‘I’m increasingly admiring of Donald Trump,’ Boris told fellow diners at a Conservative dinner in mid-2018 soon after meeting the president in Washington. ‘I have become convinced that there is method in his madness.’ The comparisons between the two men were not flattering to Boris. Both were born in New York, became famous on TV and were embroiled in sex scandals. Both were accused of exaggeration, of impatience with the complexities of government and refusal to focus on detail. Critics also accused both men of ‘populism’, defined as the sin of serving the needs of the working class while ignoring the self-interest of the liberal elites.
As a liberal and an intellectual, Boris dismissed his enemies’ comparison but he did appreciate Trump’s solution to outmanoeuvre the EU’s obstinacy. During their conversation in Washington, the author of The Art of the Deal praised Boris’s no-deal threat to walk away as the only weapon to defeat the EU’s inflexibility. If Trump was negotiating Brexit, said Boris, ‘He’d go in hard … There’d be all sorts of breakdowns, all sorts of chaos. Everyone would think he’s gone mad. But actually you might get somewhere. It’s a very, very good thought.’1 That opinion was not popular in the Foreign Office.
Boris’s experience as Foreign Secretary had convinced him about the shortcomings of many diplomats. For more than a year, McDonald’s team had failed to exert any influence on the unfolding Syrian tragedy. Indeed, it was hard to find any country where the Foreign Office had genuinely extended British influence in recent years, or seriously reconsidered British foreign policy after Brexit. Although officials presented the memorandum ‘Global Britain – delivering on our international ambition’ after February 2018, McDonald’s staff had failed to flesh out Boris’s ambitions. The most depressing discovery was the inferior quality of the additional diplomats dispatched abroad. Their timidity, unimpressive intellect and limited education inhibited original ideas and initiative. Truly, the Foreign Office was a hotbed of cold feet.
Recommendations by Boris to extend British influence hit brick walls. The unorthodox idea of buying Svarland, a Norwegian island, for $250 million as a spy base was rejected. Similarly, the dispatch of troops to the port of Hodeidah in Yemen to protect food supplies to the starving population was sidelined by officials as too risky, despite Boris’s promotion of the idea as ‘a no-brainer’. Two minor chances to project Global Britain vanished.
His proposals about causes close to his heart at the Commonwealth heads of government conference were also sabotaged. At the summit, he publicly committed funds to educate girls in Muslim countries and highlighted a forthcoming International Wildlife conference in London to protect elephants and other endangered animals. But after his speeches, nothing happened. By nature, Boris delegated, but without constantly chasing for progress reports, unlike his energetic and responsive team in City Hall, the officials felt no need to undertake the grinding detailed work to implement his initiatives. Instead, the officials whispered that his sole skill was to make big announcements.
‘They kept sending him abroad to keep him out of the way and wear him out,’ recalled one of his junior ministers. ‘He flew nine times to Africa, rubbed happily along with squillionaire Arabs in Saudi Arabia and then was sent to Peru – the first British Foreign Secretary to have visited the country for over fifty years.’ Theresa May could only have been bemused to read of him energetically dancing with schoolchildren in a remote mountain village. To his surprise, he discovered that Peru’s borders were mapped by Colonel P. H. Fawcett, a distant relative of his mother, who disappeared and was, he colourfully added, presumed eaten. After Boris’s visit to neighbouring Chile, David Gallagher, the Chilean ambassador in London, reported that his government welcomed his tour as a triumph. As Foreign Secretary, Boris would report, he had visited fifty-two countries and opened new embassies in twenty-four countries. ‘Across the world, the flag is going up, not down,’ he said publicly. In private, he muttered, ‘I’ve got no power.’
He also complained about his frustration. Over those months, even Boris’s speeches were altered at the last moment by Foreign Office officials, including one about the battle against Islamic extremism and another voicing his criticism of Trump for moving the American Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. If his officials did not interfere, then May intervened. In December 2017, just as her EU negotiations were imploding, she again impeded his planned visit to Moscow to seek a solution to the Syrian tragedy. May distrusted Boris’s belief that his force of personality could resolve the problem. But in the end, just before Christmas, she relented. ‘No jokes,’ she told Boris. After trying to establish a relationship with Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, the climax of his meeting in Moscow was an acerbic press conference. In a point-scoring exchange, Boris and Lavrov accused each other of dishonesty. ‘Well that didn’t work out well,’ Boris admitted at the post-mortem in London. Politeness was pointless, he discovered.
He would not make the same mistake three months later. On 4 March 2018, Sergei Skripal, a former Russian intelligence officer living in Salisbury after defecting to the UK, fell seriously ill. British investigators suspected that he was the victim of Novichok, a nerve agent produced by the Russian military. Three days later, before the conclusive scientific evidence had been produced, Boris abandoned his Foreign Office script. At a press conference he accused Russia of ‘malign activities that stretch from abuse and murder of journalists to the mysterious assassination of politicians’. Once again, British officialdom sought to embarrass him. This time it was the lead scientist at Porton Down, the Ministry of Defence research laboratory. The scientist said on TV that his laboratory could not identify Russia as the source of the Novichok. Without consulting Boris, the Foreign Office pulled back from blaming Moscow. Six days later, May confirmed that Porton Down’s tests proved that the Novichok was manufactured in Russia. Undermining Boris was part of May’s survival kit.
Boris summoned the Russian ambassador. Accompanied by his deputy, a KGB officer, the ambassador gave a friendly greeting. ‘We know what happened,’ snapped Boris. ‘This is unacceptable.’ The ambassador was speechless. ‘He was masterly,’ recounted Alan Duncan. ‘The buzz around the building praised Boris for his brilliance, for perfectly reading his script and standing up for his country.’ Boris also took the credit for organising the expulsion of 153 Russian diplomats from nearly thirty other countries. In fighting form, Boris described the smokescreen orchestrated by Moscow: ‘The essence of a Kremlin cover-up is a cynical attempt to bury awkward facts beneath an avalanche of lies and disinformation.’2 He was tempted to say the same about the EU’s stance towards Britain but decided instead to be even more direct.
In the aftermath of Theresa May’s Cabinet reshuffle in early January, Boris felt emboldened – because she still did not dare to fire him – and frustrated, because the Brexit negotiations were stuck. Philip Hammond’s influence as the shop steward of the Remain opposition was infuriating. With the economy growing faster than predicted and sterling back up at $1.40, the chief architect of Project Fear had become ‘a glorious living rebuttal of his own preposterous warnings’. Here was a Chancellor, Brexiteers’ allies scoffed, who could not understand the details of his own finance bill.3 To ruffle feathers, Boris demanded that the government immediately inject £5 billion into the NHS to prove the Brexit premium. Playing giveaway politics infuriated the Remainers when the Cabinet met on 23 January 2018.
