It’s good that Boris Johnson came back at the end. He should be here to see it. He should witness with his own eyes the triumph of the man he once dismissed as irrelevant.
The former prime minister popped up unexpectedly last night, during one of Rishi Sunak’s last campaign events. The two of them can’t stand to look at each other, of course. They didn’t appear together. Johnson only mentioned his successor once as a basic nicety and didn’t praise a single thing about his record. But he came: his one little effort for the party before annihilation.
He might be the first prime minister alive who has aged more aggressively out of office than they did in it. His face appears to be crumpling, ravaged by disappointment. His eyes are hollow. In his various social media videos he screeches garbled nonsense about imaginary left wing enemies. Now it’s clear that this is his default position: knackered, beaten, in serious decline.
Some Conservatives still harbour a belief that Johnson could have led them to the promised land. The most prominent proponent of this view is Nadine Dorries, who wrote a piece of romantic fiction dressed up as a political memoir about how he’d been brought down by shadowy agents of control inside the Conservative Party. Johnson himself insists the party was “only a........