'The good ship Sajid Javid’s Integrity left port some time ago' - Euan McColm

THEY wrote in sorrow about the loss of integrity and the collapse of standards. They demanded decency and honesty.

Chris Pincher. Boris Johnson was briefed "in person" about an investigation into the conduct of Pincher when he was a Foreign Office minister, the former permanent secretary at the Foreign Office has said.

Letter after letter from resigning members of Boris Johnson’s government dripped with weary disappointment over the Prime Minister’s behaviour; each writer yearned for something better.

Former Health Secretary Sajid Javid went a step further than a letter, telling the Prime Minister to the back of his head during a resignation statement to the House of Commons that serving under him had meant “treading the tightrope between loyalty and integrity”. This, said Javid, had become an impossible task.

“I will never,” he said, “Risk losing my integrity.”

Sajid Javid delivers a personal statement to the House of Commons, Westminster, following his resignation from the cabinet on Tuesday. Photograph: UK Parliament/Jessica Taylor

I have grave news for the former cabinet minister. The good ship Sajid Javid’s Integrity left port some time ago and now lies, unsalvageable, on the ocean floor.

Neither Javid nor any of the government ministers and bag carriers who - finally - found it within themselves to end the Johnson premiership last week has any right to talk of integrity.

None of those men and women gave a good Goddamn about integrity when Johnson was fined over lockdown breaking parties. Nor were they troubled by thoughts about standards when the Prime Minister repeatedly lied to the country about what had gone on in Downing Street while the rest of us obeyed the law.

None of the MPs who deserted Johnson last week had ever expressed a word of concern about Johnson, despite his long record of appalling behaviour from being sacked as a newspaper reporter for fabricating quotes to being caught on tape discussing providing a friend with a journalist’s address so that he could be beaten up.

None of them cared about the racism and homophobia that peppered Johnson’s journalism. None of them cared about the revelation of grants given to his lover, Jennifer Arcuri, while he was Mayor of London.

There was no long dark night of the soul for any of the resigners when Johnson tried to illegally prorogue parliament. His attempt to change the rules on standards to save a buddy’s neck give them no pause for thought.

Every one of those who knifed the PM did so not because of some great epiphany about the need for at least some level of decency in public life but in order to save their own skins. The case of Chris Pincher - promoted into the Tory whips office after Johnson had been briefed on his record of sexual harassment - was the final straw (though the camel has been in agonising pain for months) for MPs who have frequently shown themselves perfectly willing to defend the indefensible when it comes to Johnson. Each of them has been happy to debase themselves in service of a man whose unfitness for the office of Prime Minister was well established many years before he realised his ambition of moving into Number 10.

Boris Johnson, with his pathological inability to tell the truth, has debased our politics. At very turn, he has acted only with self-interest at heart. His great “achievement” - Brexit - is not some testament to his talents but the collateral damage caused by one man’s ambition.

Dishonesty is in the very bones of Johnson. This is a man, after all, who saw political capital in leading a campaign for a policy in which he didn’t believe.

The United Kingdom is not weakened and paying the heavy price for Brexit because Johnson truly believed departure from the European Union was in the national interest. Rather, he knew that the opposite was true but saw leadership of a frequently xenophobic anti-EU campaign as providing the surest route to the premiership.

Johnson - who affected liberal values when campaigning to become London Mayor - pandered to the worst instincts of the political right during the 2016 referendum campaign. On becoming Prime Minister in 2019, he continued to peddle cheap right-wing populism.

Boris Johnson believes in nothing so much as the greatness of Boris Johnson. He has been supported in this fantasy for decades by enablers who should have known better; by editors who should have sacked him; by party leaders who should have deselected him; by MPs who should never have supported his candidacy to become Prime Minister.

Every single one of those who turned on Johnson cannot wash away their complicity in the damage he has wrought. They said nothing while he tore up the political rules in favour of allowing him to govern without accountability.

They said nothing because they calculated it was in their personal interests to remain loyal to Boris Johnson. His dishonesty and incompetence were “priced in” to their support for him. And so long as he kept winning, they saw a bargain.

Even after bringing down Johnson, those who turned on him cannot be depended upon to continue to do what is necessary. That Johnson - a man removed by his colleagues because of a collapse in public trust in him - continues to serve as Prime Minister is a farce.

One assumes Johnson wishes to remain in position until a new Conservative leader is appointed in September in order that he doesn’t serve as Prime Minister for a shorter period than Theresa May, the woman he toppled in order to take the Tory leadership.

Government ministers shouldn’t be pandering to the Johnson ego. Every day he remains in office is an affront to an electorate that was lied to, again and again and again.

And if they won’t force him out and have his deputy, Dominic Raab, or some other cabinet minister hold the fort because it would be the morally correct thing to do, perhaps the risk that every day Johnson remains in Downing Street becomes another day that the Tories lose support might focus their minds.

We shouldn’t be surprised by the failure of Boris Johnson’s cabinet ministers to do the right thing. They might talk about integrity but they don’t know the meaning of the word.