Boris Johnson's time is running out as 'people's toff' act unravels. Tories will soon turn against him – Brian Wilson

Here’s one for the Christmas quiz. What’s the connection between the political fate of Boris Johnson and Stornoway black pudding?

Tenuous, admittedly, but there is an answer. I have only met Johnson once. He was an undistinguished part-time MP, editing the Spectator and raking in cash on the post-prandial speaking circuit. I was doing my ministerial bit at some trade lunch and he was the cabaret.

Two impressions formed. First, he was very funny. It was a routine he had delivered a hundred times with a few tweaks but he was good at it. Second, there was nothing nice about him. Do the gig, take the money and get out, almost certainly not back to the House of Commons.

And that really sums him up. As Eddie Mair put it to him: “You’re a nasty piece of work, aren’t you?” Mair instanced three episodes in which Johnson had (a) falsified quotes; (b) lied to Michael Howard, for which he was sacked; and (c) appearing to agree to give a confidential address to a fraudster crony who wanted a man beaten up. All well documented.

Subsequently, Johnson became a disastrous Foreign Secretary, a treacherous underminer of Theresa May and a late convert of convenience to Brexit. All leading inexorably to the job he considered his entitlement, in which capacity he will become a particularly disreputable footnote in history.

There is one flaw in this analysis – which is that he has always got away with it and reinvented himself as the people’s toff, first as Mayor of London and, more recently, strolling into Downing Street on the back of votes from post-industrial England.

Will this be different? Will last year’s Christmas parties turn into the demise of Johnson as Prime Minister? On their own, probably not but my guess is that it is the beginning of the end and the Tories will soon turn ruthless. If Johnson had acknowledged the parties, deplored them and censured those involved, the story would probably have died.

Boris Johnson may discover the Conservative Party can be ruthless with those seen as a liability (Picture: Frank Augstein-WPA pool/Getty Images)

Instead, ministers were sent out to maintain a fiction that was bound to unravel, as it duly has. It is unusually damaging because it conflicts so directly with people’s personal suffering and anguish during lockdown, for which the occupants of Downing Street did not give a hoot. For they are the chosen ones. Crucially, it also critically undermines his government’s own public health measures, so some will die.

There are few more damaging perceptions in politics than of one law for the powerful and another for the hoi polloi. This is so obviously true on many levels that it should not come as a surprise. But people’s noses really have to be rubbed hard in it before they turn offence into votes, and that is exactly what has happened on this occasion.

In that context, there is nothing left to like about Boris the semi-buffoon who muddles through and comes up with pithy phrases. There is only a chancer surrounded by privileged acolytes from similar backgrounds who really believe that they were born to rule.

Allegra Stratton, the lachrymose resignee, is a product of that magic circle, a pal of Johnson’s current wife, awarded a sinecure which she never actually fulfilled, part of a smug media elite… and so it goes on. All round, a pretty horrible breed of people.

Whenever Johnson has found himself in a tight corner, his first instinct has been to lie. Prima facie, he has done so again over the question of who paid for his interior decorations. Having been “cleared” on the assurance he did not know, it now transpires he messaged this individual asking for more.

This has apparently outraged Lord Geidt, the adviser on ministerial standards, who “cleared” him. As it happens, Christopher Geidt has close family connections to Lewis and the Harris Tweed industry, and now owns the farm which previously belonged to Charles MacLeod, founder of the Stornoway black pudding dynasty.

It would be pleasing to think that the missive which finally blows Johnson, his lies and deceits away just might be written in this far corner of the Hebrides, as the Christmas bells sound.

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