Farewell, Johnson's political career... we hardly knew ye

In September 2019, Britain's brand new prime minister, Boris Johnson, gave some advice to a class of eight-year-old children, and that advice was to make sure they didn't drink too much at university. It's on video.

- TOM PECK

Two of them laugh. Another just peers at the prime minister, on account of not knowing what university really is or, for that matter, what he means by "drink".

He meant it though. Despite being 55 years old, and having finally and belatedly got round to claiming what he considered to be his birthright - namely the keys to 10 Downing Street - there he was, still stewing on the knowledge that, more than 30 years previously, he hadn't worked hard enough. The knowledge that he had been too easily tempted by vicarious pleasures, and that, despite having arrived at Oxford to study the classics on a full scholarship, he had left with only a 2:1 rather than the first-class honours to which he had assumed himself entitled.

Johnson should have had an advantage over the heroes in the plays he skim-read back then. It is a rare good fortune to be so aware of your fatal flaw, but it proved to be of no use to him whatsoever. He was, in the end, rather better at projecting his shortcomings onto primary school children who didn't really understand them, and then kicking them up the arse on their behalf, than facing them down himself.

Has he been telling himself, all his adult life, that things have got to change? That he's got to work harder? Got to muster the detail? That he's not just going to be able to blag and bluster his way through everything? It is almost pitiful to imagine how loudly those voices must have been screaming in his head on Wednesday afternoon, which at no point went any better than one of those exam-based anxiety dreams. He was in the chair. The clock had begun ticking. Here were the questions. He did not have the answers.