NO ONE could have imagined the epic roller coaster which would follow Boris Johnson’s appointment as Prime Minister one year ago.
Within just 12 months, BoJo has steered the country through a political crisis, a General Election, Brexit and the worst pandemic in 100 years.
At the same time he has managed his own divorce, watching his family splinter, been close to death and enjoyed the birth of his sixth child, Wilfred.
On July 23 last year his election as leader was greeted by cheers and fear.
Cheers from those relieved to see the end of Theresa May’s three catastrophic years.
Fear from Boris’s opponents that the charismatic enthusiast would save the Tory party from extinction and that he would get Brexit done.
Now one key supporter still praises Boris, “He has kept the ship afloat”. But a critic snaps: “He is a Prime Minister without clothes. He is not up to the job.”
Boris’s priority in life was to keep everyone happy. One year later, that has proved impossible.
EMERGED AS VICTOR
“The chickens have come in to roost,” is often said by his critics, unfairly. “Boris is a fighter,” Stanley Johnson, his father, says.
Over the past 30 years Boris has resisted many blows and emerged as the victor.
Yet few gave him much hope of survival in July last year.
Boris inherited a party that was poleaxed, torn apart by Brexit.
Amid floods of tears, Theresa May had failed three times to get her Brexit Bill through the Commons.
In the European elections the Tories had come fifth, with just nine per cent of the British vote.
Reluctantly, party members turned to Boris as their saviour from a nightmare.
But the obstacles he faced were enormous.
Few imagined last July that he would lead the Tories to an unprecedented fourth election victory. Hardly any dreamt he would crush the sceptics with a majority of 80.
Just how Boris turned a political nightmare into glory, during a bitter five-month battle, is the stuff of history.
The odds were heavily stacked against the maverick politician. With a tiny majority in the Commons, uncertainty infected Britain.
“He’ll be Prime Minister for either ten weeks or ten years,” predicted Peter Lilley, a Tory peer. “He’ll be a great Prime Minister or a great disappointment.”
Yet one year later, the shine has gone.
HUMILIATED
Battered by criticism of his management of the Covid virus, he was humiliated this week by MPs who accused him of turning a blind eye to Russian oligarchs buying influence in Britain.
He has also been hammered by the public for his confused messages about wearing masks, and quarantine, and scorned by desperate shopkeepers in abandoned city centres.
“Shambolic,” is Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s caustic ridicule.
He now faces a struggle to regain the nation’s trust.
Boris’s inheritance was poisonous. During his first appearance in the Commons as Prime Minister his majority disappeared as a Tory MP crossed the floor to join the Lib Dems.
Behind Boris sat more than 25 Tory Remainers determined to sabotage his crusade to push through Brexit.
BORIS’S ELECTION GAMBLE
His only hope was to persuade the Commons to vote for a General Election.
Labour’s leaders thought it best to let the Tories first rip themselves apart.
To their satisfaction, some opinion polls reported that the anti-Semitic Marxist Jeremy Corbyn was on the road to enter Downing Street as the leader of a coalition with the Lib Dems and the SNP.
Boris’s gamble was that he could turn the tide.
Few imagined the scale of his ruthlessness. On the first day he fired 17 Cabinet ministers. In their place he appointed yes men — and women.
Anyone who disagreed with him was out.
Next he needed a no-nonsense enforcer to impose his will on Whitehall and the Commons.
To outfox his opponents he chose Dominic Cummings. Against the odds, Cummings had organised Vote Leave to win the EU referendum.
Like Boris, Cummings is an anarchical rule-breaker. Never compromise, he told Boris. Like using a bulldozer, opponents should be demolished and, he insisted, total obedience should be imposed by fear.
Including Cummings poisoned the well for many Tory MPs. “If I’d known that Cummings would come,” said Bill Cash, the veteran Tory Brexiteer, “it would have caused a lot of angst.”
For years, Boris’s critics had characterised him as a lazy, love-seeking, unfocused man. Over the next weeks that slur became redundant.
At the first hurdle, Boris fell. In a humiliating blow, the Supreme Court damned his bid to neutralise Parliament.
‘DO OR DIE’
But undeterred by the barracking in the Commons and on the BBC, he pushed to get the Brexit withdrawal bill through Parliament.
“Come what may, do or die,” was his battle cry. Defeated on a crucial vote, he shouted at his opponents: “It means running up the white flag.”
In the bedlam he fired 21 Tory rebel MPs. Among them was Sir Nicholas Soames, Sir Winston Churchill’s grandson.
“An ocean-going clot,” Soames called Boris. Now Soames was surprised by Boris’s callousness.
The giant obstacle was the Irish Backstop — a ruse to keep Britain in perpetual colonial vassalage to Brussels.
Everyone pronounced that Brussels would never give way. Boris’s ruthless decision was to agree a deal he had previously said was unacceptable.
To win, he dumped the DUP, the Tories’ ten northern Irish-supporting MPs. “Traitor,” they shouted. He smiled.
Now he moved to the climax. Turning on Corbyn, he taunted: “Call an election, you great big girl’s blouse.”
