[“He’s like a general who marches his army to the sound of guns and the moment he sees the battleground abandons it,” Michael Heseltine, a Tory politician, told the BBC . “I have never seen anything like it. He ripped the Tory party apart. He has created the greatest constitutional crisis in peacetime in my life.”]
By Sarah Lyall
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After
leaving his house on Friday, Mr. Johnson, a member of Parliament and
the
former mayor of London, was interrupted by a member of the public who
repeatedly
criticized him. By REUTERS on Publish Date July 1, 2016.
Photo
by Andrew Testa for The New York Times.
Watch
in Times Video »
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The
chronically disheveled Mr. Johnson, wearing voluminous shorts and a bandanna
decorated with skulls and crossbones, responded with his usual cocktail of
charm, bluster and obfuscation. Having already dismissed the story as “a
completely untrue and ludicrous conjecture,” and “an inverted pyramid of piffle,”
he cheerily advised the reporters to “go for a run, get some exercise and have
a beautiful day.”
He
was lying. The reports were correct, and he was fired from his parliamentary
job as the Conservative Party arts spokesman. But it didn’t seem to bother him
too much. Mr. Johnson has always had a knack for recasting disaster as farce, and
he devoted his weekly newspaper column to the virtues of being fired.
“Nothing
excites compassion, in friend and foe alike,” he wrote, “as much as the sight
of you ker-splonked on the Tarmac with your propeller buried six feet under.”
Mr.
Johnson, 52, has had a singularly charmed life, always wafting upward on a
Teflon cloud of charm and guile even as people have questioned his integrity, seriousness
and competence. But not anymore. Having gambled his political future on the
chance to lead his party and country through the aftermath of the “Brexit”
referendum on whether to exit the European Union, Mr. Johnson found on Thursday
that his luck had run out. He withdrew from the race.
In
the end, he was done in as much by his own hubris, lack of preparation and
bewilderment in the face of the Brexit result as he was by the treachery and
dwindling support of his colleagues. As he abandoned his campaign to be the
Conservative Party leader — and with it, probably, his chances of ever being
prime minister — he seemed almost relieved to be spared the burden of running
the country he had done so much to destabilize.
Mr.
Johnson, the former mayor of London, who has not given an interview since the
Brexit vote, did not respond to a message left on his parliamentary office
voice mail.
For
a student of Shakespeare, which Mr. Johnson is (he is writing a biography) the
situation was replete with ironies. A man who had spent his life behaving like
Falstaff and making merry in the pub had failed to convince his party, and
perhaps himself, that he had somehow suddenly turned into Prince Hal, poised to
lead the country through its crisis in Europe .
On
Thursday, the anger at Mr. Johnson was palpable, replacing last week’s anger at
Prime Minister David Cameron for calling the referendum in the first place. The
sense that Mr. Johnson had presided over the Brexit campaign without a plan for
what to do if it won — and then walked away without cleaning up his mess — was
particularly enraging.
“He’s
like a general who marches his army to the sound of guns and the moment he sees
the battleground abandons it,” Michael Heseltine, a Tory politician, told the BBC . “I have never seen anything like it. He
ripped the Tory party apart. He has created the greatest constitutional crisis
in peacetime in my life.”
Just
a few days earlier, Mr. Johnson had seemed poised to coast into position as
prime minister when Mr. Cameron stepped down in the fall. Outside London
He
cycles to work and carries his things in a backpack. He looks as if he’s slept
in his clothes and just gotten out of bed. He has the privileged demeanor of an
old Etonian (he went to school there), but a Bill Clintonesque way with crowds
and an appeal that transcends class. In headlines he is “BoJo”; to most Britons
he is simply “Boris.”
But
his surface success has always carried alongside it a reputation for lies, evasions
and exaggerations, a lack of seriousness and discipline, a tendency to wade
blindly into situations without thinking through their ramifications, and a
perception that he puts his own ambitions first. He has a habit of deflecting
tough questions and affecting an amused insouciance about his mistakes, which
include fathering a child with a woman other than his wife (he and his wife, a
lawyer, have four children).
