Boris Johnson

If there is a recall byelection, the international media will gorge on the theatre of a former prime minister battling to save his political career.

If the voters in Uxbridge kick him out of the Commons, and he responds by trying to find another constituency, the Tory leader would then be faced with another choice Mr Sunak would rather not make: whether or not to facilitate the return to parliament of someone who had effectively been expelled from it for dishonesty. At the turn of the year, he thought that he had a realistic chance of supplanting Rishi Sunak and staging a return to Number 10. Yet even if he managed to duck the vote, Mr Sunak would still have to decide whether or not to throw his support and the party’s resources into helping Mr Johnson fight to keep his seat. “Sick and tired of Brexit and of Boris.” They want to forget, and hope to induce amnesia among the public as well, about all the grisly pantomime and lurid psychodramas of the Johnson years. One senior Tory groans at the prospect of “weeks more of Boris and scandal”. On this topic, the former prime minister became manic: “The business of the government had to be carried on!” That was the most preposterous of his claims, the idea that the rules allowed Number 10 to throw morale-boosting drinks parties for his underlings at a time when the country was being told that people could not hold the hand of a dying loved one. On the same afternoon that he was interrogated over Partygate, his dwindling influence and increasing isolation were being demonstrated on a different parliamentary stage. For his usual self-serving reasons, Mr Johnson has sought to destabilise the prime minister and incite a rebellion against him. I did so knowing that it has always been risky to forecast the demise of a man who has engineered more escapes than Harry Houdini and more comebacks than Frank Sinatra. One standout observation came from Harriet Harman, chairing the inquisition dressed in black, when she scorned his claim that he had sought “advice” on whether or not crowded gatherings had broken lockdown rules when he himself had been present. The committee will decide on “the balance of probabilities” and you could see the way the scales were tipping in their minds by their responses to his protestations of “hand on heart” honesty. Which is bad news for him because those who share his belief that he is a titan torn down by pettifogging pygmies are greatly outnumbered by those who think he is an incorrigible scoundrel who deceived to try to hide an appalling scandal.