Zahawi’s campaign. “When Canzini walked into the study on
Thursday morning, he got told unceremoniously to leave,” a source said.
Harri was attacked by others for presiding over the inaccurate briefings.

The speech made, Johnson chaired a cabinet meeting and showed that he
still had his sense of humour. Jack praised Johnson’s loyalty and Trevelyan
his optimism. Johnson sheepishly confessed that his desire to stay in No 10
was perhaps evidence that he had been too optimistic the night before. He
compared his determination to cling to office to that of the Japanese soldier
Hiroo Onoda, who hid in the jungle for years and refused to accept Japan’s
surrender after the Second World War.

Johnson then misquoted the surrender declaration of Japan’s Emperor

Hirohito at the end of the war. “Matters have evolved, as Emperor Hirohito
may have said.” Hirohito actually said: “The war situation has developed not
necessarily to Japan’s advantage.”

Johnson concluded cabinet by giving his successor advice: “Think about the
voters. Think about the people. We win when we talk about them, not about
us.”

He spent the rest of the day filling cabinet posts. The No 10 whiteboard,
ordinarily brought out for reshuffles, detailed the risk of scandal prospective
ministers might pose. A number of names had the initials “PET” next to them
because they were likely to come under scrutiny by the propriety and ethics
team. “The situation was so grave that even known sex pests were being
considered for roles despite the Pincher scandal,” said a cabinet minister
who saw the board.

The appointment of Shailesh Vara as Northern Ireland secretary (replacing

Brandon Lewis, who quit on Wednesday night) was greeted with
bewilderment in the province, where he previously spent five months as a
junior minister and was notorious for asking an official “whether he needed a
passport to go to Derry”.

Egged on by what one insider called the “lunatics”, Johnson also began to
voice the view that Sunak had been engaged in a plot lasting months to
destabilise him, in cahoots with Dominic Cummings, his former aide, and
Gove. “He observed that there was a lot to come out about that,” a witness
said. “Someone has filled his head with it. He won’t say who he wants to
succeed him, but Rishi is the one he doesn’t want to succeed him.”

It was also claimed, without any evidence, that Oliver Dowden, who resigned
as party chairman last month and is now running Sunak’s campaign, had
passed party data to the Sunak campaign months ago. A source close to
Dowden said it was “categorically untrue” and accused No 10 of “smearing”
him, since such an action would be illegal. An ally of Cummings also
declared claims that he was working with Sunak “bollocks”, while Gove’s
response to this accusation last week was to describe it as “absolute f***ing
bollocks”.

Boris steps down: How the week unfolded

Aides expect Johnson to remain as an MP until at least the next election.

Before that, he has the opportunity to reward his allies with a resignation
honours list, something that is already causing grave concern in the royal
household. The Palace is very anxious about the number of gongs,
particularly the number of peerages” — sources suggest Johnson wants to
hand out 20 or more. David Cameron ennobled eight in his resignation
honours, Theresa May created 13 peers. “They are extremely concerned it is
going to be Uncle Tom Cobley and all. There seem to be lots of unsuitable
people. The list is going to be pages and pages,” said a source close to the
royal household.

A political official in No 10 last week contacted a veteran Tory and asked

whether it was possible that Stanley Johnson, the PM’s father, could be
given a knighthood on the basis that he was “once an MEP”. The senior
Conservative advised against it.

Nigel Adams, whom enemies accuse of persuading Johnson to employ

Pincher, a drinking partner of his, has been telling friends he will get a
peerage. Nadine Dorries is also expected to go to the Lords and revert to
writing novels. Allegra Stratton, who resigned as Johnson’s spokeswoman
over partygate, is also tipped for a peerage. A separate list of political peers,
due before the summer recess, will include Michael Hintze, the billionaire
Tory donor, and Paul Dacre, the former editor of the Daily Mail.

“This is an area where a prime minister’s power is basically unfettered,” the

source said.

David Davis, the former cabinet minister, said: “A resignation honours list
should be very, very carefully scrutinised. There should be a presumption
against handing honours for people who are associated with the problems of
the Boris regime — for example, the appointment of Chris Pincher.”

Johnson’s political aides said they had not yet drawn up the list. A senior civil
servant said nothing had yet been passed to the Palace.

The leadership contest will be as much about character as policy, but a

senior party source warned that whoever wins will face more sleaze
scandals. “There are two dozen unexploded bombs, cases of scandal that
are ready to explode that the new leader will inherit,” he said.

Johnson was the most compelling political figure I have ever encountered.
He was not as good a speaker as David Cameron, let alone Tony Blair or
Barack Obama. And as a manager he was borderline hopeless. Yet he was
matched only by Bill Clinton in his ability to connect with ordinary voters.

However, even he could not defy the consequences of his own personality.
To one of the PM’s aides, the last burst of Johnsonian bravado on
Wednesday night put him in mind of the opera La bohème, in which the
heroine, dying of TB, rouses herself to sing one of the greatest arias before
expiring. “You think, ‘If she can sing like that, she can’t possibly die’ — and
then she keels over and dies. The end.”
Even in political death, though, the legacy Johnson sat contemplating that
night, will endure. He is the most consequential prime minister of my adult
lifetime. Since 2016 we have been living in a world shaped more by his
actions and urges than anything else. This was the Age of Boris and it still
will be when he is gone. That isn’t the legacy he wanted. But it will have to
do.