‘Oh God. Poor Dave. Poor Sam. Jesus,’ said Boris as he watched David Cameron emerge into Downing Street at 8.45 a.m. on Friday morning, 24 June. He had not anticipated Cameron’s resignation, or expected to watch Sam Cameron, dazed by the unexpected result, wrestling with her emotions. At the end of his announcement, the couple turned and walked back into Number 10 leaving the Tory Brexiteers surprised, shattered and even angry.
‘Go upstairs and focus on what you’re going to say,’ Boris was ordered. ‘It’s going to be the most important speech you’ve ever made.’ After writing his speech, he rattled off an article for the following day’s Telegraph.
Outside Boris’s house, an angry crowd had gathered screaming obscenities at a man accused of dividing the country. None trusted him to pick up the pieces. Inside, Boris was not receiving congratulatory calls. Tory Brexiteers were not prepared to declare immediately their support for Boris, the clear favourite as prime minister at 4/6. On the other side, Tory Remainers had already swung behind May.
Exhausted and bewildered, and despite the sheer acrimony of the campaigns, Boris was not prepared for the antagonism sweeping the country. After telephoning Lynton Crosby to secure his help for the leadership campaign, he cautiously emerged from the house. Twenty policemen had arrived to protect him from the mob. On the railings of his house were underpants adorned with his face. Being demonised for ‘a special place in hell’ was not what he imagined. Squeezed into a waiting car, the driver was told, ‘Don’t stop at any lights. It’ll be too dangerous.’ As the first set of traffic lights turned from green to red, the driver stopped. Within seconds, a mob was beating on the car and preventing it moving. Over the next minutes, waiting for the police, Boris was told by Will Walden to rewrite his speech: ‘Insert an appeal to youth that we will unite.’ Once freed from the protestors, heading towards Leave’s headquarters, he texted Cameron: ‘Dave. I am so sorry to have been out of touch but I couldn’t think what to say and now I am absolutely miserable about your decision. You have been a superb PM and leader and the country owes you eternally.’
Shortly after, he appeared on a stage with Gove and Gisela Stuart, the Labour MP, to celebrate their victory. After a series of fractious disagreements among the Leave organisers, all three looked miserable. The markets had slumped, the pound had hit a thirty-one-year low, there were predictions that Britain would break up (Scotland voted 62 per cent to remain), City bankers were aghast and Juncker petulantly demanded immediate talks to negotiate Brexit. Speaking for many, the chef Jamie Oliver said ‘I’m out of Britain if Boris becomes prime minister.’ Unprepared for that vitriol, Boris told the crowd that Cameron was ‘a brave and principled man’. Without his normal conviction, he extolled the restoration of parliamentary democracy, condemned ‘those who would play politics with immigration’, and pledged that ‘Britain will continue to be a great European power … I believe we now have a glorious opportunity.’ Head fallen, he moved to the back of the stage. Clearly shocked, Gove spoke next. He did not disguise his guilt about Cameron’s resignation. That sucked the joy out of the victory. To avoid the protestors in London, Boris headed for Thame. Suspecting a media stake-out on the road, he walked across fields to his house.
By nightfall, however, he no longer felt so bad about Cameron’s demise. He buried his quip that his chance of becoming prime minister was as good as being ‘reincarnated as an olive’. Speaking to Ben Wallace and his group, they agreed to meet the following day at Althorp for the annual Johnsons vs Spencers cricket match.
‘Are you sure that you should go?’ Boris was asked. ‘It won’t look good.’
‘I’ve made the commitment and I won’t break it,’ he replied. ‘It’ll be fine.’
The Johnson team, captained by MP Nigel Adams, was boosted by Herschelle Gibbs, the outstanding South African batsman. During the game, Boris drank wine and optimistically discussed his prospects. After twice defying the odds and winning in London and, contrary to the polling forecasts, winning the referendum, his chances of securing the party leadership appeared overwhelming. To enhance his chances, they agreed, as the Spencers beat the Johnsons, that he would seek a pact with Gove.
