One by one, the rivals to replace David Cameron were found out. Boris Johnson, a chancer who thinks a smattering of Latin fair substitute for strategy or principle. Michael Gove, a political sociopath with a manifesto that read like an undergraduate essay. Andrea Leadsom, the hard-right’s unelectable answer to Labour’s far-left, and unelectable, Jeremy Corbyn. Theresa May’s stroll into Downing Street offered some hope that Britain has not gone completely mad.
Mr Johnson has the Foreign Office as a consolation prize. The hope must be that he is not too much of an embarrassment. The adage has it that politics always ends in failure. In Mr Cameron’s case it was self-inflicted. He always preferred tactics to strategy. Add an inflated sense of his ability to get out of tight spots and an unhappy ending was inevitable. The big tactical swerve — a referendum offered in a vain attempt to appease Tory Europhobes — steered him, and the nation, into a brick wall.
There was not much dignity, I suppose, in the abruptness with which he was bundled out of Number 10 this week but then Brexit is the biggest political and foreign policy failure of postwar Britain. The 1956 Suez debacle was a small bump on the road by comparison. The prime minister who took Britain out of the EU and, quite possibly, broke the union of the United Kingdom as a consequence — not a happy epitaph.