Boris Johnson is finished – so of course he’ll be back as Tory leader

There’s no surer sign that an organisation is out of good ideas than when it brings back a face from the past, aware that it will keep the fans happy but almost certainly lead to disaster.

Chelsea supporters wanted José Mourinho back until they got him back and were reminded of why he’d had to go in the first place. The same with EastEnders viewers and Leslie “Dirty Den” Grantham.

Multiple millions were sunk into new albums by Kanye West despite the rapper’s new-found admiration for Adolf Hitler, and into new Star Wars films by George Lucas despite him not having directed a movie for the previous 22 years. Dallas and Roseanne were rebooted for TV, even though Larry Hagman was ill and Roseanne Barr was Roseanne Barr. Sean Connery returned (unofficially) as James Bond in 1983 despite having said he was too old for the role when he left it in 1971.

None of these projects ended well, and no-one seriously expected them to. They just felt unavoidable.

The return of Boris Johnson as leader of the Conservative Party feels similarly inevitable and inevitably doomed. A More In Common poll suggests that he would beat both Nigel Farage and Keir Starmer if he were restored to the top of the Tory tree, which will be enough for many worried members of a party heading for oblivion under the useless Kemi Badenoch. The multiple reasons why he was kicked out in disgrace less than three years ago don’t seem to matter.

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Some of these flaws were on show in his response to the UK-EU Brexit reset deal announced last Monday, more embarrassing and more misleading than anything managed by the routed and riled Brexiteers; Priti Patel, Mark Francois, David Frost, Bernard Jenkin and all the rest. Johnson’s remarks, in a social media post and then in an interview with GB News, were ridden with lies, laziness, pomposity, fake numbers and cheap insults. The Tory faithful must have lapped it up.

Keir Starmer “is clearly bent on signing up to a deal on free movement which could give 80 million younger EU nationals the right to come to this country”, Johnson said, echoing the garbage he peddled about 76 million Turks with their bags packed in 2016. He claimed Starmer had “sacrificed UK fishing interests” by agreeing exactly the same fishing rights that Johnson and David Frost had signed off in 2019.

“Britain will once again be paying countless millions of pounds into EU coffers… what have we got in return?” he asked. Yes, apart from the defence and security pact, access to the £150bn Security Action for Europe (SAFE) arms fund, the vanishing red tape, the e-gates, the protection from steel tariffs and carbon tax and a predicted uplift to the UK economy of up to £25bn a year, what has the EU ever done for us?

Britain was now the “non-voting punk of the EU Commission” Johnson wrote, his use of the Shakespearean slang word for prostitute reminding us that he once accepted £88,000 for a book on the Bard of Avon, toiled on it (according to Dominic Cummings) when he should have been concentrating on the outbreak of Covid-19 and since then has been too idle to finish it.

“Two-tier Keir is the orange ball-chewing manacled gimp of Brussels,” he continued. That is language that seems likely to excite a certain type of older Conservative, but also language that winks at those who spend their time on TikTok, making up rumours about the prime minister that are so absurd even Isabel Oakeshott would think twice about spreading them. In this respect alone, Boris Johnson knows exactly what he’s doing.

Starmer, he told GB News, was “taking us back into the sweaty embrace of Brussels”. Now, sweaty embraces are something Johnson knows plenty about. Will the Conservatives soon wrap him in one of their own

For now, Johnson is said to be on alert for a safe by-election seat that not even Badenoch’s Tories can lose. As another bed-hopping Old Etonian once said, never say never again…