How history will record Boris Johnson’s premiership

Vaccine programmes? Taking a stand against Putin? No – he is the PM who brought Brexit upon us, writes John Rentoul

The memoirs and dairies will soon follow but the damage has been done (Getty)

It is astonishing how quickly the all-powerful leader is forgotten. At Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday I looked down from the press gallery and was surprised to see Boris Johnson was still there, being opposed by someone else from the distant past. After days of intense speculation about Penny Mordaunt, Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss, we seemed to have slipped into an eddy in the space-time continuum.

Suddenly, Johnson is history. He knows the drill. The diaries and memoirs will flood the market. Alastair Campbell published a Bowdlerised edition of his diaries (the rude bits about Gordon Brown taken out) the moment Tony Blair stood down. Professor Jon Davis and I started the “Blair Years” course at Queen Mary University of London a year later. Blair waited for Brown to clear the runway before he published his memoir, and his legacy has been fought over ever since.

Johnson has a book about Shakespeare to finish, and is expected to sign a deal for his memoir soon – the speculation is that he might get £3m for it, less than the £4.6m Blair earned (and gave away) for A Journey. On the evidence of his speeches and his book about Churchill, Johnson’s memoir will be a fitfully good read, but I doubt that it will change people’s minds much about his record in government.

It is the fate of even the most significant prime ministers to be remembered for one thing. Churchill won the war. Attlee created the welfare state. Heath took us into Europe. Thatcher smashed the unions. Blair took us into Iraq. Johnson took us out of Europe. At least Johnson will be remembered for something, but he had hoped to be a more consequential prime minister. It was only last year that his ambition to serve for 10 more years featured (twice) on the front page of The Times.

As it is, he ended up with a three-year term, just outlasting Brown, Theresa May and James Callaghan, but falling short of the median three-and-a-half years of all 55 prime ministers since Walpole, and lasting half as long as David Cameron, his (younger) Etonian rival.

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If Johnson is allowed more than “Brexit” in his paragraph in one of those short histories of the United Kingdom in decades to come, he would want to be remembered – he tried half-heartedly to draft the paragraph in his leaving speech outside No 10 – for the vaccine programme and for standing by Ukraine against Putin. But his handling of coronavirus was unexceptional by international standards, and while he might deserve some of the reflected credit for the vaccines, most of that lies with Kate Bingham, head of the task force.

Other than that, he will be remembered as a prime minister who lost his office because the voters thought he wouldn’t tell the truth. Given that most history will be written by people who think that Brexit was a bad idea, I expect him to rank a long way down the next survey of historians asked to rate British postwar prime ministers.

Yours,

John Rentoul

Chief political commentator