The two had first met in Oxford. During Boris’s second attempt to become the Union president, Gove had acted as one his ‘stooges’ to ‘rustle up support’ in his college. The relationship, Boris admitted in The Oxford Myth, ‘is founded on duplicity’. Gove fell for Boris’s unfulfillable promises about the future and delivered his college’s votes for Boris. Over the next thirty years, Gove rarely featured in Boris’s life. Although they frequently met at party meetings, in Westminster and Gove had vigorously campaigned for Boris in 2008, there was no special bond. Gove’s close relationship with Cameron not only precluded friendship with Boris but he shared Cameron’s disdain for Boris’s character. Unlike Boris, reform was Gove’s passion. By relentless focus on detail, Gove had pushed his ideas through Whitehall’s resistant bureaucracy and could deliver outstanding sixty-minute speeches on complicated issues without hesitation or even notes. So although the two had little in common they were united on the big issue of the moment.
In a teleconference that evening, Boris, Gove and Will Walden discussed Boris’s leadership bid. The fourth participant was Dominic Cummings. Boris understood that Gove would not move without Cummings by his side. Boris also knew that the forty-four-year-old was famous as unremittingly bombastic, volatile, aggressive, and occasionally depressed. As a proud iconoclast, Cummings cherished creative destruction. The son of an oil-rig project manager and brought up in Durham, he had studied history in Oxford under the outstanding Norman Stone who introduced him to Euroscepticism. Uncompromising and unwilling to take prisoners, some appreciated Cummings’ extraordinary ability to shape political judgements based on perceptive understanding of effects and consequences of actions. As a congenital rule-breaker, he was more interested in delivering policies than converting voters to new ideologies. The majority of Tories with personal experience of working alongside him agreed that his outstanding characteristic was his talent to alienate those he sought to influence. Many Tory Brexiteer MPs, Boris knew, would refuse to support him if Cummings was part of his team.
Towards the end of the four-way teleconference, Boris accepted Gove’s offer of collaboration. He also agreed that Gove would be the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in charge of Brexit negotiations and responsible for reforming the Civil Service. He refused Gove’s demand that Osborne be made Foreign Secretary. ‘I’m not committing to anything more,’ Boris insisted, but then made another concession. With mixed feelings, Boris agreed to Gove’s non-negotiable demand that Cummings be included in their team. He had no choice and believed he could resist his intellectual intimidation. ‘That was an example of two people parking their tanks on your lawn,’ Walden texted to Boris. Gove, Walden was convinced, assumed that Boris would be prime minister just in name and could be rolled. As Gove’s chances to be leader were rated at 11/2, Boris ignored Walden’s warning. After all, Gove had repeatedly pronounced himself over previous years unsuitable to be prime minister. ‘I could not be prime minister,’ Gove had told BBC TV. ‘I’m not equipped to be prime minister. I do not want to be prime minister.’ Boris did accept Walden’s advice to call Lynton Crosby. ‘Gove will support me,’ Boris told the Australian. ‘Our deal is that Michael will be deputy prime minister and Chancellor and Brexit negotiator. Dominic will be head of policy in Downing Street.’ But, he added ‘Dom must be invisible’ during the leadership campaign. Boris and Crosby agreed to meet on Monday morning after a planned secret summit between Boris and Gove arranged for the following day at Boris’s house in Thame.
The Sunday morning newspaper photographs of Boris enjoying the Althorp cricket match outraged the Remainers. While half the nation grieved, the man who had convulsed Britain had been frolicking with his Etonian chums. Why, they shrieked, was he not at work to repair the destruction? Boris ignored the losers’ carping. With his loyal team – Will Walden, Jake Berry, Ben Wallace, Nigel Adams, Eddie Lister and Amanda Milling – he considered the pledges of support. ‘According to our data,’ said Nigel Adams, ‘we have sixty-four definites. We’ll need 111 to get over the line into the final round.’ He expected at least twenty-five more commitments over the next two days.
‘How come the TV cameras are here?’ Gove asked when he arrived.
‘Because your wife told them,’ Walden replied. ‘The TV crew told me that Sarah [Vine] tipped them off.’
