There was, beforehand, a limp kind of excitement. It felt closely held, protected. Johnson appealed to people who wanted to live through him. Too scared to drive supercars or flirt with strangers or prorogue parliament, they chose someone who would. They still speak fondly of him, because he is still the only politician they have ever liked, and I can’t think of a better measure of our failure. They still talk about his “charisma” because they don’t know him. They just think they do. He has what Kemi Badenoch’s supporters call an ability to “cut through” in the age of attention deficit disorder: in the leadership election she will depend on it. They “hope he will be back” but he “probably won’t be because MPs don’t like him”. The current Tory Party is, “individualist” and “too weakly led”. “I don’t think anyone led the party like he did.”

His entrance is downbeat. He shuffles in, hair shining and dishevelled. He looks, for an instant, mock terrified, and then does the nodding dog with his head. The downbeat entrance is deliberate: his small penance. He can’t say it in words because he doesn’t really feel it. Unleashed is not an apology for how he promised hope and set it on fire, nor is it a fair assessment of what he really unleashed, which is a more toxic populism that even he gave us. It is propaganda, written in the fake intimate style of the lifestyle columnist. I searched in the book for passages on his failure, and how he felt about it. They aren’t there.

He says he’s sorry he’s late, but it’s not his fault this time: “I understand everyone was being frisked for handguns”. They laugh: that’s not their England. The interviewer offers a trivial question first, for the fans. It’s about the zipwire at the London Olympics 2012, when he dangled with a Union Flag: the Johnson stunt by which all others are judged. “Although I was held to global ridicule,” he says, “it had exactly the effect I wanted: not for the first time!” The next day, he says, Britain “began to win medals”. This is Johnson the magician who expresses, entirely unconsciously, a universal boredom with conventional politics. It is also Johnson the Fisher King. His wounds mirror ours — that is his peculiar power — but neither are healed.

He is asked about the Brexit bus and its promise of £350 million a week for the NHS. “It’s the bus of truth!” he cries, even now. This is not a place to analyse the rotting political discourse, and what part he may have played in it. Such agonies are for Leftists. “It’s a significant sum,” he says, “people were right to ask what they were getting for it.” He adds, “Being unleashed from the EU gave us the freedom to do things differently,” and if they weren’t better, that is not his fault. Brexit saved lives during pandemic, he says. She asks about other “concrete dividends”. He looks nervous, cites giving lethal weaponry to Ukraine, makes a joke about William Hague’s baldness, and I remember that there are at least five different people inside him.

Johnson is happiest on diversions: Nicola Sturgeon, for instance. “Princess Twinkle-toes investigated by the fuzz for possession of a campervan. The Nationalist dog barked while the campervan moved on”.  It’s a mash-up of metaphor and slang: and it’s meaningless. His serious point, when he gets there, is this: Reform polled low when he was prime minister. He kept us “bubble-gummed together”. But he didn’t.  Rather, he opened the doors to them.

He is asked about his Covid. “A lot of people say I was shamming,” he says. But he was ill, he insists. And he realised, “I’ve done some pretty worthwhile things. I need to keep going. I thought I had a lot to live for and I had a country to look after”. Now I think: if he’s telling us he loves us, he wants to come back. He’s waiting for the party to fall so low they take him back.

Suggested reading

Boris Johnson's squandered chance

By Travis Aaroe

The audience is restless. It wants Johnson the avatar of joy, and he’s talking about the nearness of Death, and defending his government. “We acted as vigilantly as we could, given what we knew”. He thinks Covid-19 came from a laboratory: “Do you really believe that this was the result of the love that flowered accidentally between a small slice of pangolin and a bat?” He doesn’t despair about a Trump presidency, even if he hated the Capitol riots: “He is not going to spend the first few months of his presidency trying to make the Soviet Union great again”. He says this last part in an accent thieved from Paint Your Wagon.

But then he reveals something. Being mayor of London was “great” because “I was a monarch”. And that’s it. Johnson was always more suited to absolute monarchy than parliamentary democracy, and, like an absolute monarch, he doesn’t think he did anything wrong, because an absolute monarch is the law. To Tory voters who hated him because he betrayed them, and, worse, made them betray themselves, he offers nothing. To the Tory romanticism he destroyed while pretending to share it he says nothing. The wine in the suitcase was a Downing Street ritual that long preceded him. His defenestration was all, “a bit of a put-up job”.  His advice to the audience – a response audience question, they still think he has something to offer, is: “there’s no earthly point in being too self-deprecating”. Is that what he thinks he was?

At Cheltenham, Johnson offers us, as ever, a mirror, because that is what he is. He mirrored our hope. Now he mirrors our confusion. The Tory Party is in ruins — he essentially endorsed Truss, his closest allies voted for her — and it had nothing to do with him. He doesn’t talk about the leadership contest. He talks about himself.