He
is better on the big picture than he is on the details.
Take
last Monday’s column by Mr. Johnson in The Daily Telegraph, the first
substantive statement anyone from the Brexit side had made since the vote. As
chaos swirled outside and Britain
Supporters
of Mr. Johnson said at the time that the article had been written hastily and
turned in late and should be treated more as a first draft than as a definitive
statement.
In
fact, it was as a journalist who played around with the facts that Mr. Johnson
first made his name. He was fired from his first reporting job, at The Times of
London, for inventing a quote and attributing it to an Oxford Brussels
It
was a boring assignment, but Mr. Johnson found a way of livening it: He made
things up. His great talent was to take tiny grains of information in reports
and proposals, repackage them as official European policy and present them as
part of a broad narrative about Brussels
While
his stories became increasingly influential in the euro-skeptic wing of the
Conservative Party and in many ways set the tone for the British papers’
coverage of Europe ever since, Mr. Johnson tends to treat his approach as great
fun.
“I
was just chucking these rocks over the garden wall and listening to this
amazing crash from the greenhouse next door over in England
“Everything
I wrote from Brussels
After
Brussels
I
was in London
Mr.
Johnson seemed constitutionally incapable of taking anything truly seriously. Deciding
he did not feel like being photographed for The Times article, for instance, he
got another man in The Spectator office to impersonate him in the photo session.
The photographer duly snapped away, until the magazine’s publisher found out
what was going on and made Mr. Johnson sit for the portrait. (He was 37 at the
time.)
Around
that time Mr. Johnson also became a bona fide celebrity, honing his trademark
persona as a hyper-articulate upper-class-twit-for-the-masses in a string of
highly amusing appearances on the current events quiz show “Have I Got News For
You.” Viewers adored him.
“His charming, bumbling buffoon image was
neatly done and went down very well with audiences,” said Ian Hislop, editor of
Private Eye magazine and a panelist on the show.
In
2008, Mr. Johnson unexpectedly ran for mayor of London
“We
had eight frustrating years where we’d ask detailed policy questions, and what
we’d get back in response was bluster and grandiose claims,” said Joanne
McCartney, a Labour Assembly member who is now deputy mayor. “If he didn’t know
the answer to the question, which was a regular occurrence, he’d use bluster
and wit to avoid answering.”
Mr.
Johnson all along denied that he wanted to be prime minister, saying it was
about as likely as his being “reincarnated as an olive.” But he has always been
wittier, quicker and more charismatic than Mr. Cameron. The 2012 London
Olympics proved the perfect showcase for his off-the-cuff anarchic wit. Filmed
stranded haplessly on a malfunctioning zipwire, Mr. Johnson took an incident
that would have humiliated most other politicians and somehow used it to
burnish his appeal. (A photograph of the dangling Mr. Johnson was used to quite
different effect last week on the cover of the French newspaper Libération.)
Mr.
Cameron has always been threatened by Mr. Johnson; his efforts to slough off
the mayor as a kind of amusing Tory mascot never worked. But it wasn’t until Mr.
Johnson betrayed the prime minister by throwing his support behind the Brexit
campaign that the party saw the extent of his ambition.
Before
now, Mr. Johnson has rarely been confronted by a situation he could not
maneuver his way through. But a harbinger came in March, when he was summoned
before a House of Commons committee and forensically interrogated by its Javert-like
Tory chairman, Andrew Tyrie, about a series of statements he had made over the
years about Europe .
Mr.
Johnson tried his normal humorous approach. Asked, for instance, about his
assertion that the European Union has a law saying that balloons cannot be
blown up by children under 8 (it doesn’t), he deflected the question, saying, “In
my household, only children under 8 are allowed to blow up balloons.”
He
continued in this vein throughout the session, as Mr. Tyrie peered unsmilingly
at him, acid in his voice.
“This
is all very interesting, Boris,” Mr. Tyrie said at one point. “Except none of
it is really true, is it?”