Be in no doubt – Mr Ambition wants PM’s job

Finally, Boris Johnson, an inveterate political ditherer, has come off the EU fence. and it’s a move that could define his place in history.

He would have preferred to have delayed any announcement – to have given himself time to mull over public reaction to David Cameron’s deal and assess which choice would be in his own best interests.

For while Boris has often been an outspoken critic of Brussels, don’t be in any doubt – the crucial factor in this dramatic decision was: ‘What would most promote the career of alexander Boris de Pfeffle Johnson?’

it has been woven into political folklore that when Boris was a young man, he told people that his ambition was to be ‘world king’.

That particular job may never be available – but Boris has another target: Being Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

He would not have launched himself behind Brexit unless he thought it served that grand design.

Even so, it was not an inevitable decision. Over recent days, the london mayor confessed he had been ‘veering like a supermarket shopping trolley’ over which side to back.

among competing forces was the lure that if he backed the Stay campaign, he could have exacted from Cameron a top Cabinet post – possibly, sources suggest, even Foreign Secretary or Home Secretary. Victory in the referendum, many believe, would then have made him a shoo-in to succeed Cameron as Tory leader.

in the opposing balance was his intense rivalry with fellow old Etonian Cameron and the opportunity to outflank his leadership rivals by striking out against the Establishment and standing up for Britain in the style of his hero Winston Churchill.

an astute student of recent political history, Boris will also have realised he was facing his own ‘Portillo moment’. That is a reference to Thatcherite minister Michael Portillo, who 20 years ago seemed destined to be Tory leader but fatally delayed deciding whether to stand in 1995.

Having allowed allies to set up a campaign HQ, and even install extra phone lines, Portillo lost his nerve at the 11th hour; John Major kept the job and Portillo’s political reputation never recovered.

There are, indeed, similarities between the two men.

it took months of public and private agonising for Boris to decide to challenge to be london mayor. Ultimately, he agreed to run after Cameron and George Osborne told him that if he didn’t, he had no future in Tory frontbench politics.

Then, after winning the mayoralty – and brilliantly securing a second term – there was another bout of confusion and dithering when he stated that he wouldn’t combine being mayor and standing as an MP.

yet that is precisely what he then did – because he calculated that having both jobs would further his career.

THE fact is that he had been boxed into a corner this weekend by Michael Gove, who had made the bolder move of breaking Tory ranks quicker. Friends of Boris were exasperated that Gove had stolen the moral high ground by declaring first.

it was not as if Boris was not aware of Gove’s intentions.

The Justice Secretary had made it clear he would back the leave campaign when the pair met for dinner last week at the mayor’s £3million islington home – ironically located about half a mile from Granita, the restaurant where Tony Blair and Gordon Brown infamously carved up the labour leadership between them in 1994.

i’m told that long-time allies of Boris, such as lynton Crosby, who masterminded the Conservative general election victory, then privately urged him to throw his hat in with leave.

There was also another key calculation in Boris’s mind. Whenever Cameron steps down as Tory leader, his replacement will be chosen from a shortlist of two by the party’s 100,000-plus members.

it is estimated that around 70 per cent of those want to quit the EU – and so they would most likely pick a man or woman who has championed the anti-EU cause.

Boris’s qualms over Europe have always been at odds with his very international background – born in new york (to a father who has worked for the European Commission and has been an MEP), his great-great-grandfather was a Muslim entrepreneur from anatolia, he worked in Brussels and he has toured the world drumming up business for london.

YET, as a young Brussels correspondent, he established himself as one of the few Eurosceptic journalists in the late 80s and early 90s, belligerently criticising the European Commission’s excesses.

More recently, however, he has blown hot and cold – one moment saying there was nothing to fear from Brexit; the next, vehemently denying he was an ‘outer’.

Only two weeks ago, in his weekly newspaper column, he wobbled again – writing that the choice was ‘ simple in favour of staying’, as it was in Britain’s interest to be ‘intimately engaged’ in the workings of a Continent with a grim 20th-century history. ‘leaving would be read as a very negative signal for Europe. it would dismay some of our closest friends, not least the eastern Europeans for whom the EU has been a force for good, stability, openness and prosperity.’

But always in the background was the thought of the Tory leadership.

Once, discussing the prospect of leading his party, Boris famously said that ‘if the ball came loose from the back of a scrum, it would be a great thing to have a crack at’.

it seems that he has just spotted that rugby ball spin loose – and reached out to grab it.