Over the barbeque lunch, the atmosphere became ‘frosty’. ‘Who supports you?’ Gove asked. ‘No, you tell us who supports you,’ replied Adams. ‘Eighteen,’ he replied, including Jacob Rees-Mogg and Dominic Raab. Numbers, in Gove’s opinion, did not matter. As a Cabinet minister with a proven record, he assumed his superiority over Boris while Boris saw no reason to suspect his friend from Oxford of plotting.
‘Let’s see your list,’ said Gove. Wallace resisted but Boris agreed. ‘I’ll run your leadership campaign,’ announced Gove. Wallace became angrier but Boris did not protest. ‘And we’ll run the media operation,’ added Gove. ‘That’s my job,’ Walden interjected. Boris’s key aides were being sidelined. Gove and his team assumed control. Wallace handed over his spreadsheet of supporters. Despite winning on every score, Gove left in a huff. ‘This is all very odd,’ said Adams.
‘I’ll sort Michael out,’ said Boris, insensitive to what had happened, which in his unfocused manner, he did not try to understand. Too often, for convenience’s sake he took people at face value. He was unaware that Gove had earlier confided to Rod Liddle, ‘Boris can’t be trusted.’ Nor did he suspect that Nick Boles, who had previously described himself as ‘a vague Remainer’, had become a Brexiteer helping Gove. But others became suspicious after Boles described the lunch as ‘boozy’. No one drank alcohol, there were no jokes, and anyway, Boles was not at Thame that day. The only link to alcohol was Boles’s endorsement of Boris as ‘the Heineken candidate’.
That night, Boris wrote his column for Monday’s Telegraph. Having divided Britain, he posed as the agent of reunification to the 16 million Remainers with a plan, not least to prevent Scotland breaking away. ‘We must reach out, we must heal, we must build bridges.’ He praised co-operation with Europe for culture, education and the environment; he promised to protect the rights of EU citizens living in the UK; and he insisted that Britain would have access to the single market thanks to a special arrangement to stay within the EU’s ‘internal market’: ‘There is every case for optimism: a Britain rebooted, reset, renewed and able to engage with the whole world.’ Pledged to pursue One Nation policies, he would end the discrepancy that FTSE 100 chiefs earned 150 times more than the ‘forgotten people’. Before submitting the article, he sent it to Gove for comment. ‘Overall very, very good,’ Gove replied. He suggested minor changes to present a more ‘inclusive, positive and optimistic message’.1
The article caused mayhem among Boris’s potential supporters. To Iain Duncan Smith and other seasoned Brexiteer MPs, Boris seemed to have gone soft about the single market. He wrote: ‘The only change – and it will not come in any great rush – is that the UK will extricate itself from the EU’s extraordinary and opaque system of legislation.’ That was not the Brexiteers’ Gospel. Britain, they preached, would have access to the single market but would not be part of the ‘internal market’. Unlike Boris’s ‘have the cake and eat it’, they did not expect to leave and enjoy the benefits.
Before he had absorbed this fundamental disagreement, Boris was sitting on Monday morning in Lynton Crosby’s Pimlico office. The good news, said Crosby, was that his calls to donors had produced money for Boris’s campaign. The rest was bad news. Gove arrived with Cummings, despite Boris having stipulated that Cummings was not to be present. Nick Boles also arrived. Crosby had already warned Boris: ‘I wouldn’t trust Boles. He has no political judgement.’ The mutual suspicion increased because Gove hated Crosby. In the summer of 2014, the pollster had advised Cameron to remove Gove as Education Secretary. Gove’s anger had been restoked by Sarah Vine, his ambitious wife. And because Crosby distrusted Boles, Boles distrusted Crosby. Despite that tension, all that mattered was finding more MPs to support Boris. By then, Wallace had listed commitments from nearly one hundred MPs including Nicholas Soames – a surprise after he recently called Boris, ‘an ocean-going clot’. Wallace did not know which MPs supported Gove. They would need to switch to Boris.
