Bojo’s ‘Boriswave’ tantrum shows how unfit he was for No 10

A little over three years after leaving Downing Street, the former prime minister’s recent media appearances reveal a man urgently trying to correct the record. It’s the same old story, says Sean O’Grady – all deflection, no reflection

Boris Johnson was always a shameless figure – part of his perverse charm, you might say.

Still, to this day, he refuses to take responsibility for the damage he, above all others, has done to this country – campaigning for a Brexit he likely never really believed in, and then implementing it as prime minister in such a roughshod manner as to leave this country hamstrung. I imagine the fact that the subsequent collapse in inward investment and costly trade restrictions hastened the Tories to their landslide defeat last year, and possible extinction, is not a matter he chooses to dwell on as he potters around his Oxfordshire moated mansion.

The former prime minister defended his political actions in a podcast appearance (AP)

Yet you can sense some lingering dissatisfaction. An appearance on The Telegraph’s Daily T podcast this week proved he is as unwilling to take responsibility for his actions as ever he was – a tendency that dates back, according to his biographers, at least to his time at Eton, where he also learned how to dissemble. Specifically, not least because of the fuss made about it by Nigel Farage, he has had to confront the “Boriswave” – 2.6 million immigrants who came into the country entirely legally under his administration.

As ever, the excuses are ready to hand, just as they were while he was trying to run the country. There were the refugees from Ukraine and Hong Kong (they don’t count, he implies). During Covid, immigration was negligible, so it was bound to bounce back, wasn’t it? The EU students came back to finish their courses. The Home Office didn’t have any real-time figures, so “we were flying blind”.

Johnson managed to ‘get Brexit done’ while he was in office – but with little plan for what came after (Getty)

In his version of events, he – Boris – had taken back control, and if his successors had wanted to have a zero-migration policy, then that was the legacy he left them – outside the strictures of the EU’s freedom of movement for workers’ rules. It only got worse after he’d been thrown out of office.

In other words, blame someone else. It’s Sunak’s fault for losing his grip and his nerve and calling the election last July too soon for the Rwanda plan to be in operation, and for failing to reduce the numbers sooner. Putin and the Chinese created a refugee crisis. The civil service didn’t have the information. Covid created labour shortages we had to fill. More than anything, he heavily hints, it’s down to those useless Conservative MPs who forced Johnson out back in July 2022, when they suffered what he calls “a nervous breakdown”. Nothing to do, therefore, with Partygate, and him lying to parliament.

Did he do anything about that as mayor or as prime minister? A single initiative? A speech? As much as a casual pointed quip? We got the Boriswave instead – the very opposite of what “take back control” implied.

That perceived betrayal, on the part of many, has given rise to a good deal of the tensions we’ve witnessed in recent years. However, like David Cameron, Johnson has, in that memorable phrase of Danny Dyer’s, got his trotters up somewhere nice, far away from such problems.

Of course, Johnson is still wrong about everything, with the honourable exception of Ukraine. The Rwanda plan would never have “fixed the small boats thing” because Rwanda was not a safe country under international law, and the package on the table was too small to act as a deterrent.

As far as I can tell, the Boriswave is his to own and his alone, because it was he who panicked as Brexit (his creation) wreaked economic havoc, and he had to give up on border controls on an unprecedented scale. Yet the irony is lost on him. He could have capped the numbers. He could have planned for what would inevitably follow Brexit when it was implemented.

He could have behaved himself during Covid, and then not needed to deliberately mislead the Commons. He could have chosen not to indulge sleazy allies. He could have not borrowed so much money to fund repeated lockdowns that the national debt spiralled up towards wartime levels. He blames the Labour government for the debt crisis.

Indeed, he is at his very worst when he attacks Labour. He’s pointlessly personal, recycling old lines about Keir Starmer being a “bollard” and a “snoozefest”, and attacks him for his relationship with China, although he didn’t do much about their espionage while he was PM, and resisted calling them a threat or an enemy of Britain. At one point, asked about Starmer’s great failing, he immediately replies that it is his – Starmer’s – willingness to take freebies. This from the man who didn’t even pay for his own wallpaper or – ever the romantic – his honeymoon with Carrie. (“It was all declared.”) Chutzpah, thy name is Johnson! Well, he did lie to the Queen.

Whether he’s persuaded himself that he was a brilliant success whose only “crime” was to be given a birthday cake (which he never took a bite of), or whether it’s all another charade from a man who knows he squandered his talents and the opportunities they presented, we will never know. I imagine he doesn’t know himself.

For Boris John is a man who seemingly never holds a mirror up to his own behaviour, and a man who cannot honestly examine himself and his record with equanimity. He is not a man who should be allowed anywhere near power again. Thanks to the Boriswave, it’s unlikely he’ll get that chance. As someone once said: them’s the breaks.