Encouraged by Theresa May, Amber Rudd attacked Boris for failing to ‘respect the dignity and privacy of Cabinet’ by leaking his NHS giveaway. ‘I’m talking to you, Foreign Secretary,’ snapped Rudd. ‘Jealousy,’ thought Boris. The £5 billion suggestion, said Jeremy Hunt the health minister, was ‘not helpful’. Hunt’s reprimand would not be forgotten by Boris. At the end of the discussion, May offered no conclusion. Was it fear of division, some wondered, or had she even listened? Leadership depended on fashioning unity. That eluded May and without a respected leader, no one would follow. The acrimony set the scene for a seven-month battle which climaxed on 6 July at Chequers.
Boris walked back from the Cabinet meeting to the Foreign Office feeling isolated. He had no natural allies, let alone friends, in the Cabinet and, other than the four back-bench MPs who organised his leadership bid, his only reliable parliamentary supporters were the fifty arch Brexiteers, members of the European Research Group (ERG). Yet even that group, led by Jacob Rees-Mogg, were not agitating for Boris to replace May. Despite the plots, feuds, and derision of the prime minister, they feared that without May the Remainers, who were a majority in the Commons, would reverse Brexit. With Labour leading in the opinion polls, May survived only because there was no limit to the humiliation she would accept.
Europe’s leaders were similarly not disposed to show May any mercy. At a meeting at Sandhurst with Emmanuel Macron shortly after the Cabinet meeting, May faced an uncompromising French president. Britain, said Macron, could expect no special deals, especially for the City. France would do its best to lure bankers to decamp to Paris and the Commission would formulate proposals to damage Britain. Flights to the UK would be grounded, Britons would not be allowed to drive cars or trucks in Europe, and Britain would be excluded from the Galileo GPS system, despite its major contribution to it. Sniffing that the Brexiteers’ fantasies were dissolving in the harsh light of economics and realpolitik, Macron was encouraging Leo Varadkar to exploit the parliamentary splits caused by the backstop. If Dublin pressed harder, Brexit could well unravel. By the end of her conversation with Macron, May was floundering. Two years after the referendum, Britain’s incompetence aroused incredulity across Europe.
May’s plight encouraged Boris to renew his attack. He prepared to deliver in mid-February a 4,000-word speech about the EU in central London. At the last moment, Jeremy Heywood, the Cabinet Secretary, forbade him from making the speech. Then, to execute a pre-emptive kneecapping, May’s office leaked a part of the speech. But nothing in Downing Street ever worked to plan. Instead, Boris’s full call to arms emerged in the Telegraph. The government, he said, could not ‘frustrate the will of the people’. Bowing to the Remainers would be a ‘disastrous mistake’ causing ‘ineradicable feelings of betrayal’. Britain must take back control of its laws. To abandon Ulster would be ‘intolerable’. Crossing the Irish border, he said, was the same as travelling between Camden and Westminster in London. The idea that refined technology could not monitor the Irish border used by just a few hauliers was nonsense. It would be similar to paying the congestion charge or using the Oyster card on the Tube. The backstop, he protested, had become weaponised to stop Brexit. This would impose ‘the worst of all worlds … out of the EU but still largely run by the EU’. The reply from Brussels hardened the Brexiteers’ resolve.
Martin Selmayr, Juncker’s aggressive German chief of staff known as ‘The Monster’, personified the worst of the Eurocrats. Losing Northern Ireland, declared Selmayr, was the ‘price’ Britain should pay for Brexit. Selmayr’s denigration of Britain provoked no response from Olly Robbins or Jeremy Heywood. Their silence confirmed the Brexiteers’ suspicions of their partisanship. Both were accused by Boris of using ‘dirty tricks’ to undermine the referendum. In retaliation, three former Cabinet Secretaries – Robin Butler, Andrew Turnbull and Gus O’Donnell – lined up to attack Boris. The three portrayed the ‘rabid’ Brexiteers as snake-oil salesmen for suggesting that civil servants were sabotaging Brexit.4 Buffeted by unceasing disputes, May arranged a meeting of the Brexit committee at Chequers for the end of February. She had faith that her silent chairmanship of the antagonists would produce reconciliation.
In anticipation of those showdowns, Boris increasingly resorted to hyperbolic acclaim to prove his loyalty. Before the Chequers meeting, he praised May’s speeches as equivalent to ‘the lapidary status of the codes of Hammurabi or Moses’. (Hammurabi was a mighty Babylonian king.)
Even May’s admirers would regard that comparison as exaggerated, but the seduction did produce one benefit. In her Mansion House speech, May announced that Britain would leave the single market and customs union and would not tolerate a border down the Irish Sea. ‘No UK prime minister could ever agree to it.’ Her swing towards the Brexiteers was applauded by Boris. But not in Brussels. Abruptly, Michel Barnier rejected May’s proposals to use technology to police the Irish border. With the Remainers’ encouragement, the EU refused to discuss compromise over the backstop. The weak British would take what’s offered or return to the EU.
Shocked by Barnier’s rebuff, May resorted once again to secrecy. Crab-like, hoping Boris and the ERG would not notice, she manoeuvred backwards to satisfy Hammond. She suggested to Barnier that Britain would stay in the single market after all, and in a ‘customs partnership’ to collect the EU’s tariffs. Effectively, Britain would remain in the EU without a vote or influence. Barnier was delighted.
At the beginning of May, the prime minister finally sought the Cabinet’s approval for her latest plan. ‘Bonkers,’ declared Michael Gove. ‘The worst of all worlds,’ said Jacob Rees-Mogg. ‘A crazy system,’ said Boris. May became even more distrusted. Rees-Mogg spoke about toppling her and Boris mentioned her resignation.
May was saved just in time by the electorate. In the weeks before the local elections on 3 May, the Tories feared a wipeout in London including the flagship Tory councils in Westminster, Kensington & Chelsea and Wandsworth, not only because of the Cabinet’s open warfare but because about 60 per cent of Londoners were immigrants. The revelation that innocent Windrush Jamaicans had been deported by the Home Office exposed May, the Home Secretary at the time, as anti-immigrant. Two weeks before the council vote, Fraser Nelson at the Spectator warned that the Tories have ‘all but given up on London’. Predictions that Labour would ‘paint London red’, he warned, were accurate. The scare was misplaced. Nationally, the Tories lost just thirty-five seats and retained control over their London flagship councils. Voters were repelled by Jeremy Corbyn, reviled by outspoken Labour MPs and most Jews as Marxist and anti-Semitic – and, in the wake of UKIP’s collapse, they were attracted by Boris and Brexit. May out-polled Corbyn 37 per cent to 24 per cent.
