If you thought Boris Johnson was bad, what’s to come is likely to be even more toxic

A week ago, having won the confidence vote, there was little serious effort to ensure his imminent departure and Johnson was expected to struggle through contortions and tricks to the convention and beyond.

All those 50-plus ministers would never have resigned, would never have wrestled with their conscience, would never have sent out pompous letters about “integrity” if Johnson had released a fact sheet and timetable on his dealings with Pincher soon after Sun broke the story, a routine Tory smut.

They backed Johnson through the Dominic Cummings scandal, through the resignation of two ethics advisers, through the scandal of a party donor paying to decorate his flat, through mishandling the pandemic and badly handling Brexit with a rotten deal, Partygate and breaking the law, illegally prolonging Parliament and breaking treaties and international law, allegedly trying to get wife Carrie a £100,000 job and son Wilfred a £150,000 tree house, depriving children of free school meals… and much more , much more.

They went through all of this and would have continued with Johnson for months, if not years, if he hadn’t humiliated some of them by giving them shady lines for media interviews.

If Therese Coffey had been given better, more honest information when she went on Sophie Raworth’s BBC show, Johnson would still have had shameful, slavish support from the likes of Javid and Sunak.

So it’s not just Johnson who is morally compromised, it’s the entire Tory party, with rare exceptions.

They are all guilty men and women because they voted for him, fought for him, supported him, lied for him, and generally embarrassed themselves and the country in the process. They were all members of the Boris cult and they knew exactly what he was.

They didn’t care because he was a winner. He didn’t suddenly become angry – he’d been like that since he was about eight years old.

He has outlived his usefulness to them, but if they thought the devil incarnate could win them in the next election, they would be signing his nomination papers now. Parties tend to get the leaders they deserve.

Be careful what you wish for, as the old curse says. Getting rid of Boris Johnson, with his stubborn refusal to accept reality, does three things that will severely hurt Britain and his party for years to come.

First, the new prime minister and his administration will face exactly the same problems as Johnson and will not be able to solve them.

These will still be there when a new prime minister is appointed: inflation and the cost of living crisis; the chaos of Brexit and the Northern Ireland Protocol and the failure of the Irish peace process; the approaching recession; the trade deficit and weak public finances; strikes and shortages; long-term support to Ukraine; and prepare for the next Covid wave.

With all the events of the last few days and the last few weeks and months there is no impression that there are any alternative leaders with the political solutions the UK needs to all of these challenges.

Aside from some vague and reckless plans to cut taxes and regulation, do any of them have a way of ending stagflation? I would like to see it.

A new Tory PM will change little fundamentally (or at least for the better) because so many of the problems the UK is facing stem from Brexit and the next government will obviously be a Brexit government too. That’s Johnson’s other toxic legacy.

In fact, it’s entirely possible that the next Brexit leader will have to be even more uncompromising and authoritarian than the last incumbent just to win the grassroots elections. Like Johnson, the next prime minister will be elected by some 90,000 mostly older, reactionary and unrepresentative members of the Conservative Party. Just let that sink in. Dreadful.

There will be “more Brexit”, not less, and even m

It is against international law and the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement. Imagine, if you will, Steve Baker or Suella Braverman as Prime Minister.

They would happily exit the EU Free Trade Agreement and opt for World Trade Organization terms of trade with Europe, and a bonfire of safeguards for employment, health and safety, animal welfare and product safety.

How about withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights? Contradiction to UN legal conventions? Force refugee boats back into the English Channel? Keeping Nadine Dorries and, out of spite, ordering her to abolish the BBC? Tory members love that sort of thing. The likes of Liz Truss and Nadhim Zahawi would also be heading in the same direction, albeit more cautiously.

These runners might be more competent and honest than Johnson – but they would also be more extremist, more divisive and even more aggressive towards Europe, refugees, human rights and the constitution. In other words, Britain might not get that nice Jeremy Hunt or Tom Tugendhat in power, but instead an even more vengeful figure than Johnson.

One of Johnson’s many ominous legacies is “pieism,” but any attempt to deviate from it will force the kind of tough decisions the party and country have been trying to avoid for years – mostly pretending that Brexit is with compatible with the Belfast Good Friday Agreement and that Brexit is compatible with a thriving economy.

Penny Mordaunt seems most likely to be trying to muddle through by trying to make Johnson-style pies work, constantly splitting the difference and getting blown around by the factions, and would be the closest thing to a Johnson sequel but without the jokes .

Tory political differences will not go away, and they will be exacerbated by this regicide. As Johnson’s most staunch and capable ally, Conor Burns, warns, even among his sizable fan base across the country and within the party, there will be great resentment at the way Johnson was ousted. It’s a version of the standard “stab in the back” conspiracy theory.

The idea is that 14 million voters gave Boris Johnson a mandate in the 2019 UK general election and were betrayed by a cabal of Tory MPs backed by mendacious media. In this scenario, there was a coup d’etat, a conspiracy to thwart the will of the people.

Nonsense as it is in a parliamentary democracy, but they believe that a prime minister should only be removed by the people in another general election. It’s the same kind of myth that perpetuated Thatcher’s supporters after their 1990 defenestration, bittering their differences in Europe and poisoning conservative politics for two decades.

Some people, believe it or not, love Boris Johnson and will see any successor as a fraud. That’s another toxic legacy of his lewd departure. (© Independent News Service)