You might call it complacency, or conceit, or just stark insensibility.
But if you had asked me in June 2022 whether I was likely to continue as leader of the Conservative Party, I would have blinked in surprise and replied that not only was I confident of leading my party into the next general election, but that I was sure we were going to win.
On any objective view, the position was pretty darn good. In spite of the media-driven battering we had received in the previous six months, we were still only a handful of points behind the Labour Party.
The Reform Party, that was to go on to do so much damage in the 2024 election, was on zero, I repeat, zero.
Then prime minister Boris Johnston with the chancellor Rishi Sunak in February 2022
Mr Johnson announces his resignation outside No10 Downing Street on July 7, 2022
Look at what we were doing, and had done. We had won a record majority, and with about two and a half years to go we were relentlessly delivering on the pledges of our 2019 manifesto.
We had already recruited 13,500 new police officers, and were on track to reach the promised 20,000.
We had rolled up 1,500 county lines drugs gangs, and cut neighbourhood crime by 31 per cent.
We had already recruited 10,000 more nurses, and were on track to deliver 50,000 – and the NHS had more doctors and nurses than at any time in its history.
As ever, we were out-building Labour and giving thousands of young people new hope of owning their home, adding about 250,000 homes a year, the most since the 1980s. The previous year there had been 400,000 first-time buyers.
We were pushing on with the biggest infrastructure revolution since Victorian times, triggering construction and investment across the country. We had tech unicorns – new companies worth more than a billion dollars – emerging virtually every other week.
In the three years of my premiership, the number of homes with gigabit broadband had gone from 7 per cent to 69 per cent.
Thanks in part to Brexit, we had delivered the fastest Covid vaccine roll-out of any major economy, and that had in turn enabled the fastest economic recovery in the G7.
Contrary to the predictions of the anti-Brexiteers, we had unemployment at a 50-year low, with 620,000 more people in paid jobs than before the pandemic began; and we had youth unemployment at a 45-year low.
Thanks in part to Brexit, the UK was leading the global response to Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine.
Thanks to Brexit we finally had a plan – the Rwanda deal – to deter the cross-Channel people smugglers.
At home and abroad, it seemed to me, we had a confident and active government, getting on with our agenda of levelling up; and Keir Starmer wasn’t exactly setting the world on fire.
Of course, I was aware that I had enemies; and I would sometimes notice that colleagues would break off their conversations as I approached.
I heard people sometimes muttering about ‘the letters’ going in. By this they meant the Tory Party’s peculiar method of epistolary assassination.
If 15 per cent of the parliamentary party – amounting back then to 54 Tory MPs – write to Sir Graham Brady, then chairman of the 1922 Committee of backbenchers, expressing no confidence in the prime minister, then a vote must be held on whether the PM can remain in office.
I wasn’t worried. The whips were confident, and I had my own intelligence network.
Staff gather outside No10 to applaud and bid farewell to an emotional Mr Johnson
Carrie and children give a ‘well done’ hug to the outgoing prime minister
The House of Commons hairdresser, Kelly Dodge, sees all and knows all. As she snips and twirls the locks of the MPs and polishes their pates with her hot towels, she hears the things the whips don’t pick up. She also had a contact in Sir Graham Brady’s office.
‘It’s OK,’ she told me one morning as she gave me a trim. ‘We think there are only about a dozen.’
Even if Kelly was wrong, even if there was a rebellion, who was their candidate? Rishi? Some discontented MPs certainly seemed to think so.
‘Rishi will win my seat,’ a bumptious young MP had told me back in January. In 2019 he had won one of those north-eastern seats that had scarcely ever been Tory before, and he came to explain, with magnificent condescension, that as far as he was concerned I might as well disintegrate.
I was far too polite to disagree, but as I looked at him I wondered . . . Really? I thought (when it came to the 2024 election, he was, of course, vaporised).
I liked Rishi, I considered him my friend and partner. But I had not seen the evidence that he knew how to cope with the scale of the job, how to mount a truly massive campaign, how to project a vision of the future that really resonated with the voters.
I thought Rishi’s best bet would be to hang on, help get us through 2024, and then take over in due course.
We had discussed his career several times, and he assured me of his complete support ‘for as long as you want’, and it goes without saying that I was pretty fervent in my support for him.