In Pimlico, the heat was rising. Crosby decided to bang heads together: ‘There’s only one fucking list – both of you hand yours over to me and I’ll merge them.’ To everyone’s surprise, Gove refused. ‘I’m running the campaign,’ snapped Crosby, ‘and we’re focusing on Boris.’ Gove hated that and knew that his wife would be outraged. In the pandemonium, Gove told Boris ‘I’ll run the campaign and Lynton can help.’ Without any questions, Boris flapped and guffawed. Slow to think on his feet, he preferred not to sully the atmosphere with an argument. He failed to reflect about the similarity of the demands and protests the previous Saturday. He allowed the momentous decisions to be rushed through rather than demand time to reflect about the barrage of disagreements that had emerged over the previous twenty-four hours. For a man who had for years survived despite consistently ignoring deadlines, there was on this occasion no safety net. He agreed to Gove’s demand. ‘Nick will submit the formal nomination papers,’ continued Gove, clearly in charge. In return for his support, Gove again demanded that George Osborne would be Foreign Secretary, and Andrea Leadsom, a former banking bureaucrat, would be Chancellor of the Exchequer. Forty-eight hours earlier, Gove had said he would be the Chancellor. Now he was promoting an unknown energy minister with a peculiar passion, as she would highlight in a speech, for the benefits of massaging babies’ brains. Since some Brexiteer MPs were mentioning her as their favourite to be prime minister and she had confirmed her own ambitions for the leadership, Boris just nodded.
Arriving later that morning in Westminster, Boris knew that his success depended on converting the sceptics to favour him rather than Theresa May, his principal rival. A well-functioning election machine would have smoothly conveyed the uncommitted MPs into his office. He would listen to their demands, pledge sympathy for their interests, assure them that with him as prime minister they would keep their seats in the next election and that, with confidence, they could rely on his plan for Brexit and government. The most important group to seduce were the fifty hardcore Brexiteers – some of whom had campaigned for Britain’s departure from the EU since the 1980s.
Most Brexiteers were sceptical about Boris as prime minister. He had no ministerial experience; he had never been a true Brexiteer; and many were cross about the £350 million slogan on the bus. ‘I don’t think he is intellectually ready,’ reflected one Brexiter. ‘He isn’t well organised and does not realise it. He’s only been mayor and he’s never run a Whitehall department. He doesn’t have enough experience.’ As shrewd politicians, they also looked at his closest aides as an indication of his administration. All they saw were Gove and Boles. Although Boris had denied that Cummings would be part of the government, few believed him and Gove aroused suspecions. In personal meetings with Boris, they made requests and were angered by his confusing answers. Andrew Mitchell was among many to criticise the campaign. ‘We know what we’re doing,’ replied Wallace. By Wednesday, the muddle had increased.
Boris the Buffoon, reported The Times, had turned into Boris the Brave Brexiteer, but even some Leave voters saw him as Boris the Betrayer. ‘He’s completely untrustworthy,’ reported the newspaper, ‘or rather you can trust him completely to always let you down.’2 There was also despair about assertions by Brexiteers. David Davis predicted that the day after Parliament approved of Brexit, a British government minister would fly to Berlin and conclude a new trade deal with all the same benefits of EU membership. ‘The cards’, he said, were ‘incredibly stacked our way’. Liam Fox asserted that fixing a new deal with the EU would be ‘the easiest in human history’ and that the day after Parliament’s Brexit vote, he would sign ‘forty new trade deals’.3
During the morning, May summoned Boris. Neither trusted the other and during the referendum she had behaved suspiciously. ‘Submarine May’, said Cameron, was ‘an enemy agent’. Unlike Boris, she had played her cards close to her chest, in her own interest, ignoring the country and the party, not least by rejecting Cameron’s demands for immigration controls. Until the very end, she had refused to campaign for Remain. Her opportunism was paying off. YouGov reported that morning that May was the favourite among Tory voters at 31 per cent against 24 per cent for Boris. As the stop-Boris candidate, she could assume the support of Remainer MPs.
