Boris Johnson- We wish you well.

 Boris Johnson - We wish you well.

History will never look kindly upon Boris Johnson. Sometimes you begin to wonder whether things will ever turn out right for the blond one from Uxbridge and Eton public school. You look back at his recent tales of woe and disaster and can never find anything that looks remotely like salvation or redemption. It was always likely to end in tears, bitterness, grudges and bad blood. Besides, what to make of a man who used to be Prime Minister and then found himself directly drawn into a hellish nightmare, a dystopian vision of a world that had now been lost in the most horrendous spiral of death and suffering? It could have been saved at the last possible moment but then fate intervened and we all know what happened next.

Yesterday Johnson emerged from the scrum of media attention and didn't quite know which way to turn or look. Boris Johnson resigned from his current position of party politics and slowly drifted away into the misty wilderness of complete obscurity. Now this is a first for Boris Johnson because, for the last two decades, Johnson has become public property, desperately seeking the front page headlines and almost obsessively clinging onto the belief that he was simply the persecuted one. He was then  hounded out of office and left to skulk in a lonely doorway, licking his wounds and braving the elements once again.

On a glorious day in early June, Boris Johnson quit the House of Commons, bruised and damaged by all the people who simply misunderstood him and then tore him to pieces when it all looked distinctly promising.  Besides, from the moment he was elected as Prime Minister way back when everything in the garden was rosy. He'd taken us out of the messy wreckage that was the European Union, stamped his assertive feet firmly on the ground and for a moment must have felt like his noble predecessor Sir Winston Churchill. 

And now then there was the dizzying complexity that was the Customs House union and the ever increasing circles of the now deepening uncertainty that was Brexit. Johnson hadn't a clue which way he was going. Are we in or out of Europe? What about the financial implications, the tariff charges on specific borders of Europe and just look at the industrial strife that Johnson had now left Rishi Sunak, the current Prime Minister, to clear up. All of that emotional energy spent on something that in theory, looked so simple.

So Boris Johnson looked around him and found that he was trapped in the middle of an insoluble predicament. The political quicksand was dragging him deep into yet more humiliation. His time was up and there seemed no plausible alternative. So Johnson, blond hair now on the point of anarchic rebellion, growled and snarled with utter contempt and loathing for his erstwhile colleagues. Of course he'd broken lockdown laws, of course he'd partied excessively while the rest of his beloved Britain was simply stuck at home, bemused by a terrifying virus-cum disease known as Covid 19. But what else could he have done?

At the beginning of the 21st century Johnson was still an effective presence and orator. He was editor of the Spectator, a magazine so admired by both politicians and intellectual thinkers that our Boris must have thought he'd won the Lottery several times. Johnson now had the perfect literary platform to air his innermost thoughts and controversial opinions. Then the Daily Telegraph came calling and once again put all of his cards on the table, announcing yet more punchy and polemical views on all manner of subjects. It was going so well until the Johnson ego began to believe that this bright new career had obvious potential.

So his head began to expand quite painfully, the critics became camp followers and Johnson discovered the rarefied air of politics. His column in the Daily Telegraph, became almost a holy scripture and then the Tories reached out for him, drawing him warmly into their very Conservative fold. Somebody must have told him about a vacancy left by Ken Livingstone as Mayor of London. The rest of course is well chronicled and printed. 

For almost as long as anybody can remember Boris Johnson was always regarded as fanatically ambitious and aspirational. He'd studied the giants, the Macmillans, the Churchills, the Heaths and latterly the Thatchers. He'd concluded that anything they could do he could do better. So he was appointed Mayor of London and everything which followed on from that point now seems barely believable. He promised things that very rarely come to fruition. The critics knew he was just a bumbling buffoon and it all became totally 

But on a memorable day in the summer of 2005, Britain was chosen to host the Olympic Games for the first time since 1948. It was at this point that Johnson experienced delusions of grandeur. He was the one who confidently predicted that one day Great Britain would become the centre of global attention. In the years that followed the 2012 Olympics in London, Johnson literally went from the sublime to the ridiculous, from rugby tackling young children to the famous zip wire across the skies of London. 

Then on another day of the sweetest fragrance, Johnson was elected as a leader of his Tory constituencies of both Henley and more recently Uxbridge. But power had now gone to his head completely and the job as Mayor of London had become tiresome and repetitive. So he upped the ante, saw that Theresa May had now left 10 Downing Street and thought he could do the job of Prime Minister so much more skilfully than anybody else.

So when it came to the crunch Johnson threw his hat into the ring and thought somebody had given him the most beautifully packaged birthday present when his Labour counterpart put forward his credentials. After the briefest of spells as a Foreign Secretary, Johnson was now up against the Labour challenge of Jeremy Corbyn. Johnson licked his lips with delight at the easiest of goals from close range.

But then came Covid 19, the wild parties behind the scenes in Downing Street, the laws that were flagrantly broken, the unforgivable misdemeanours, the accidental trips to far away relatives in castles, the indefinite round of the Hokey Cokey, cheese and wine gatherings. All of these outrages had come in complete contravention of everything the Tories had told us to do. You had to stay in doors at all times and should never venture out in case the Covid 19 virus suddenly spread to all four corners of the globe- which it did anyway. You had to stand yards apart from your family and friends while at your local chemist a remarkable queue had formed and in your local park. Meanwhile a park ranger's truck with a tannoy did a passable impersonation of Winston Smith from George Orwell's dark but gripping novel 1984. Go for your exercise and then go home immediately. It was vaguely unnerving but you knew exactly what you had to do.

And finally there were the daily medical bulletins from 10 Downing Street, a sight that became so ingrained in our consciousness that some of us thought it would go on for much longer than it did. It was bizarrely fascinating, one Prime Minister flanked by two eminent scientists and doctors who did their utmost to explain a virus that went completely over our heads. They kept pointing at graphs, delivered the worst of all statistics, the fatalities and the new casualties while Boris Johnson must have been longing to hide in a dark room.

But Johnson came through, one of the horrific thousands upon thousands of those were infected with Covid 19 and then walked out from hospital as if it were some minor affliction. And then Johnson was rumbled, caught out, the perpetrator of heinous crimes that just engulfed him at the end. The dam broke and the fingers were firmly pointed out at a man so naive and vulnerable that even his closest friends must have been concerned at his fragile mental health state.

Yesterday then Boris Johnson said that he'd had enough and couldn't take the heat in the kitchen. Brexit will remain one of Johnson's redeeming positives. But even that old chestnut is beginning to wear thin  and it's hard to know where we stand in relation to Europe. Still, he does like his morning run but with rucksack on his shoulders, it all looked very uncomfortable. He may well write his memoir, almost certainly launch onto the after dinner speech circuit expressing yet another selection of forthright opinions on anything in particular. It may not be pleasant or complimentary but the familiar voice, the dishevelled appearance and the lovable eccentricity will never change. Boris Johnson. We wish you well wherever you go.