He had run into some difficulties in April over his wife’s tax affairs, and I can tell you that we were all full-throated in our defence of Rishi and his family. I just assumed he would reciprocate.
I assumed he understood that he was not yet ready, that we were a good fit; and that together we could get on and deliver a great and inspiring agenda for the country.
I knew that the news cycle was turbulent. But I thought he would get that politics is sometimes about soaking up the pressure and coming through it. I thought that all my colleagues would get it.
Alas, when things are febrile, a tiny episode can make a sudden difference for the worse. In early June 2022, my colleagues were spooked, like a herd of cows by a barking dog. It was enough to push them, or at least 15 per cent of them, over the edge.
At the beginning of that long, hot summer, the nation was celebrating the unique achievement of the Queen’s 70 years on the throne.
There was a great service of Thanksgiving (which, unfortunately, she was too infirm to go in person) in St Paul’s Cathedral.
The crowd outside was in boisterous spirits. So I was relieved to hear what sounded like a very favourable reception – loads of cheers and claps.
Then, just as we got to the top, another noise cut through. Carrie didn’t even notice it, but I picked it up all right – a couple of boos or jeers. That was enough.
It didn’t matter that the general mood was positive, or that some reporters didn’t even detect the disapproving noise. In her Sky News commentary Kay Burley simply observed that we were cheered.
But the good old Beeb had the booers on their soundtrack and sought one out for interview (he turned out to be a French resident of London, who didn’t much like le Brexit). They churned and churned the story, as you can with 24-hour news.
Something told me that for skittish Tory MPs this was going to be a difficult moment.
Every day for the past six months the poor things had been pelted with ordure intended for me: social media messages saying what a prat I was, and worse.
Now here, to their jangled imaginations, was the proof of what some of my colleagues were whispering in the shadows – that I was losing my grip on our public, that the voters would be glad I was gone.
So when the phone went the following day, I was not surprised that it was Graham Brady. He didn’t sound particularly gloaty, or chuffed – but unquestionably pleased to be in on the action.
‘Prime Minister,’ he said, ‘the 54 letters are in.’ A vote on my leadership would have to be held.
I can see now that events were now moving ineluctably towards their grisly conclusion; but what strikes me today is my blithering refusal, at the time, to give in to despair. You can be taking an active part in your own decline and fall without realising that it is going on.
On the morning of the vote I sat at the Cabinet table, topping and tailing 365 letters, one for every Tory MP, setting out what I believed was a powerful case for my remaining in office. As I wrote out each Christian name and urged their support, I dimly began to see the full difficulty of my position.
For every Tory MP that I felt I could call my friend there was at least one, I am afraid, who was most definitely not on my side.
‘These people hate me,’ I muttered.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Charlotte Owen, one of my political advisers who was helping with the whipping operation. ‘We are going to win!’
Which we did – and pretty comfortably. I felt I had won a reprieve, and that if I could just get past the summer all would be well.
With a sense of almost cockroach-like invincibility, I got on with the job.
We had a big domestic agenda, and that spring my most urgent concern was UK energy supply. We helped households with the cost but, much more importantly, we green-lighted new supply: more nuclear reactors, tragically neglected by Labour; far more wind power.
Without abandoning the goal of net zero, we also understood that more hydrocarbons were now an inevitable part of the transition.
We were also leading the campaign for Ukraine. That June I went to three summits in succession – the Commonwealth Heads of Government summit in Kigali, Rwanda, the G7 and Nato – and made the case for more support, and more weapons, for the victims of Putin’s aggression.
My blood was still coursing with the dopamine of my final press conference of the Nato summit in Madrid when I came back to the UK delegation room to find that my political secretary, Ben Gascoigne, needed to talk to me.
There was another problem at home, it seemed. The deputy chief whip, Chris Pincher MP, was in trouble for allegedly groping a man’s bottom, while drunk, in the Carlton Club.
I could imagine the hilarity and scorn in the Kremlin: that this was (a) the kind of thing that British MPs got up to and (b) the kind of thing that required the attention of the Prime Minister.
‘These MPs will be the death of me,’ I said to Gascoigne.
At the time I meant it to be satirical.
A week later I announced my resignation.
