It's just like old times, former friends David Cameron and Boris Johnson might have once trashed restaurants together at dinners held by the Bullingdon Club—an Oxford University drinking society—but now they've graduated to entire countries. This morning Boris fled the scene of the crime as if he'd just thrown a brick through its window, announcing that he wouldn't stand to lead the country out of the Brexit crisis he's helped bring about. Cameron himself dashed to safety as the results came in last Friday.
It is easy to cast Johnson, the Oxford classicist as Narcissus—he fell so in love with his own reflection that he forgot to make sure he could actually follow through on his Brexit promises. But as soon as his fellow Leave campaigner the Justice Secretary Michael Gove declared his candidacy, you didn't have to be Pythagoras to see that Johnson would not be able to win enough votes from his fellow MPs to make it onto the ballot paper.
By all accounts, the Johnson camp were preparing to join the race until the last minute. I was chatting to one of his team last night who was expecting to be extremely busy over the coming days. Then things started to unravel, first with Mrs Gove's leaked email in which the Daily Mail columnist Sarah Vine warned her husband about backing Boris. That was followed this morning by Gove's announcement that he was standing for the party leadership because he had come "to the conclusion that Boris cannot provide the leadership or build the team for the task ahead." According to one report, Team Boris only had 10 minutes notice.
With Remain campaigner Theresa May already the frontrunner, according to a recent YouGov poll, it was up to Gove and Boris to run a joint Leave ticket to counter her. As long as Boris could make it through the parliamentary votes into the final two then it should have been easy to get the Tory faithful to anoint him as the grassroots favourite. But with Gove in the mix and an ABB (Anyone But Boris) campaign underway among MPs, Gove's popularity among his peers in Westminster compared to Johnson's relative low stock left the former London mayor's chances ever of putting his case to the wider membership slim at best.
Which is all rather a shame. Johnson has long cast himself as a Churchillian figure, albeit one in search of a war to win. Finally here was his Dunkirk moment and I suspect he had some bombastic turns lined up and could have been a strong leader helping Britain punch above our weight at the upcoming negotiations. We may even have rallied round him, his Daily Telegraph article on Monday showed a willingness to build bridges.
Except that Churchill didn't glance at the odds and decided to duck out. Churchill would have fought Gove on the beaches, landing grounds, fields and streets and never surrendered. Rather than a great statesman striding the pages of history, or a hero of Greek mythology, Boris has proved himself to be a coward who thinks only of himself and scarpers at the first sight of danger. At least the Bullingdon Club would famously send a generous cheque to cover the cost of its destruction.
Follow Phil Clarke on Twitter: @triflemonster
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