The relief for May was short-lived. In early June, warfare resumed in the Cabinet. At stake was getting the European Withdrawal Bill through Parliament within six weeks. As before, the backstop divided the government. The backstop, Boris insisted, must be time-limited. ‘I will be prepared to compromise over the time,’ he said. ‘I will not compromise over the destination.’ To appear loyal, he urged the restive ERG group to give May ‘time and space’ to conclude a deal with Brussels. Their fears of ‘betrayal’ by May, he promised, were unfounded.5
Looking at May, drained and distraught, few believed that she could fashion an agreement at the next round of talks with the EU. In the Commons, there was no majority for any policy except to remain. Now, amid intrigue and recrimination, it was the turn of the Tory Remainers to threaten the government with defeat of the Withdrawal Bill. ‘The moment of truth,’ admitted Boris facing a dilemma.6 If he and Davis resigned in favour of no-deal, the Commons would vote to ban no-deal Brexit.
Boris’s emollience had lasted just one week. His earlier faux praise of the prime minister was jettisoned. He resumed his attack in public. At a Conservative dinner on Wednesday 6 June, he denounced May for having ‘no guts … It’s beyond belief that the Northern Ireland border has been allowed to dictate policy’. Leaving the EU without a deal was the only solution. There would be short-term disruption, he admitted, but not the ‘mumbo-jumbo prophecies of doom’ predicted by the Remainers. ‘They’re terrified of this nonsense … I don’t want anyone to panic during the meltdown. No panic. Pro bono publico.7 No bloody panic.’ His call to arms was again ignored. As a divisive figure, Boris could not outrightly challenge May because few Tory MPs would support his bid to become prime minister.
Boris’s position was further weakened after Rudolf Huygelen, Belgium’s ambassador to the EU, reported overhearing a comment during a Foreign Office reception to celebrate the Queen’s birthday in Lancaster House. Boris said about the Confederation of British Industry’s attempts to frustrate Brexit, ‘Fuck business.’ The business community erupted angrily. Boris was accused of creating the chaos of Brexit and, businessmen asserted, was too cowardly to accept any responsibility. This, May thought, was a good opportunity to weaken him.
A bill to permit construction of the third runway at Heathrow was due in the Commons. May knew that in 2015 Boris had pledged to lie down ‘in front of bulldozers’ rather than allow it to go ahead. Later, like Greg Hands, a junior minister, he had threatened to resign rather than support the legislation. The moment of truth had arrived. A bill was introduced to the Commons and May imposed a three-line whip on a vote. Boris began to squirm. First, he denied that he had threatened to resign. But he had also promised May that he would not campaign against the runway. Unlike Hands who did resign, Boris said that resigning would achieve ‘absolutely nothing’. To avoid the vote – and total embarrassment – he decided to escape. On 25 June, he flew to a ‘secret’ destination. That turned out to be Kabul. The Foreign Office announced that he was to meet the Afghan president. Instead, he had his photo taken with a deputy foreign minister and drove back to the airport. He landed in London the following day. After answering questions in the Commons, he flew to Holland, Denmark and Lithuania.
May had good reason to feel more confident. On the same day as Boris was exposed as unprincipled, the Withdrawal Bill became law. The showdown among Cabinet ministers to finalise Britain’s proposals to the EU of their future trade relationship and the backstop was due to be held at Chequers on Friday 6 July.
During the days before that fatal meeting, May promised all factions a new ‘magic’ plan. With Liam Fox and Michael Gove onside, she believed that she could bounce the Brexiteers to accept her latest deal. Boris, she calculated, had not mastered the detail, lacked the courage to resign and eventually would capitulate. Boris was certainly distressed. Absolutely nothing was clear – or honest.
May’s assurances that Brussels would not exercise control over Britain after Brexit was confusing. On the one hand, she had offered the EU leaders on 29 June a customs partnership. But then she told the ERG’s leaders she rejected a customs partnership. Either way, it was puzzling because the EU rejected her proposed ‘customs partnership’ as ‘cherry-picking’. Was the prime minister self-delusional, he wondered, or outrightly dishonest? Or was she orchestrating a brilliant diplomatic coup? Thirty-six ERG members led by Rees-Mogg openly challenged May to stage a hard, clean Brexit – just leave the EU. Her supporters tried to suffocate her opponents. ‘That’s insolence,’ said Alan Duncan. ‘Shut up,’ Nicholas Soames told them. At a summer party, John Major’s former Chancellor Norman Lamont urged Boris to defy May. ‘Our backs are against the wall,’ replied Boris, ‘but we’re going to fight, fight, fight.’ In the countdown to Chequers, nothing was clear except that May was desperate. On Thursday 5 July, the day before the Chequers meeting, she dashed to Berlin to show Merkel her latest proposals. Bemused by her anxious visitor, the German leader said little, deluding May to return to London convinced of Europe’s sympathy.
Late that same afternoon, Downing Street finally sent Cabinet ministers a 120-page document – the proposed offer to the EU – entitled ‘Facilitated Customs Arrangement’. Boris invited a group of Bexiteer ministers including Gove, Davis and Fox to his office to examine her proposals. For the first time, they read her unequivocal insistence for a soft Brexit. She planned to stay in the single market for goods but not services; and British laws and regulations about employment, aid to industry and consumer protection would remain harmonised with the EU’s ‘common rule book’. The soft Brexit effectively ruled out Britain concluding separate trade agreements with any country including America. ‘It’s a big turd,’ said Boris, ‘which has emerged zombie-like from the coffin.’ Unanimously, the ministers in Boris’s office agreed that Britain remaining in the single market as a rule-taker was unacceptable. After the meeting broke up, Boris headed to meet David Cameron at White’s in St James’s. Cameron urged him not to resign. At the same time, Liam Fox went to Downing Street. He revealed to May the reaction of Boris and Davis, and pledged to support the prime minister.
The following morning, the ministers were driven in the chauffeured cars to Chequers for the Brexit showdown. May had ordered that on arrival they should all surrender their telephones. They were also warned that anyone who resigned during the day should call for a local taxi and would have ‘a long walk down the driveway’ to the gates.
Olly Robbins set the scene in the wood-panelled Hawtrey Room. The twenty-seven EU states were united and, contrary to the original plan, would not be played off against each other. Next, May was emphatic that Britain would need to remain within a limited single market for everything except services. Any other deal would separate Northern Ireland from Britain. Boris’s reply was explicit. The plan, he repeated, was a ‘big turd’. Looking at May’s officials, especially Olly Robbins and the Remainers like Hammond, he concluded, ‘I see there are some excellent turd-polishers here.’ But he left unclear whether he would actually oppose May. The eagerly awaited contribution was Michael Gove’s. After several attempts by Downing Street to secure his support, May was anxious to hear his opinion. He set out both sides of the argument and concluded that despite a lot ‘I find hard to swallow … we should accept it.’ Andrea Leadsom and other Brexiteers also supported May’s deal.