Boris ignored her command. Two hours later, Gavin Williamson, an ambitious but lowly MP employed as her campaign manager, delivered her offer: ‘Step down. You can be my deputy.’ Her terms were rejected. Boris was playing to win. Looking for allies, he summoned Amber Rudd. Even calling Rudd exposed Boris’s artlessness. In the event, she offered her support on the condition she would be the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
‘Why are you bothering with Amber?’ he was asked by one of his key MP aides. ‘She brings no supporters. You should speak to Andrea [Leadsom].’
‘Andrea’s on board,’ replied Boris. Patting his pocket, he added, ‘I’ve got a letter for her.’ The letter confirmed that Leadsom would abandon her own leadership bid in exchange for being the Chancellor in Boris’s government. ‘But I’ve got a problem,’ Boris added. ‘Michael [Gove] also says that he wants to be Chancellor.’ In his solitary state, Boris could no longer make sense of events as gossip about his offer to Leadsom flew around Westminster. Brexiteers could not understand why Boris cared about Leadsom. She was stubborn, not particularly intelligent and had exaggerated her banking career. Blind to the turmoil, Boris, a one-man band without a consigliere, moved fast towards the climax of the drama. Before noon the following day, he would formally declare his candidature for the leadership.
That night, the Tory Party’s leaders and donors met at the annual summer party at the Hurlingham Club in Fulham, a black-tie dinner. As usual Boris was late. While he was hurrying back to Islington to change, Jake Berry was texting with Gove about the choreography for the following morning. Amber Rudd, it was agreed, would introduce Boris to his supporters at the St Ermin’s Hotel in Westminster. Boles, it was agreed, would drive Boris after the dinner at the Hurlingham from Fulham to Islington to write his declaration speech.
Boris arrived at the Hurlingham to find a toxic, mournful and tearful atmosphere. Among the most emotional was Cameron. The most hated person in the room was Boris. Amid that emotional bedlam, a series of conspiracies was born. The first was the fate of Boris’s letter to Leadsom guaranteeing she would be the Chancellor. She had demanded a letter in exchange for not declaring her leadership bid the following day. In Boris’s version, he gave the letter to Boles to hand to Leadsom. In the account by Gove’s team, Boris admitted that the letter was left at his home when he changed clothes.
At the end of the evening, Boles and Boris drove back from Fulham to Islington. ‘Give me your mobile,’ said Boles, ‘so you can focus on writing.’ Unknown to Boris, among the text messages received on his mobile during the journey was one from Leadsom asking about the promised letter. Boles, it appears, deleted that text. As he got out of the car in Islington, Boris said ‘See you at St Ermin’s tomorrow.’
‘Yes,’ replied Boles.
The car sped away, not to Boles’s home but to Michael Gove’s west London house. The plotters did not sleep much that night.
*
Despite denying any ambition to be prime minister, Gove hankered for the job, especially after working so close to Cameron. For years, his ambition had been encouraged by Rupert Murdoch. Over the past days, Gove’s team of advisers encouraged his disdain for Boris, even as a figurehead. Cummings was against Boris in anger that he had been banned from a future government. Boles, filled with self-important delusions, could not forgive Boris for his success. He joined Cummings to persuade Gove to dump Boris, especially after Osborne had been recruited to be Foreign Secretary. The seal had been set in an email from Sarah Vine to her husband. Both Paul Dacre and Rupert Murdoch, she wrote, ‘instinctively dislike Boris’ and would support him, Gove, as prime minister. In Gove’s negotiations with Boris, Vine ended, ‘Do not concede any ground. Be your stubborn best. Good luck.’ Vine was described as Lady Macbeth without the charm.
At 8.53 a.m. on Thursday morning, Gove called Crosby who was eating breakfast at the Corinthia hotel by the Embankment. ‘I thought I’d call you first,’ said Gove. ‘I’m running.’
‘I know you’re running,’ replied Crosby, puzzled. ‘You’re the campaign manager.’
‘No. I’m running for the leadership.’
‘Have you told Boris?’
‘No.’
One minute later, Boles emailed Boris’s office that, despite their agreement the previous night, he would not be submitting Boris’s nomination papers.
