If you concentrate too much on what's going on in Boris Johnson's bedroom, you'll forget what he's doing to the country

It is a long time indeed since it was thought that a man who can cheat on his wife can cheat on his country – I’m not sure it was ever true. But what's going on in government because of Johnson is serious stuff

Brexit will be Boris’s epitaph, not babies (PA)

Frankly, I don’t give a damn about Boris Johnson’s purple personal life. What he gets up to in the cabinet room is much more important than what he gets up to in the bedroom. But his personal life is today the focus of some media attention, the “political significance” of which is duly weighed and speculated upon, to much sucking of teeth and sonorously delivered verdicts.

Yes, Johnson’s allotted role is, it appears, to add to the gaiety of the nation. We can all have a laugh. Yet it is inappropriate. There is human misery involved. This is also, so far as I can tell, the story of a family being torn asunder, its privacy invaded once again by the press, with all the unhappiness that will add to the circumstances. Johnson’s family didn’t ask for this or give permission, yet they are caught up in it. All to give readers of The Sun, and supposedly the rest of us, a giggle at the plight of dear old Boris.

None of it matters. Long after Johnson has repaired his marriage, moved in with someone else or decided to take vows of silence and join a monastery (the least likely option, but you never know with our boy), Britain will be lumbered with a Brexit that nobody wants.

You may rest assured that he will, through his talent for journalism, telly appearances and his (no doubt) candid memoirs, make more than enough to live on. Others, effectively victims of his determination to himself before party and before country, will be chucked out of their jobs, and face family breakups of their own because of Brexit, for which he, above all, was responsible. There are many more family tragedies he will be accountable for, across the land.

Brexit will be Boris’s epitaph, not babies, and Brexit was designed principally to strengthen his hand in some long-distant Tory leadership election. He never intended Leave to prevail. Recall that he wrote those two articles – pro- and anti-Brexit – to help him make his mind up. Recall too that his column in The Daily Telegraph at the time advocated a Leave vote as a tactical device to get more concessions while staying in the EU.

When it all went right/wrong and Leave unexpectedly won, the Tory leadership campaign arrived early. He was ill-prepared for it, his party saw through him, his closest political ally, Michael Gove, broke the news that he wasn’t up to the job, and, thus, we were left with Theresa May, for want of better. The truth about Boris is that, for all his enthusiastic love-making, he reserves his most ardent affection for his own ego.

It is a long time indeed since it was thought that a man who can cheat on his wife can cheat on his country. I’m not sure it was ever true. Some premiers have had “colourful” private lives (say, David Lloyd George, John Major) and others relatively quiet ones (Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher). There is also a long list of other extremely talented figures who have had their careers cut short or derailed because of revelations, or fear of exposure, relating to their sex lives (Jack Profumo, Cecil Parkinson, Michael Portillo, Robin Cook). On balance, we’d have been better off if the British public hadn’t indulged in the periodic taste for moral panic.

What is more telling about Johnson is a much more general pattern of political selfishness, and carelessness, symbolised painfully in the plight of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a mother banged up in some filthy Iranian jail at the pleasure of the ayatollahs. When Johnson casually declared she was in Iran to train journalists he seemingly sealed her fate. It was a far more heinous crime than breaking up with his wife.

If you think Johnson is a modern day saviour of Brexit Britain, then you shouldn’t care about whatever he gets up to outside his political duties, but you should care about the fact that he tries to busk his way through politics.

If you think he is a an idiot masquerading as a brilliant man masquerading as an idiot, then you shouldn’t condemn any further, and need not for whatever he has done to his family. Imagine if it was Jeremy Corbyn, say, whose marriage was collapsing. Would you think much differently about his views on much more important issues – the future of his party, the antisemitism scandal, his economic policies, Brexit?

The tragedy of it all is that Johnson is being treated as a character in a reality TV show or soap opera, which denigrates politics. He is much more than that. Still, a potential leader of the country in some diabolical takeover of the Conservative Party by Leave fundamentalists.

What Johnson proposes to do next with his genitalia is nobody’s business than his own. What he proposes to do to the country concerns all of us, whether he is happily married or not.