‘This is an ambush,’ David Davis realised. Two days earlier, May had told him directly that she was not proposing that Britain stay in the single market. That morning she said the opposite. She was gambling that no minister would dare to resign. Davis decided to fight but after Gove spoke in May’s support, he knew he would lose. With all the other Brexiteers falling in behind the prime minister, Davis alone spoke against May. There were too many concessions to Europe, he said, and after Britain left the EU it would be wrong to be ruled by Brussels. Boris spoke again. He agreed with Davis but had not prepared a detailed critique. What emerged was confusingly about a part-in and part-out plan. To Davis’s surprise, the climax was Boris’s pledge of support for May. The ministers and officials then went downstairs for dinner. During the meal, Boris toasted the new unity. The government, he said, now had a song to sing.
May looked pleased. Boris had decided not to resign. And Davis, after criticising the weak negotiations and concessions, had also stayed. The rebellion had not materialised. Collective responsibility, she announced, would now be restored. No one could step out of line and remain in the Cabinet. As their discussions continued, a Downing Street spokesman announced that the Cabinet had agreed that Britain would remain within a limited single market. Even before they left Chequers, Saturday’s newspapers had been briefed about May’s victory and the Brexiteers’ surrender. On Sunday morning, Gove appeared on a succession of TV programmes to defend the deal agreed by a united government.
The ERG group was outraged. MPs spoke of ‘complete capitulation’ and ‘a charade intended to dupe the electorate’. They vowed to vote against the government. Boris’s performance, said Andrew Bridgen, a leading Brexiteer, was ‘waving the white flag of appeasement’. Boris was a ‘Chamberlain when we wanted a Churchill’. Rees-Mogg became the Brexiteers’ favourite as party leader. ‘Your death warrant if you sign up and don’t resign,’ Iain Duncan Smith messaged to Boris.
David Davis had returned to London from Chequers convinced that he had witnessed an eye-opening watershed. May proposed to surrender British sovereignty indefinitely. The choice was between Britain’s humiliation or no-deal. The sixty-nine-year-old former member of the Territorial SAS was an outspoken individualist. He decided to resign but on his own terms.
On that Sunday, he was invited to watch the Formula One race at Silverstone. During the morning, there were repeated calls from Downing Street. ‘I’ll come and see Theresa at 6 p.m.,’ he told Robbie Gibb, her director of communications. ‘You can’t come,’ Gibb replied. ‘I will,’ insisted Davis. As night fell, Julian Smith, the chief whip, called. ‘What about we make you Foreign Secretary?’ asked Smith. ‘I won’t be bribed,’ replied Davis. After speaking to May on the phone, it was agreed that his resignation would be announced at 11.30 p.m. – precisely timed to be too late for the morning newspapers but in time for him to appear on live radio and TV in the morning. He would be replaced by forty-four-year-old Dominic Raab, a former lawyer and Foreign Office official.
‘I’ve resigned,’ Davis told Boris at 11 p.m.
‘Why didn’t we threaten her last week?’ Boris asked.
‘Because it wouldn’t have worked,’ replied Davis. The impact was bigger, Davis believed, after May had set out her proposals at Chequers.
Boris blustered. Sitting in his official flat overlooking the Mall, he was vacillating, uncertain whether to resign. Never before had he been so conflicted by principle against convenience. As usual, he wanted to believe that his willpower alone could defeat her, but he could not ignore that all the other ministers – Remainers and appeasers including Gove and Fox – had opted for the soft route. He was isolated. To have resigned alone would have been futile and encouraged particularly intense criticism. Now, he wasn’t sure that he wanted to be associated with Davis’s departure. Davis, brought up in a council house and a grammar schoolboy, was, he thought, unreliable. His attitude – ‘It’s not working and I’m off’ – was, Cameron warned, inappropriate for Old Etonians. As a crowd-pleaser, Boris didn’t want to be classed as disloyal. He wanted to fight from within. But Davis was a rival. Now outside, Davis might also run for the leadership. Boris would have preferred to have his cake and eat it. Their conversation ended inconclusively. Shortly after Davis’s resignation was announced, Boris mysteriously texted, ‘Please don’t speculate who might follow you.’ Boris was hoping to game it for longer. Constant media questions cut short his brooding.
‘Am I doing the right thing?’ he asked Will Walden about not resigning. May, he complained, just never listened. Unspoken were his personal conflicts. Being Foreign Secretary was like owning a box of favourite toys. The planes, flunkies, foreign trips, Chevening, Carlton Gardens and all the perks would be lost. On top of all that was the hiatus in his personal life. Marina had discovered his affair with Carrie Symonds. Inevitably there were fierce arguments but after making a full confession he had hoped for forgiveness from his loyal soulmate. She resisted. She was emphatic. She couldn’t take his infidelity anymore. He had no sense of loyalty to women, she asserted. She explicitly blamed Stanley. All Boris’s worst qualities stemmed from that relationship. The symmetry of Boris and Stanley, the son as the mirror image of his father, could never be broken. Two weeks earlier, Marina had decided to end the marriage. She refused to live with Boris anymore. Before that weekend, she had left Carlton Gardens with the children. Since their house in Islington was rented out, she was searching for her own home. Left alone, Boris lived in an increasingly unpleasant mess.
Boris seems never to have considered the consequences of a permanent break-up, especially that his relationship with the children would be ‘toast’. Nor that by jockeying in politics and marriage, his family was splintering. Leo no longer mentioned his relationship with the Johnson family on his website, and nor did Julia, Boris’s half-sister. Rachel openly disagreed with her beloved brother. Moreover, Stanley’s four oldest children had become estranged from his youngest two. Boris was the catalyst for the distancing. Some blamed Boris for choosing ‘hysterical girlfriends’. Others said he chose perfect but temporary companions who could never replace saintly Marina. All, however, would wonder whether he ever considered the consequences of a final split with Marina.
The immediate dilemma he faced was the price of principle. But was it even a principle? he wondered. Resign or stay? In the end, he had no choice. After his dash to Afghanistan to avoid the Heathrow vote, he faced checkmate. He couldn’t flee twice or he would be dubbed a coward. Staying would be the kiss of death.