I am told that the announcement that I was stepping down left a fair bit of confusion on Tory doorsteps.
Some voters seemed mystified. They had voted me in with a large majority three years before. Now I was being removed – without consulting the electorate.
Why exactly had I gone? What was my crime? Why did so many of my colleagues have a fit of the vapours?
I can tell you it wasn’t Partygate, which by then was feeling pretty stale.
It wasn’t Pinchergate, though we certainly mishandled that.
It wasn’t the polls (one poll in March even put us ahead, after months of being battered by the media).
It wasn’t any particular election result. We had averted the predicted rout in the May local elections, and even took some seats from Labour. Beneath the surface, you could see the realignment still going on.
No, the fundamental problem was that too many Tory MPs just wanted me out of their hair.
Some had been rattled (unnecessarily, I think) by the hate storms of Twitter. Some disliked me: some for personal reasons, some because they thought they could do better under someone else.
Quite a lot of them, of course, still secretly opposed me over Brexit. Many of them weren’t worried about the next election; or at least they weren’t worried that I would lose. They were worried I would win, and they still wouldn’t get the preferment they thought they deserved.
So they wanted CHANGE. They thought they could painlessly switch horses with an 80-seat majority and still canter to victory.
They also had an obvious replacement in view, and had done for months if not years.
When Sajid Javid resigned as Health Secretary, I was fairly phlegmatic. I loved old Saj, but he was finding it very hard to reform the NHS and fix waiting lists, and I suspected that he was paranoid about his own position. But when Rishi resigned later that same day, I was sad.
It was worse than a crime, it was a mistake – both for Rishi and for the party, never mind the country.
As I read his resignation letter, with its leaden phrases, I murmured (at least internally) the dying words of Julius Caesar, kai su, teknon *. If Caesar had 23 stab wounds from his assassins, I ended up with 62, in the sense that a grand total of 60 ministers decided to follow Saj and Rishi out of the door.
That, in the end, was why I had to go. I could still have built a government – I had enough straw to make my bricks. But by then I felt I was only staving off the inevitable.
Was it a plot? You bet it was a plot, in the sense that a lot of them were at it for ages, some of them from the very moment I took over.
Was the plot enough, on its own, to bring me down? Well, I don’t think you should underestimate my many goofs. I made too many duff appointments, a couple of whom turned out to be homicidal maniacs. I badly mishandled our response to some of the crises.
Above all, and partly because of Covid, I did nothing like enough to explain myself to the parliamentary party and keep them onside. Too often I would go back to the No 10 flat, tired out, and work into the evening, when I should have been talking to colleagues and keeping them cheerful.
That was my failing, and not the only one.
I should have done more to protect myself, and the rest of Whitehall, against Partygate-type allegations. I should have said something to the entire staff – perhaps in a letter – about the vital importance of not only obeying the rules but being seen to obey them, and reminding everyone that people were angry and wanting to find fault.
In retrospect, that is an obvious thing to do, and I greatly regret it; and I only didn’t do it because I assumed it was understood.
I was complacent and thought I could charm people into sticking with me, when actually I should have taken more time with them and, if necessary, had a row.
I am afraid I was also sometimes arrogant. I should have realised that, as Prime Minister, you serve not just at the pleasure of the people but of your colleagues.
I don’t blame Rishi for prematurely wanting to be PM; in fact, I don’t blame any of them, really, for trying to turf me out. It’s just what Tory MPs do.
Rather than blaming my colleagues for kicking me out, I should actually thank the majority who stuck by me, and who believed in me, and what we were doing, and in many cases still do.
We had a great agenda for the country. We would have gone on in the next two and a half years to defeat inflation, as we had defeated Covid. By cutting taxes and simplifying regulations – thanks to Brexit – we would have been making Britain the greatest place in the world to live and invest and start a family.
It goes without saying that if we had all stuck together I have no doubt that we would have gone on to win in 2024, and a lot more of my friends would now have their seats.
How did it feel, then, getting assassinated? Well, I have never been shot (only in the stomach by my brother Leo, with an airgun) but I am told that sometimes you hardly feel the wound, at first.
Then after a while, like all big human rejections, it hurts a lot. Then you start to think about the future, and it gets better.
Dictionary corner
*Kai su, teknon: You too, child
