There were moist eyes around the cabinet table on Thursday as Boris Johnson began his long goodbye from British politics. “There were a few of them wiping away tears,” says one member of Johnson’s hastily assembled team. “Pathetic really. I wasn’t crying.”
Indeed beyond the loyalists clinging to the wreckage of Johnson’s broken government, there were few tears being shed among Conservative MPs after they drove out of office the man who led Britain out of the EU and who — according to his critics — dragged British politics into the mud.
After a series of scandals in which Johnson repeated the same dismal cycle of concealing the truth, retreating, then being found out, his party could take it no longer. “Enough is enough,” Sajid Javid told parliament the day after quitting as health secretary on Tuesday, a decision that triggered an avalanche of resignations which swept the prime minister away.