Fizzing with scandal and expletives, the dizzying tale of how Big Dog Boris was hounded from No 10

The Fall Of Boris Johnson Sebastian Payne Macmillan €22 ★★★★★

It is difficult, now, to believe that Boris Johnson only ceased being prime minister in September. Perhaps that’s because the UK is on its second PM since his departure, but the turbulent events described in Sebastian Payne’s account of The Fall Of Boris Johnson already seem both familiar and strangely far away, like some surreal national dream.

And yet the book opens with a moment of Johnsonian hubris from only a year ago, in November 2021, at a dinner for former Telegraph leader-writers in the convivial atmosphere of London’s Garrick Club. Johnson had made a great effort to attend, arriving in a characteristic blast of mixed signals via private jet from the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow.

It was an evening for the assembled journalists ‘to celebrate one of their own’, and the star guest was firmly in his comfort zone, tucking into pheasant and cracking jokes. He had weathered a gruelling year, and that autumn’s Tory party conference was deemed to have gone well, with the slogan ‘Build Back Better’ injecting a note of optimism.

Yet it was at this point, the author argues, that the seeds of Johnson’s subsequent political downfall were sown. The Telegraph dinner seemed to harden his existing ambition to save the career of Owen Paterson, the former Conservative environment secretary who was also a close friend of Johnson’s journalistic mentor, the former Daily Telegraph editor Charles Moore.

Paterson was facing a 30-day suspension from the House of Commons for breaking rules on paid lobbying, but during the investigation had also suffered a painful personal tragedy: the suicide of his wife Rose.

Johnson’s efforts to rescue Paterson from the disciplinary process sparked fury in the opposition, press, public and even among Tory MPs, forcing Johnson into a humiliating U-turn. Paterson retired from politics shortly afterwards.

For Payne, this represented the first of three scandals – best summarised as ‘Paterson, Partygate and Pincher’ – which were to split the party and end in Johnson’s ‘remarkable political defenestration’ before the following July was out. Thereafter he leads us through the dizzying turns of ‘Partygate’, prohibited Downing Street gatherings – some attended by Johnson himself – which happened during governmentimposed national lockdowns.

Then the Pincher scandal broke: the charge that Johnson was briefed on allegations of sexual misconduct about Chris Pincher MP but appointed him Deputy Chief Whip anyway. No10 – and biddable government ministers – denied this, before Johnson remembered that he had indeed been briefed on Pincher after all. The chaos and embarrassment had now reached such a pitch that health secretary Sajid Javid and chancellor Rishi Sunak felt compelled to resign, triggering an avalanche of further resignations and Johnson’s own departure.

The author, who is Whitehall editor for the Financial Times, had a ringside seat for this feverish drama, and an impressive number of contacts willing to spill the beans on hidden machinations. The book fizzes with expletives and the urgent pinging of texts from whips, ministers, allies and enemies of its subject. Johnson’s burgeoning suspicion of Rishi Sunak and his ongoing psychodrama with Michael Gove – culminating in his bizarre sacking of the minister for levelling up shortly before his own exit – are compellingly sketched. History will be indebted to Payne for this forensic account, especially since the fog of denial and admission pumped out by the former PM himself tends to blur the public memory.

Yet the immediacy of this vivid ‘first draft of recent history’ does exact some cost in perspective. We’re told ‘the parallel to Johnson is Thatcher’, another ‘election-winner that transformed the political scene’ and was brought down by her MPs. But before that, Thatcher was in power for over a decade, during which – like them or not – she pursued ideas that fundamentally altered the fabric of the UK and its global standing.

There’s a brief vision of how Johnson’s administration could have prospered but what chiefly arises from these pages is his hectic squandering of political capital. Towards the end, the energies of ‘Johnson’s support networks’, huddled in ‘The Bunker’ and engaged in ‘Operation Big Dog’, were not focused on the UK’s mounting problems – as the faux-wartime language might suggest – but on rescuing the PM from his own entirely avoidable political conflagrations.

Future books will no doubt explore more fully just what that meant for the UK: the unavoidable gravity of a PM’s lack of seriousness.

A ringside seat for this feverish drama and an impressive number of contacts willing to spill the beans