In the morning, Boris telephoned May to tell her that he was resigning. Downing Street announced his departure before he had even finished writing his resignation letter. Once completed, he posted a photograph of himself signing the letter. His tone was predictable: ‘That dream is dying, suffocated by needless self-doubt … We are truly headed for the status of a colony (sending negotiators) into battle with white flags fluttering above them.’ His litmus test was pertinent. Under her terms, Britain would still be unable to change the laws that affected British cyclists’ lives. The driver’s visibility from a lorry cab would not be improved, an issue that had been important to him since his days as mayor. In conclusion, he reminded May how he had said at the Chequers dinner that the government had a song to sing but ‘The trouble is that I have practised the words over the weekend and find that they stick in the throat.’ The letter was dispatched. Shortly after, Boris said to Davis, ‘You’re the man who started all this. If you hadn’t resigned, I wouldn’t have resigned.’ Boris did not leave the official residence. With nowhere to go, he told Jeremy Hunt, his successor, he needed to stay. Hunt was understanding.
No one shed tears or voiced regret about Boris’s resignation. His rebellion, thought Tory Remainers, was mad, juvenile and poised to hand power to Corbyn. The Times ‘warmly welcomed’ his departure. Two rats, commented the newspaper, had fled the sinking ship leaving others to clear up the mess. As a ‘figure of fun’, the newspaper judged, his resignation was the product of his ‘own overweening ambition’. May’s proposals, concluded the newspaper, were acceptable. Even more concessions, declared The Times, could be made to seal an agreement.8 James Lansdale of the BBC criticised Boris for failing to convince the world that Brexit did not mean Britain’s withdrawal from global affairs. Boris was to blame, he wrote, that Britain’s policy towards China, Saudi Arabia and Syria was unclear. The Guardian recorded that Boris would be remembered for his gaffes and his failure to spell out his policy on Yemen and Global Britain. Thanks to his ‘attention span of a gnat’, judged the Guardian, Foreign Office officials felt even more ‘marginalised’. Those judgements were endorsed by David Howell in his report for the House of Lords International Relations Committee. British foreign-policymakers, stated Lord Howell, had lost their sense of direction. In future, Britain should distrust America, trust China and be ambivalent about Russia.9 Those who mocked Boris’s period were clearly prejudiced. None had any notion about his constant struggle against recalcitrant Foreign Office mandarins. The obituaries of Boris’s political career were similarly predictable.
Britain, Max Hastings wrote, had been represented by a ‘jester … He is a man of remarkable gifts, flawed by an absence of conscience, principle or scruple … It is a mistake to suppose Johnson is a nice man. In reality he often behaves unpleasantly. I myself have received some ugly letters from Johnson, threatening consequences for writing about him in terms that he thought unflattering.’ Hastings concluded, that if Boris became prime minister ‘a signal would go forth to the world that Britain had abandoned any residual aspiration to be viewed as a serious nation.’10 That Monday night, eating pizza in the Carlton Gardens flat with friends while watching a football match, Boris was determined to prove his critics wrong.
*
May had appointed Boris as Foreign Secretary in order to destroy him. The opposite had happened. Despite the critics, Boris had gained invaluable ministerial experience and some credibility, especially in the White House. ‘Boris is a very talented guy,’ said Trump. ‘He’d make a great prime minister.’ On the eve of coming to London, Trump reportedly called May ‘a bossy schoolteacher’.11 Her days were numbered but her exit scenario was uncertain.
‘Let’s put a leadership campaign together,’ Jonathan Marland told Boris. ‘I’ll get Lynton.’ Scruffy, unshaven, overweight and sweating from his cycle ride, Boris arrived twenty minutes late at Crosby’s office. ‘You’re fucking late again,’ the Australian erupted. ‘You’re fucking around again. I want nothing to do with you. I’ll never do anything for you again.’ And he walked out of the room. Boris was left open-mouthed.
In Westminster, the ERG group was less sanctimonious. Iain Duncan Smith and Priti Patel arranged that Boris should be surrounded by Brexiteers including Jacob Rees-Mogg and Bernard Jenkin. ‘We could not let him drift,’ recalled Duncan Smith. He needed support and ideas from a group becoming a party within the Tory Party. At a series of dinner parties organised by Rees-Mogg at his home in Queen Anne’s Gate, Boris began to establish a relationship with MPs he barely knew. ‘We were feeling our way,’ recalled Bill Cash. ‘We’d had little contact with him before he declared for Brexit in 2016.’ Boris’s colourful phrases gave dull politicians hope. ‘Britain has gone into battle with the white flag fluttering over our leading tank,’ he said about the Chequers plan. Was he thinking of Churchill, perhaps, wondering how he could save the day?
Invariably arriving late at the ERG’s regular Monday morning meetings, the fifty hardcore members gave Boris a solid base. But they were warned by Graham Brady, chairman of the backbenchers’ 1922 Committee, that Boris could not get enough MPs’ votes to be the leader. Beyond Westminster, the situation was different. Party members were outraged by the Chequers deal. Only 16 per cent of the public polled approved of May. In the fallout, the public sided with Boris against May. But so far, only one third of Tory Party members supported Boris as leader.12
So much, Boris knew, depended on the manner of his resignation. Rather than imitate Geoffrey Howe’s famous mocking of Margaret Thatcher in the Commons in 1990, Boris decided to speak without jokes, Latin or rhetoric. In a half-empty chamber, he offered no rapier oratory in his description of the ‘dithered’ negotiations, ‘a fog of self-doubt’ and May’s ‘stealthy retreat’. Breaking with convention, May was not on the front bench. ‘A futile gesture by a disillusioned man in search of a new start,’ mocked one journalist. ‘Mrs May was gummed by a toothless lion.’13
With good reason to fear the media, Boris delayed his departure from Carlton Gardens while he tried to resolve his future plans. Marina, he still hoped, would forgive him. Simon McDonald emailed that Boris could no longer use the official car and should leave the house within forty-eight hours. Boris asked for more time. McDonald replied he was ‘humane’ and asked for a timetable. Boris refused to give a departure date. On 13 July, McDonald wrote that he should be out by the 20th: ‘Time is passing and I have still not seen a plan. So I’d be grateful for an update please.’ Six days later, there was no plan and Boris had not handed over two iPads and his telephone. McDonald gave a deadline of 25 July with the order, ‘You must keep a very low profile.’ Boris ignored the deadline, and finally left on 30 July, three weeks after his resignation. No one spotted that the family’s belongings were divided between two trucks. Marina would live in rented accommodation in Islington while Boris headed for his house in Thame. He could have moved there three weeks earlier.
As the long summer recess began, Boris was marooned. Without a wife and waiting for the inevitable media storm when his latest adultery emerged, he could not imagine his fate in the Brexit turmoil; nor how he would ever return to government. At least, he intended his exile to be lucrative. To maintain his five children and his wife, he reactivated the £500,000 contract to write Shakespeare’s biography, told his agent that he was available for speeches for a minimum of £30,000, and resumed his £275,000 Telegraph column. In 2014/15, he had earned £224,000 in royalties from the Churchill book.
‘I want to get back together again for the leadership,’ Boris told Jonathan Marland, a long-standing ally always ready to help Boris.
