Susan Scott, from Ampthill in the Mid Bedfordshire constituency of Nadine Dorries, said Boris Johnson ‘told us to follow the rules and then broke them’. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer After reading the first volume of Margaret Thatchers biography, I thought I'd read a more modern book concerning a Prime Minister. I must admit I got this book purely on the basis that it was about Boris Johnson. Yes, it's not a book that is from his better days but it is a necessary read. Preaching the Johnson creed to the end, Dorries said: “Any Conservative MP who would vote for this report is fundamentally not a Conservative and will be held to account by members and the public. Deselections may follow. It’s serious. MPs will now have to show this committee what real justice looks like and how it’s done.” This book points to the main reasons why Boris fell before he should have. There seems to be a finality to his tenure as soon as the book starts. I did find it very informative and it does give a good timeline of the scandals that but Boris. I think all the swearing could have been toned down though. Yes people swear but blimey...

An interesting explanation for Johnson’s popularity with the Conservative party’s grassroots – those 170,000 mostly elderly people who nowadays elect our leaders – is that Johnson brought them “freedom from the reign of virtue”. They were “grateful” for the “frivolous” and the “fantastical” or, as Gimson once ventured to me on the radio, they “ wanted to be lied to”. In this strange world, virtue and the virtuous lurk as constant enemies, and any notion of public life as a bastion of morality is dismissed as dull and “goody-goody”, or even sadistic. Where once swivel-eyed schoolmasters beat their pupils to feel virtuous, Gimson recalls, perhaps from his own experience, now “such punitive urges” can be indulged by denouncing Johnson. Connected to this is the notion that Johnson 'got the big calls right'. He constantly repeated this phrase, but did anyone actually buy it? His government had done well on the vaccine rollout and on responding to the Ukraine war, but (especially with the vaccines) it was pretty clear what needed to be done, and it was implementation that mattered rather than decision-making.During the countless internal debates about pandemic policy that followed, the pair were often of similar mind. But as the crisis eased with the mass rollout of vaccines in early to mid-2021, the focus turned to how to manage the post-pandemic economy. Johnson, with his populist instinct, was a big spender, having vowed to end austerity and seeing pound signs as the easy way out of many political binds. Sunak had a firmer ideological commitment to traditional low-spend, low-debt and ideally low-tax Tory economics, seeing fiscal prudence as the way forward. The Prime Minister had just been told that the second most important figure in his government had quit. Rishi Sunak was out – and without giving his boss any warning. No meeting was requested by the Chancellor to explain his reasons, as had been the case with Sajid Javid, the departing Health Secretary, earlier that day, 5 July 2022. There was no conversation over the phone; not even a text. It fell to the Number 10 political secretary to tell his boss a resignation letter was on the way. Johnson was raging. ‘Who the f--k does he think he is?’ the public nature of Sunak’s willingness to hold Boris at arm’s length was different from that of other future rivals Brendan Clarke-Smith, a Johnson loyalist elected in his 2019 landslide as MP for Bassetlaw, tweeted that he was “appalled at what I have read and the spiteful, vindictive and overreaching conclusions of the report”.

When did Sunak start thinking about the Tory leadership? And when did he start acting on that thought? Perhaps it is an unfair question. It is not just Partygate and Johnson’s clashes with the privileges committee that have damaged the former PM’s reputation in the minds of MPs. So too has his resignation honours list, in which he rewarded a host of allies and acolytes, many of whom helped him during the scandals over Covid rule-breaking events at No 10. Sunak and his allies played a part in Johnson’s downfall, but that should not be mistaken for swallowing the narrative – pushed by Team Boris – that his premiership only ended because of Sunak That may be part of the story. But the alleged “bourgeoisification” of the red wall does not explain why, when Ronnie Campbell and his wife went canvassing in Blyth in 2019, “there were more Labour votes in the posh areas than there were in the council estates”. The true trauma of December 2019 was that Labour lost its emotional rapport with the less well-off. And throughout his road trip, Payne encounters again and again the desire for a restoration of what Phil Wilson – defeated in Tony Blair’s former seat of Sedgefield – describes as “communality”. This surely, rather than aspirational individualism, drove the Brexit revolt among the working class; a desire that places should be able to take charge of their collective destinies again. As Payne points out, Boris Johnson made sure that the Conservative party reaped the electoral rewards of the insurgency.

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He could stay in office for some time. The Conservative Party is considered ruthless when it comes to disposing of its leaders, but the next general election is still almost three years away. Theresa May, Johnson’s predecessor, lost her political authority many months before she announced her resignation, in the spring of 2019. Most recently, the political gossip was that Johnson might be given a last chance to redeem himself, at a set of local elections in May. Rishi Sunak, Johnson’s chancellor—and possible successor—was noticeably absent when the Prime Minister apologized in the Commons. Like other prominent Tories, Sunak has said that a civil-service investigation of the Downing Street parties must be allowed to run its course. The investigators are expected to report by the end of the week. A source close to Johnson said the former prime minister stood by all those he had rewarded with an honour, believing they were “meritorious and will contribute to public service”. Many existing peers have their doubts and worry that his appointments have further damaged the reputation of the second chamber. We did change the course of international opinion," believed one insider. A former cabinet minister argued that only Boris could've pulled it off: "He took on the blob" of policy orthodoxy "and won, it was a shame he could not do it on other matters, too." The Fall of Boris Johnson is the explosive inside account of how a prime minister lost his hold on power. From Sebastian Payne, former Financial Times Whitehall editor and author of Broken Heartlands. Others considered Johnson had been treated somewhat harshly. Elaine Lee, 66, a lifelong Conservative voter from Ampthill, said: “He was up against it as prime minister with Covid and I think he did a good job. I think they have been out to get him. I like him.”

His long-term adviser and later lead Brexit negotiator, David Frost, has his own take: ‘I think his big problem as PM was that he wasn’t clear enough on what he thought himself about problems. Sometimes no decision was really final.

His latest (but not necessarily final) tome is almost as elegantly written as its predecessors, even if his hero’s forced resignation must have messed with the publishing schedule. If Johnson had been a historical figure, a cavalier whose antics did no harm to the people around him, I would have enjoyed reading this homage almost as much as Gimson seems to have enjoyed writing it. Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial?