Them’s the breaks but it rarely breaks bad for Johnson and his old school chums

It is the kind of shrugged-off resignation of someone who’s missed a two-footer on the last green or lost their cases on the way home from Majorca.

This was our prime minister in Downing Street on Thursday beginning his protracted departure with the palms-aloft, what-can-you-do fatalism of someone who has just been to the car wash before the rain came on. As he stood at the podium outside No 10, amid the rubble, the flames licking his trouser cuffs, Boris Johnson was defiant, unapologetic and resolute. It would have taken a heart of stone not to laugh.

And, despite the photographers catching a frame or two of him looking down at his notes that could, if you squinted, make him look a little emotional, Johnson seemed neither up nor down. There was certainly no repeat of Theresa May’s choked-off sob when she was making the same speech for the same reason. She was, of course, a decent and well-meaning woman driven out by Johnson and his braying, bullying mob but, in truth, on Thursday he didn’t seem too fussed to be leaving because, well, them’s the breaks.

His insouciance was reminiscent of no one so much as his old Bullingdon buddy David Cameron – unsurprisingly the only one of his predecessors who has not enjoyed a little reputational uplift because of Johnson’s careering ineptitude – when he was recorded humming a little happy tune as he ambled back to No 10 after resigning in the wake of cataclysmic defeat in his needless referendum on Europe.

He was doing the honourable thing, you see, because, well, Brexit would be a disaster, inflicting economic damage for generations to come; millions of people would suffer because of it; the country’s government would be handed to Johnson, Dominic Cummings and their swiveleyed acolytes but, ultimately, what could you do apart from buy a £25,000 writer’s shed and pen your £1.5 million memoirs? Them’s the breaks.

The thing is the breaks are far kinder to people like Cameron and Johnson than people like us. It seldom breaks bad for these millionaires, cushioned by wealth and privilege, propelled from elite schools to esteemed universities to golden career paths where doors swing open and opportunities gleam in the golden sunshine.

Politics to these men is a lark, a game. Good sport. It doesn’t matter to them so why, they seem to wonder as they wander from the smouldering ruins, should it matter to everyone else so much?

Perhaps, in the long dark night of his soul, Johnson regrets ruining our country with Brexit; rubbling the standards expected in our public life and disgracing his party and parliament again and again? Well, as Ernest Hemingway once wrote, isn’t it pretty to think so?

The thing is we know men like Cameron and Johnson – and, for that matter, Rishi Sunak – understand nothing of our lives. They have never walked a single step in our shoes. So why are we surprised when they treat our lives with such carelessness? And why are we content to let them?

Maybe, just maybe, after Johnson tarnished the brand so spectacularly, the warm winds will turn chill for these political lightweights, these careless dilettantes. If them’s the breaks, Johnson might, despite it all, have done us a favour.