At that moment, Boris was stepping out of the shower. The phone rang. Crosby relayed the news.
‘It’s over,’ puffed Boris. ‘That’s it. I can’t go on. I can’t run.’
‘Don’t make any decisions,’ ordered Crosby. ‘Don’t tell anyone you’re not running. Come over with Marina to the office.’
At 9.02, Gove’s office emailed journalists: ‘Events since last Thursday have weighed heavily with me … I have come, reluctantly, to the conclusion that Boris cannot provide the leadership or build the team for the task ahead.’ Gove declared he would run for leader.
Will Walden was at Crosby’s office by the time Boris arrived. Like the others, Walden was shocked by the treachery of Gove, Vine and Cummings.
‘Gove has done the dirty on us,’ Boris told Jake Berry on the phone.
‘If you both run,’ replied Berry, ‘you’ll destroy each other.’ His parliamentary team were already calling ninety MPs to check whether they remained pledged to Boris.
‘We should have been suspicious when Gove asked for the list of our supporters,’ Wallace told David Davis in the Commons. ‘It’s been a spectacular betrayal.’
‘We’re losing people,’ Boris was told. Even Michael Howard, a Boris supporter, switched to Gove. Only sixty MPs were likely and just thirty were firm. Their constituency associations were supporting May with her Thatcherite image of safety and security. Boris’s decades of gaffes cemented MPs’ conviction that he was flakey.
‘You haven’t got enough support,’ declared Crosby.
‘Bad for your image if you fight,’ added Walden.
‘It’s your call,’ Crosby said. ‘We can’t win. Keep your powder dry for another day. But if you decide to run, we’ll stay in the trench with you to the end. You and Marina, go to a room and discuss it.’
Fifteen minutes later, they emerged. Marina had persuaded Boris to pull out.
‘It’s not your time,’ agreed Mark Fullbrook, Crosby’s associate. ‘Let Gove spend his time hitting you.’
‘I was a fool to trust him,’ admitted Boris.4 ‘Some of you told me I should never have done so and I’m sorry I didn’t listen.’
At midday, Boris entered the Cloister’s Suite at the St Ermin’s Hotel. One hundred politicians, journalists and supporters were waiting to hear the declaration of his candidature. None had spotted that his staff had covered the ‘Exit’ sign over the tradesman’s entrance through which he would leave. The photographers would be denied an open goal.
Boris stepped towards the lectern to speak about steadying nerves and unifying the country. Now, he continued, quoting Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, was ‘a time not to fight the tide of history but to take that tide at the flood and sail on to fortune’. Britain’s new leader would need to unify the party and represent the country. And then came the bombshell: ‘But I must tell you my friends … I have concluded that that person cannot be me.’ Silence followed. Shocked and speechless, his supporters watched Boris walk away. Without a murmur, he left the room. Mindful of the perils, he said nothing more to the media. He resisted lashing out at those who betrayed him and those who now piled in, speculating about unrevealed skeletons. Was it his past relations with women, or other secrets? Leaving some mystery camouflaged his weakness.
‘Holy shit, I’m glad it’s over but it was a mistake to pull out,’ he said as his car drove away. ‘You should have stuck with me, mate,’ Cameron texted, bemused by the shock announcement. ‘Blimey, is he [Michael] a bit cracked or something?’ Boris replied. ‘Great speech last night,’ referring to the dinner at the Hurlingham. ‘Everyone watched and thought we’d gone insane to lose you and people were looking at me as if I was a leper, but you had eleven hard years of party leadership and six superbly as PM, more than I will ever do.’ Within the hour, Crosby had emptied the campaign office. Boris’s presence had been wiped out.
Thirty minutes after Boris’s exit, May launched her bid. Mocking ‘showy’ politicians and their ‘gimmicks’, she derided her former rival: ‘Boris negotiated in Europe. I seem to remember last time he did a deal with the Germans, he came back with three nearly-new water cannons.’ (They would be sold as scrap by Sadiq Khan for £11,025 in 2018.) Boris was a target for point-scoring and Gove joined the crowd.