‘You’ll have to get Lynton back,’ replied Marland, knowing that Boris could not operate without Crosby.
‘I’ve called him,’ said Boris, adding that he had texted apologies and promises of good behaviour.
Crosby, a Brexiteer who disliked May, especially after the 2017 election fiasco, finally relented. With an assured group of financial backers including Crispin Odey, an adventurous hedge-fund manager, Crosby teamed up with Boris to ‘Chuck Chequers’.
In that battle, Boris was careful not to wholly align himself with the ERG group. He was not present when the group met in Westminster’s Thatcher Room to discuss May’s removal or join the applause for the MP who said ‘She’s a disaster and she’s got to go.’ And he also refused to support the publication of Rees-Mogg’s 140-page Brexit manifesto which promised huge tax cuts and a fanciful Star Wars missile-defence system. Always the loner, he cut his own path. ‘I want to ditch Chequers not May,’ he emphasised.14
Boris’s Telegraph column was his best platform to attract attention. In early August, on the eve of leaving for Italy, he spotted a favourite topic. Under the headline ‘The lovely Danes have got it wrong – a burka ban is not the answer’, he criticised Denmark’s decision to fine any woman wearing a burka. ‘What has happened, you may ask, to the Danish spirit of live and let live?’ the liberal asked. He continued, ‘If you tell me that the burka is oppressive, then I am with you. If you say that it is weird and bullying to expect women to cover their faces, then I totally agree – and I would add that I can find no scriptural authority for the practice in the Koran. It is absolutely ridiculous that people should choose to go around looking like letter boxes or bank robbers.’15 But, he concluded, he opposed Denmark’s ‘total ban’ because that would be interpreted as anti-Islamic, turn the women into martyrs and ‘make the problem worse’.
The theme was not new. Five years earlier, as mayor he had opposed young Muslim girls being forced to wear veils and burkas as part of their school uniforms. ‘This is against my principles and the principles of liberty that London should stand for,’ he had written.16 ‘Female education,’ he said about the need to educate Muslim girls, ‘is the Swiss army knife, the universal spanner that tackles … poverty, social exclusion, gender inequality and radicalisation.’17 He had also criticised Muslim leaders for failing to prevent some of their young people becoming terrorists. Too often, he wrote, the leaders were ‘apologists for terror’, blaming Britain and not the Muslim murderers for beheading European hostages. In his book The Dream of Rome, published in 2006, he described how Islam, championing ‘fatal religious conservatism’, had obliterated 1,000 years of Byzantine’s glorious culture in Constantinople. That was followed by the Ottoman suppression of democracy, liberal capitalism and even the proscription of printing presses until the mid-nineteenth century. Consistent with his belief in a liberal society, he criticised his local council for forbidding an Englishman to erect a TV dish to watch cricket on the grounds that it was an eyesore. Contrarily, the council did allow TV dishes for people to watch Bangladeshi soaps, Turkish cookery classes and Blind Date in Serbo-Croat on the grounds of their ‘social needs’. If they live in Britain on welfare benefits, Boris believed, they should learn English.18 But lest anyone assumed he was a moralising Islamophobe, he reminded his audience that not so long ago Christians had burned books and heretics. In all those comments, he had never advocated imposing a legal ban on Muslim veils. He believed in debate. As a supporter of liberal tolerance and freedom of expression, he was at liberty to oppose Denmark’s prohibition of the burka and similar laws in France, Austria, Holland, Belgium and Bavaria. His honesty appealed to the majority of Britons but many Muslims were automatically offended. His use of the ‘letter box’ and ‘bank robbers’ jibes gave them the ammunition to attack. Naz Shah, a Labour MP, accused Boris of ‘ugly and naked Islamophobia’. Shah was a self-confessed anti-Semite who had proposed ‘transporting’ Israel to America. She also urged that white girls raped by gangs of Asian men in Rotherham ‘just need to shut their mouths for the good of diversity’.19 By contrast, Maajid Nawaz, the Muslim founding chairman of Quilliam, a counter-extremism think tank, said the burka should be ‘ridiculed’ as ‘the uniform of medieval patriarchal tyranny’.20
Tory Remainers were not offended by Boris’s liberalism but by his motives. ‘Burkagate’ had provoked splenetic criticism fixing Boris in the very spotlight his enemies hoped to turn off. Boris Johnson, commented The Times, is ‘a cynical political opportunist who knows exactly how his remarks will go down with the Tory grass roots’.21 May said he had ‘offended people’. Andrew Cooper, the unreliable Tory pollster, wrote ‘The rottenness of Boris Johnson goes deeper than his casual racism and his equally casual courting of fascism … His career is a saga of moral emptiness and lies: pathetic, weak and needy.’ Female Tory Remainers including Anna Soubry, Ruth Davidson and Heidi Allen piled in demanding an official party inquiry. Camilla Cavendish, a former adviser to Cameron, wrote about an untrusted ‘great showman’ who ‘is surely too smart to have misspoken’. Burkagate, she concluded unconvincingly, was ‘not an accident. It is a deliberate bid for the leadership of the Conservative Party – and it may work.’22 Envy, Boris assumed, fuelled his antagonists. Brandon Lewis, the party chairman and a passionate Remainer, ordered Boris to apologise. Boris refused. Satire was acceptable, he replied, when ‘speaking up for liberal values’. His critics should stop trying to shut down legitimate debate. ‘Where is the spirit of Charlie Hebdo?’ he asked, deriding the Snowflakes. ‘We need to fight, gently, for free speech.23 We need to campaign for the right to make jokes and the right, within the law, to be satirical to the point of causing mild offence’, otherwise extremism will flourish. Dismissing his defence, Brandon Lewis ordered an official inquiry. Accused of conducting a witch-hunt, Lewis was criticised for fuelling hysteria against the politician in order to protect May from the eighty Tory MPs opposed to the Chequers plan.
Touring Africa towards the end of August, May was plagued by reports that Burkagate was Boris’s ruse to oust her. ‘I am in this for the long term,’ she replied to questions. The notion that an article about burkas in Denmark written in less than forty-five minutes was a leadership plot was ludicrous, but during the weeks before the party conference she was fretting. She had split the party between no-deal and no-hope. Her Chequers plan had been rejected by Barnier but was supported by Tory Remainers because there was no alternative.24 Party members, she feared, would hurl abuse at her on live TV. Attacking Boris, she assumed, was her best lifeline, and that included isolating him from Central Office, the party’s headquarters.25
Within Central Office, the relationship between Boris and Carrie Symonds was well known. Earlier in the year, a notable sighting had been Boris dancing to Abba at Carrie’s thirtieth birthday party at her mother’s home. Her father, Matthew Symonds, was a founder of the Independent newspaper, while her mother, Josephine Mcaffee, was one of the newspaper’s lawyers. Boris did not believe Brandon Lewis’s decision to abruptly fire Carrie as the party’s director of communications in mid-August was a coincidence. Nor, as one journalist wrote, that she had been sacked for being lazy, divisive and submitting questionable expenses. It all reeked of Downing Street’s familiar dirty tricks. Boris assumed that May wanted to thwart him before the party conference.