In a skilful game of poker, he bluffed and Corbyn finally agreed to the poll.
In a brilliant election campaign, Boris’s gamble confounded the polling experts.
Only Boris — and certainly not his party leadership rival Jeremy Hunt — could have persuaded voters in the Midlands and north of England to abandon their lifelong allegiance to the Labour party.
Even Sedgefield, Tony Blair’s old seat, voted Tory. On election night the Lib Dems were eviscerated and Labour seemed doomed for another ten years.
The glow of “Borisism” spread across the nation.
That night Boris celebrated hard. No one could begrudge the victor the spoils.
But his success was not just the result of ruthless skill. He was also lucky. All his life, he turned disadvantage to advantage.
Somehow, his darkest hours became a new dawn.
During the election campaign, Jennifer Arcuri, the Californian bombshell with whom he was rumoured to have had an affair for nearly four years until 2016, was exposed.
“I fell in love. I never admitted how much I loved him,” Arcuri said with enough information to destroy Boris.
Loyally, however, she refused to spill the beans. For Boris, that was lucky.
SECRET GIRLFRIENDS
Just as all his other secret girlfriends and ex-wives have remained remarkably discreet.
No other Prime Minister has moved into Downing Street in the midst of a divorce, with a pregnant girlfriend. Somehow Boris lived by different rules to everyone else.
On January 2, as he lay in the sun in Mustique in the Caribbean with Carrie Symonds, his fiancée, and dreamt of the sunny uplands, thousands of miles away his biggest test was only beginning.
In London that day, Chris Whitty, the country’s Chief Medical Officer, was reading the first report about a new coronavirus in China.
Over the next eight weeks, as the so-called Covid-19 spread across Europe towards Britain, Whitty and the other scientists knew a pandemic was certain.
Always the loner, Boris delegated responsibility to officials and Health Secretary Matt Hancock.
TORN APART
“Following the scientists” seemed sensible to a politician ignorant about unknown viruses.
After all, if Boris had announced he was rejecting the scientists’ advice he would have been torn apart.
Critics including Peter Ricketts, the former National Security Adviser, claim Boris ignored the warnings. “We put it up in lights,” he says.
Boris’s grave error was not to question the senior civil servants. Especially Chris Wormald, an invisible official who runs the department of health, and Mark Sedwill, the then all-powerful Cabinet Secretary in charge of the whole Whitehall machine.
Sedwill was paid to be Boris’s eyes and ears. Instead he sat like a dummy in Downing Street as the Covid crisis grew.
“Boris should have fired Sedwill on his first day,” says a Downing Street insider. “But he was too polite.”
Boris has never understood how the Whitehall government machine works.
Unlike other Prime Ministers, he did not arrive in Downing Street with skilled administrators. Instead, he relied on untalented civil servants.
As the Department of Health made a series of bad decisions — abandoning widespread testing for the virus, sending old people back to care homes without a test and not ordering sufficient protective equipment for NHS staff — Boris was floating.
The climax of that apparent tardiness was his ten-day holiday with Carrie at grace-and-favour country house Chevening. In early March Corbyn accused him of being a “part-time Prime Minister”.
As the death rate accelerated across Europe and thousands were dying amid draconian lockdowns, Boris faced the same darkest hour as Churchill in 1940.
For several weeks the country trusted him. Foolishly, he then ignored his own warnings and caught the virus.
While Carrie went to her mother, Boris lived alone in his Downing Street flat. Sweating and coughing, he delayed going to hospital.
“If he’d still been married to Marina,” a close friend confided, “he would have been properly looked after.”
Instead, when he finally got to hospital, a doctor told him: “One hour later and you could have been dead.”
Once again Boris had been saved by luck. Surprisingly, however, there was little sympathy as he recovered his health.
Over the past weeks Boris has been on probation. Bad communications from No10, confusing speeches by Boris himself and mixed messages from his ministers have all eroded hard-earned trust.
Casually, he gave his enemies ammunition to cause injury. Not least his refusal to fire Cummings for breaking the lockdown by driving to Durham — 45 Tory MPs demanded Cummings’ dismissal, including Damian Collins.
“The Government would be better without him,” said Collins, but Boris stayed loyal.
Ever since, Boris’s approval ratings have been falling — now down to 44 per cent.
One year ago Boris seemed destined to remain in Downing Street for ten years.
The eruption of the Covid nightmare cast doubts on that certainty.
Always the gambler, his roller coaster political career could quickly end in tears.
Much depends on making his own luck and turning the wild card.
If fate turns sour, Britain will face a second wave of the virus, amid mass unemployment and near-bankruptcy.
If Lady Luck delivers winners, Oxford’s scientists will produce a vaccine against the virus, Britain will escape a serious second wave and the EU, desperate to avoid a trade war, will agree a satisfactory Brexit deal before the end of the year.
Like Churchill, Boris will emerge as the hero. But there are many obstacles to overcome before the country awards him that prize.
- Tom Bower’s biography of Boris Johnson will be published on October 15
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