Accompanied by Nick Boles, his campaign manager, Gove announced his candidature to a small audience including just five MPs, not the fifty he had expected. Careless about the hostility towards himself and deluded he could beat May, Gove had not anticipated Boris pulling out. His speech was not about Britain’s future but justification of his conduct. ‘In the last four days I had a chance to see up close and personal how Boris dealt with some of the decisions we needed to make in order to take this country forward. During that period, I had hoped that Boris would rise to the occasion … but I saw him seek to meet and not pass those tests.’ Boris, said Gove, lacked the necessary experience and leadership qualities to ‘unite the team and lead the party and the country’ and he did not ‘believe heart and soul’ in Brexit.
Gove would later claim that the Sunday barbeque in Thame was shambolic, that Boris’s Telegraph article was a ‘sloppy’ appeal to both sides, and that the non-delivery of the Leadsom letter was typical of Boris’s disorganisation and lack of attention to detail. Those misrepresentations would provoke Boris to denounce Gove as ‘deeply Machiavellian and flawed’. He accused Boles of ‘stealing’ his phone to sabotage his link with Leadsom.5 But the ultimate passage of Gove’s speech was the most wounding because, as Boris later learnt, it was crafted by Clare Foges who had worked for Boris in City Hall. That, he felt, was the ultimate betrayal: ‘I also thought ultimately, can I recommend to my friends that this person is right to be prime minister? The answer was no.’ He added, ‘I think I am the right person to be prime minister.’ Then followed a uniquely self-destructive reason for his candidature: ‘I did not want it.6 Indeed, I did almost everything I could not to be a candidate for the leadership … I was so very reluctant because I know my limitations. Whatever charisma is – I don’t have it – whatever glamour may be, I don’t think anyone could ever associate me with it.’ The instant vituperation against Gove was widespread.
Gove, wrote Rachel Johnson, had ‘executed the most egregious reverse ferret and act of treachery in modern political history’. Jake Berry tweeted, ‘There is a very deep pit reserved in hell for such as he.’ Others spoke of a ‘calculated plot’, a ‘venal backstabbing liar’, ‘a political psychopath run by his wife’, and ‘a total cuckoo-in-the-nest operation from the beginning’.
Boris’s exit was welcomed by Ruth Davidson, the Scottish Tory leader. Others were appalled that the architects of Brexit had fled. ‘He ripped the Tory Party apart,’ wrote Michael Heseltine, ‘he has created the greatest constitutional crisis of modern times. He is like a general who led his army to the sound of guns and at the sight of the battlefield abandoned the field. I have never seen such a contemptible and irresponsible situation … He must live with the shame of what he has done.’ Max Hastings was grateful that an ‘amiable cove’s’ withdrawal had saved him ‘having to fulfil my 2012 pledge that I would catch a plane to Buenos Aires if this essentially brutal buffoon became prime minister’.7
The following day, Boris fulfilled a long-standing engagement at a constituency dinner. He drove four hours to Devon to speak for Mel Stride, a Tory MP, even though Stride had not supported his leadership. During the journey, he contemplated the end of his career. Instead of negotiating Brexit, he was gone. Hated by Tory Remainers and not supported by Leavers, he plunged into a deep depression. Not one of the 150 Tories at the dinner that night sensed their speaker’s humiliation or his personal devastation. Compartmentalising his emotions, his performance was perfect. At the end, they cheered a speech that in the circumstances had been surprisingly jokey.
Boris returned to London and backed Leadsom in the leadership stakes. Paul Dacre at the Daily Mail backed May. The Times did not outrightly endorse Gove. In the first round, May won 50.2 per cent of the votes with 165 MPs while Gove had 48 votes. In the second round, Gove dropped to 46 votes and was eliminated. After serious inconsistencies were exposed in Leadsom’s version of her own career, she withdrew. On 11 July, May was elected unopposed.
Isolated and lonely, Boris was not consoled by the Remainers’ misery. Their dream had been shattered by the people (or voters) they pretended to represent. Instead of blaming themselves, they cursed Boris. The Brexiteers’ success sowed a deep hatred of him.