At the end, there are no cheers, as if he has disappointed them, but the disappointment should be with themselves. Johnson was our first modern populist politician and his danger was always in his precedent: now there will be other, less charming populists walking the paths he made. His damage to the polity was incalculable — the prime minister who lied to parliament — and they don’t even mind. Nor, it seems, does he. Out they go, holding copies of Unleashed. It wasn’t what we — or even he — thought it would be. It is something infinitely sadder, and that, of his legacies, will endure.

Like Mildred, the stubborn old-girl character played by Frances McDormand in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri seeking restitution for her murdered daughter, I sometimes have problems with compliance. And I do think it’s a generation thing. Mine is the generation which came to young adulthood in the 1960s when the contrarian reflex was to defy authority, rather than succumb to it. Authority can often turn authoritarian. Give me the information, and I’ll make up my own mind about my conduct, thanks very much.

Contemporaries — some a little younger, some slightly more senior — seem inclined to react to all the rules and regs with a more laid-back manner than younger folk. Madeleine Grant says she cannot get her 79-year-old father to take the warnings seriously. Peter Hitchens in the Mail on Sunday claims that the alarm about the spread of the virus is over-stated, and he doesn’t need to be told when to wash his hands, or whether there are germs on doorknobs. Here in coastal Kent, my friends and peers display a blithely stoical attitude. “If my number’s on the bullet, it’s on the bullet,” laughs Josephine, seventyish. “I feel sure I’m going to get it,” chuckles Colin, born, like me in 1944, and just off to join pals for a night-time pub session. “Face the music and carry on!”

Suggested reading

Will coronavirus change the world?

By Ed West

Many of the Irish — who are implementing much more draconian measures, closing down the pubs by diktat — have been complaining on Twitter that the Brits allowed Cheltenham to go ahead. Disgraceful! I asked a horsey friend (78) if he thought it should have been cancelled – 60,000 people huddled together for the legendary festival. “No!” he chortled. “I had three winners!”

No, I know I shouldn’t take a cavalier attitude to the coronavirus — and I promise my family that I won’t. I am diligently obeying all the rules. I am practicing “social distancing”. I am washing my hands on the hour every hour. I am monitoring my health for coughs or fevers — as it happens I do have a slight chest infection, picked up from an Easyjet flight from Belfast (airplanes are full of germs). Altogether, I am acting responsibly — to protect others, as we are told to do, as much as myself. And yet I am still not really aligned with some of the general attitudes around the Covid-19 alarm.

I know my dear family are worried since the “elderly” (please call us “old”, rather than use twee euphemisms) are more vulnerable; and because those of us prone to respiratory problems are particularly in the firing line. But whatever became of the virtues of fortitude and courage? In my convent schooldays, we were taught that in life it is really important to be brave. We were regaled with stories of heroic nuns who willingly embraced lepers — St Catherine of Siena drank a cupful of leper’s pus just to show that she didn’t entertain fear. If we were to be tortured to death for our faith, we should, like Joan of Arc, accept it with a soldier’s valour.

But safety, caution and aversion of all risk are now prized more greatly than these stoical values.

It need hardly be pointed out too indelicately that the graphs and statistics clearly indicate — in Italy, for example — that the greatest proportion of deaths occur among those over 80. The next greatest number are in my own demographic — in their seventies. I certainly think that oldies have just as much entitlement to medical care as anyone else, and speculation about leaving them to their fate is harsh. But facing death in your seventies and eighties is also accepting that nature eventually takes its course. No, I don’t want to pop my clogs quite yet, but I do want to have the fortitude to recognise that at our age, we are moving towards the departure lounge.

Suggested reading

Farewell free trade, and good riddance

By David Goodhart

I actually don’t mind being old: I can put up with the aches and pains: I don’t share the dislike that some women have of being “invisible”: and I thoroughly concur with the Greek philosopher who said that being freed from sexual desire is like being unchained from a maniac. The one thing I do dislike — even dread — is being patronised. I hate people asking me “Are you all right, dearie?” Or cautioning: “Watch the step, my lovely.” To the prudent counsel, “take care”, my instinctive reaction is to reach for Nietzsche’s “Live dangerously!”

And I know that all sorts of kind and good people are going to be asking me “Can you manage, dear?”, “Are you very lonely?”. I’m just going to have to be a well-behaved old gal, comply, and be grateful.

My philosophy of old age is to do as much as you can for as long as you can, and I fear that the Covid-19 house arrest will put a halt to my gallop, as the Irish say. I already look wistfully at our hi-speed trains, departing on the hour for St Pancras International. Will I ever see the inside of the London Library again? From the beach at Deal, we can glimpse the white cliffs of Calais and the twinkling lights of France: will I ever again board that ferry across the Channel? Will I never again walk by Galway Bay?

Food and loo rolls – who cares? It’s being deprived of the stimulus of life itself that’s so dismaying.