‘Bonking Boris booted out by wife’ was the Sun’s exposé headline on 6 September. The newspaper was allegedly tipped off after Lara, Boris’s twenty-five-year-old daughter, told a friend, ‘He’s a selfish bastard. Mum is finished with him. She’ll never take him back now.’ Carrie was just five years older than Lara. His daughter would later post on Instagram that the period was ‘the hardest and most hurtful year of my life’.
To avoid the inevitable storm, Boris flew to Greece with his children to stay in Stanley’s house on the Pelion peninsula. Two days later, Downing Street offered chosen journalists a 4,000-word dossier on Boris’s sex life written by Nick Hargrave, the deputy head of May’s policy unit. Drawn up during the 2016 leadership election campaign, Hargrave had collected lurid allegations about Boris’s adultery and of taking cocaine and other damning assessments of his character.26 ‘It all looks like a sanctioned hit operation as part of an orchestrated campaign to smear him,’ wrote one of the recipients.27
After seeing the news about Carrie, Bill Cash called Stanley Johnson, a friend from Oxford. ‘Buy a takeaway and two beers for yourself and Boris,’ advised Cash, ‘and show him Darkest Hour. Let him see Churchill’s moment. Boris is not as tough as Churchill and tell him, unlike Churchill who dodged bullets and bombs, he only faces bits of paper.’
Warfare introduced a new vocabulary into Boris’s articles and speeches. ‘Humiliation’, ‘insanity’, ‘legal servitude’, ‘democratic disaster’ and ‘lies’ peppered his arguments against the backstop. May, he wrote, had got ‘lost in a dither’ about a ‘myth’. As a result, ‘The EU has so far taken every important trick.’ Just at the time that his relationship with Carrie Symonds was exposed, he wrote ‘We have wrapped a suicide vest around our constitution and handed a detonator to Michel Barnier.’ The tabloid language was once again seized by his enemies. ‘His words are one of the most disgusting moments in modern British politics,’ spat Alan Duncan. Boris was an ‘irresponsible wrecker [and] I’m sorry but this is the political end of Boris Johnson.28 If it isn’t now, I will make sure it is later.’ Sarah Wollaston, another Remainer Tory, convinced that Boris had used ‘disgusting language’ to distract from the Carrie revelation, committed herself to resign if Boris toppled May. In reply, Boris asked whether ‘the tide of holy feminist rage’ would also remove the scourge of female illiteracy, genital mutilation and forced marriages across Africa, the Middle East and Asia.29 Wollaston did not reply.
Weaponising Burkagate along with Boris’s adultery and his tabloid language by those terrified that May could be toppled infected the Daily Mail. The ‘reckless and egoistic’ Boris and the ‘foolhardy rebels’ were denounced by the newspaper for threatening to ‘tear the party apart’. To deflate the panic, Tories were urged by the Mail to ‘cling on to Theresa May for dear life’. Only she could navigate Britain into safe waters.30 Fraser Nelson agreed with that make-or-break option. Although May was ‘not very inspiring’, he wrote, Britain was best off with her – ‘the best woman for the job’.31 With many similar endorsements, May was reassured, there was no alternative to Chequers.
On 18 September, May flew to an emergency EU summit in Salzburg. She had been persuaded by Olly Robbins that the EU would support her request for concessions to modify the backstop. The forty-three-year-old official lacked experience in foreign affairs, Europe and negotiating international agreements. With limited expertise in disseminating intelligence across Whitehall, Robbins, a PPE graduate from Oxford, had risen through the Civil Service without the experience to tell the prime minister that Chequers would not be approved by the Commons. Nor that half her Cabinet rejected the backstop. May did not want to hear about the disturbing implications of Dominic Raab’s admission that he was unaware of the importance of the Dover–Calais route for British trade. Once again, May’s lack of emotional intelligence made her deaf to Raab’s limitations. The former lawyer failed to impress on her before she flew to Salzburg that the EU absolutely refused to time-limit the backstop.
Insensitive to reality, Robbins and May walked into total humiliation. Without the charisma and skill to persuade the twenty-seven EU leaders to make concessions, May exposed herself as an over-promoted junior officer. As predicted, Chequers was comprehensively rejected as unworkable. As usual, Brussels calculated the Remain MPs had a majority in the Commons to reverse Brexit. ‘Brexit has shown us one thing,’ said President Macron. ‘Those who said you can easily do without Europe, that it will all go very well … are liars.’ Pale and wounded, May emerged from the conference with her stubbornness intact. Chequers, she asserted, would survive. She had nothing else to say.
‘At last we’re arriving at a moment of truth,’ said Boris on the eve of the party conference in Birmingham. Blaming ‘a collective failure of government, and a collapse of will by the British establishment to deliver on the mandate of the people’, he refused to support the government. ‘Chuck Chequers and restore basic Conservative values’ was his message during the four-day conference.32 The counter-attack was deafening. Boris, said Philip Hammond, was ‘incapable’ of grown-up politics. A publicity seeker and a troublemaker, spat David Mundell, the Scottish Secretary. John Major damned the ‘princeling fighting for the political crown’ who ‘deceived’ the electorate with ‘untruths and half-truths’ just to become prime minister. Implausibly, Boris denied he was planning to stand against May.33 Alan Duncan had the final word: ‘He risks bringing everything down and … destroy[ing] our prospects for many, many, many years.’ Even if MPs voted for him, said Duncan, the party membership would never vote for someone so ‘reckless’.
At the end of the conference, Boris had made little progress. While his supporters spoke of May ‘entering the killing zone’, she remained silent and inscrutable. No one, including her Cabinet, knew her thoughts as the 599-page Withdrawal Agreement which included the unchanged backstop was finalised by Robbins and Barnier. Despite the irreconcilable disagreements between the Remainers and Leavers, the agreement set out the terms of Britain’s exit from the EU on 29 March 2019. Renegotiation, rebuked the EU, was impossible.
On publication in early November, May presented the agreement as ‘the best that could be negotiated’. In that moment of truth, there were gasps. Nothing had been changed since Chequers. ‘An absolute stinker,’ said Boris, ‘leaving Britain a vassal state, a colony … This is not taking back control. It is a surrender of control. Parliament will have even less power than before.’ Tony Blair agreed, describing May’s deal as ‘capitulation, the worst of both worlds’. Out of the blue, Jo Johnson, Boris’s youngest brother, resigned as minister of transport on the 9th, damning a ‘failure of British statecraft on a scale unseen since the Suez crisis’. Less than a week later, Dominic Raab and three other ministers resigned on the same day. May was told that a majority of the Commons would vote against her deal. Among the few loyalists was Michael Gove, fearful of reigniting suspicions about his character.
