As I’m writing this, Boris Johnson seems to be losing a cabinet minister every couple of hours, and there’s a finite number of them so at some point soon he’s likely to resign — or in Tory tradition, be knifed by a former trusted colleague. Ed West gets in an early political obituary for Boris:

However bad Boris Johnson’s career ends, it will surely be a better finale than that of his great-grandfather, the Turkish journalist, editor and liberal politician Ali Kemal. Almost exactly a century ago, following the trauma of defeat and the end of the Ottoman Empire, Kemal was attacked by a mob of soldiers, hanged from a tree, his head smashed in with cudgels before being beaten to death. I can’t imagine that the Tory backbenchers will go that far.

There is something charming and colourful about Johnson’s background, the mixture of Turkish, Russian, Jewish and even a Circassian slave just a few generations back (according to Boris himself, and if you can’t trust his version of events, who can you trust?). Just like David Cameron, he is also descended (via a mistress) from George II, the last king of England to fight in battle.

As Rod Liddle once put it, Boris is “the esoteric product of millennia of Eurasian toff miscegenation”, and that’s part of the attraction. It explains his ease with people of different backgrounds, and his liberal persona as London Mayor, which felt like the real him, more than his later populist act. It’s why the charges of racism never stuck; he has his faults, but racial prejudice isn’t one of them.

It’s often been noted that Boris was the latest incarnation of the slippery mountebank in politics while his opponents, both Keir Starmer and Jeremy Corbyn, came from that other British political archetype, the do-gooding Puritan. Disraeli and Gladstone were the Platonic examples of these contrast, but the division dates back further to the Civil War, and there could be no doubt which side Boris would have fought for at Marston Moor.

In fact he is almost more like an oriental potentate, a benevolent and cosmopolitan sultan, hampered by court intrigue and presiding over a crumbling empire. At the time of his ascension to Downing Street, Wikipedia listed Johnson’s de jure and de facto spouses, making Boris the first polygamous ruler of England since King Canute. Since coming to power his rule has been marked by unprecedented court drama, with quite obvious parallels to the reign of Henry VIII, with Carrie Symonds as Anne Boleyn and Dominic Cummings playing Thomas Cromwell.

And on his political legacy, such as it might be:

There’s a whole new generation out there who hate progressivism, who don’t want social norms dictated by dysfunctional, miserable people, and yet the Tories have nothing to offer them. Everywhere there is a sense of overwhelming gloom about the state of the country and its lack of future. Boris Johnson, one of the funniest men to inhabit Number 10, has left his audience with a feeling of dread and sadness, a lesson perhaps in allowing newspaper columnists too much of a say.

As Johnson’s rule nears it end, it feels like everything is collapsing, from the health service to the police, even a shared faith in institutions — and as a Conservative voter I’ve got no “buts” to give in response, except perhaps that Corbyn would have been worse.

In clear expectation of the smash, Mark Steyn reposted what he wrote when Boris took possession of Number 10 Downing Street:

Boris Johnson, it seems, is determined to hang on. Tonight I chanced to see, on the one hand, his father, apparently breezy and unperturbed. On the other hand, a senior Tory backbencher told me that, were another confidence vote to be held, Boris would win the support of fewer than sixty Conservative MPs, with over three hundred voting against him.

I don’t really have anything new to say about this failed prime minister because, in the third of a century since I first met him, he has been, in the turbulence of a constantly changing world, eternally unchanging. Here is what I wrote about him upon the occasion of him taking office as PM:

Is he a nice person? Well, he’s left an awful lot of human wreckage in his wake. Some of the women he’s used and discarded seem to me, without naming names, to be sad and profoundly damaged from their brief intersection with his wandering zipper. His latest squeeze seems likely to be moving into Number Ten without benefit of clergy — a first for the Tories and a sign of how desperate they are after years of letting all the sober, serious, earnest types turn their party into a laughingstock.

What does he believe in? Other than himself, not terribly much. About a decade ago, I was in London for a couple of days and had lunch with him and Stuart Reid at a favorite Italian restaurant. Stuart was the deputy editor who did all the hard grind at the Speccie, while Boris was the great fizzing impresario fronting the operation — a business model he transferred successfully into his mayoral regime, and will no doubt be trying again in Downing Street. He was going on the BBC’s Question Time that night and was worried that he didn’t have anything sufficiently arresting to say, so asked if I had any tips. I gave him a few thoughts on the passing scene, and he considered them not in terms of his own public-policy positions (if any) but in terms of attitudinal cachet. Finally, I said, “Why don’t you really stir them up and put in a word for social conservatism?”

“You mean abortion and all that? Oh, God …” he sighed, and ordered dessert.

If that seems to be (for self-interested reasons) his most firmly drawn red line, don’t nevertheless overstate his ideological flexibility. Like Boris, Theresa May schemed and maneuvered for decades to reach the top spot … and, by the time she pulled it off, she’d spent so much time and effort on the scheming and maneuvering that she had no idea of what to do once she got there. Boris is likewise invested in himself, but, having reached the finial of Disraeli’s greasy pole, he doesn’t intend to be just the latest seat-filler. Mrs May wanted to be prime minister; Johnson wants to be a great and consequential prime minister.

So much for that. That was July 2019. Six weeks later came the first of what would become an avalanche of ministerial resignations …