In the midst of the latest crisis, Boris went to an ERG meeting in the Commons. Speaking on his behalf during the hour-long meeting, Conor Burns speculated that the prime minister might have to go. Jacob Rees-Mogg revealed that he had already submitted a letter of no confidence in May to Graham Brady, the chairman of the 1922 Committee. Brady would be obliged to hold a vote of confidence once forty-eight MPs had submitted letters. Boris refused to support Rees-Mogg. Others agreed that Rees-Mogg had ‘jumped the gun’ and had made foolish remarks outside Parliament. Lacking forty-eight votes, the plot collapsed. Gossip about the manoeuvres aroused a cacophony of protests from Tory Boris haters. Among the loudest was Nick Boles, the MP for Grantham. The serially disloyal Wykehamist condemned Boris as a ‘plummy-toned Old Etonian trying to bully a conscientious and determined woman out of her job’.34
The crisis coincided with the retirement of Paul Dacre as the Daily Mail’s long-standing editor. His departure marked the newspaper’s shift under the new editor Geordie Greig from supporting Brexit to advocating a soft Brexit. To signal the new editorial policy, Dominic Sandbrook, a columnist, derided the Brexiteer ‘pygmies sniping at Mrs May’ driven by ‘a childish thirst for melodramatic grandstanding and a deep sense of narcissism’. Is there a better deal? he asked. ‘Definitely not.’ May, he concluded, ‘deserves better than to be betrayed by a moral degenerate like Boris Johnson’. As a new member of the Remain church, the Daily Mail now sang eulogies to May’s deal, blind to the reality.
Standing on the cliff edge, May was paralysed. She had no reply to Boris’s repeated speeches damning her pledges about the Withdrawal Agreement as ‘a monstrous untruth’. He criticised her promise Britain would retain control over its own laws as ‘a stonking, stinking, steaming lie’. No attack evoked a whisper from her.35
At that critical moment, he made no ostensible attempt outrightly to challenge May. Surfing, guiding the board as best he could, he had fixed his eye on the destination but retained flexibility about the details so any mistake would not be noticed. Fearful that a slight wave would cause him to fall, he left observers uncertain of his tactics. Listening to his advisers about what to say, when to remain silent and how to vote, he offered a broad sweep leaving no glaring clues about a plot. As the party’s internecine battle intensified, his popularity in Westminster fell.
Ensconced in one of Westminster’s most unpleasant offices for MPs – he suspected at May’s direction – Boris slid into depression. Distressed that half the nation openly despised him for leading a dishonest Brexit campaign, his bitterness about his prospects and the hostile media accelerated. Daily, he grumbled about his plight in the wilderness with his press adviser Lee Cain. The lacklustre former tabloid journalist, paid by a generous donor to work on Boris’s staff, listened to his master’s regular condemnation of the media. Gradually, as both became convinced that Boris was the victim of spite, the inclusive Boris of the City Hall era was replaced by a man fuelled by suspicion of loathsome journalists. In conversations across Westminster, Cain mirrored his master’s sentiments, sowing yet more dislike for Boris amid party members already fearful of their future.
By early December, the Tory Party was in meltdown. David Cameron’s prediction in 2015 about a referendum ‘unleashing of demons of which ye know not’ had occurred, and May lost control of her party and Parliament. After repeated defeats in the Commons, she postponed the vote on the latest Withdrawal Agreement. The bookies ranked her probable successors as Michael Gove, Amber Rudd or Sajid Javid. Boris was way down. He was damaged by the noise of the battle. He changed tactics.
The ERG group, Boris knew, was on the verge of submitting the forty-eighth letter to Graham Brady that would trigger the vote of confidence in the prime minister. He used an invitation to speak in Amsterdam to eulogise about Churchill and draw what he hoped would be obvious parallels. His hero, he said, was a ‘compulsive gambler’ who prevailed against his opponents and eventually was proved ‘triumphantly right’. He concluded, ‘Sometimes you must take the decision which is fraught with risk.’36 The backlash was nasty. Anthony Seldon, the political biographer, led the ridicule. Boris, wrote Seldon, ‘would not heal the nation as did Churchill. It is a fantasy game on his part and we must not let it become a fantasy for the nation.’37 Deaf to the naysayers, Boris again changed gear.
Unusually well groomed, he appeared on BBC TV on Sunday 9 December to launch his leadership bid. He said nothing new but did forthrightly criticise May in a statesmanlike manner. Two days later, the forty-eighth letter was delivered to Brady. May decided that MPs should vote the following day. That night, as a concession, she told Tory MPs gathered in a Commons committee room that she would not stand in the next general election due in 2022. In return, they should vote for the Withdrawal Agreement. ‘God, she’s awful,’ Boris texted during her speech.38
Tory MPs faced a stark choice. Either support the Brexiteers’ no-deal with no obvious alternative leader, or continue the division and disarray without a fixed destination. At 9 p.m. on 12 December, Graham Brady announced the result. Only 117 MPs out of 317 had voted against May. With 63 per cent of the vote, she ignored the demand to resign, and furthermore could not now be challenged for the leadership for a year. The coup had failed. As Brady read out the result, Alan Duncan led the cheers. Boris stayed silent. ‘Don’t play in this arena,’ he was advised by Iain Duncan Smith. ‘Keep to the margins.’
Despite the collapse of party discipline, the economic news was remarkable. Unemployment was the lowest in forty-three years, wages were rising, a lengthy Treasury analysis admitted that by 2035 the impact of Brexit could be marginal and education was improving. Boris could also bask in Sadiq Khan’s poor record as mayor during the past two years. The annual addition of new homes under Boris had steadily risen from 21,000 in 2012/13 to 39,000 in 2015/16. But under Khan, the new homes had fallen back to 32,000 a year. Under Khan, crime had risen. Because Khan forbade stop-and-search, knife crime and the murder of black youths had increased. Boris accused Khan of ‘an abject failure to grip the problem of violence’. Stop-and-search was resumed and the epidemic of young black deaths started to fall. Boris’s misfortune was that no one reminisced about his achievements as mayor.
In limbo for Christmas, Boris and Carrie hosted a New Year’s party in her south London flat and then flew to Greece to stay in Stanley’s house. Under her guidance, he was losing weight – off alcohol and late-night binges of cheese and chorizo. Their relationship had taken a course unintended by Boris. If Marina had not terminated their marriage, his fling with Carrie would have abruptly ended. Instead, he was falling under the influence of the woman with whom he was now living.