Voices: After a short, brutish premiership, what will Boris Johnson do next?

It was Boris Johnson’s great hero Winston Churchill who is often misquoted as saying “history will be kind to me, for I intend to write it”. It’s more likely he actually said: “For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.”

But you see the point, and it’s one that can hardly be lost on Johnson as he ponders his immediate future and his short, nasty and brutish premiership. It is why he is not going to conveniently melt away, go gently into that good night, and why he is going to be a constant problem for his successor. He will, in short, make life hellish for Liz Truss.

Soon Johnson will return to the more agreeable life of the media commentator, one with the prerogative of power without responsibility. He will exercise it to the full. Whatever Truss decides to do about taxes or migrants or the energy crisis it will never be enough. When the next wave of Covid arrives, he’ll criticise her whether she decides to lockdown or not.

And, of course, she’ll be attacked for not being tough enough on Europe and the union, even if she starts a trade war and Northern Ireland erupts into violence. Truss will be drowned with faint praise at best. Labour will eagerly seize on every freshly minted, barely concealed Johnson attack line against Truss.

Johnson will, above all, want to push his version of recent events. Churchill was speaking in the Commons in 1948, not long after the British people had unexpectedly (at least to him) turfed him out of office in favour of a socialist government he had warned would “need some sort of Gestapo” to implement its radical policies.

Churchill was acutely aware of his own place in history, and was determined to make sure that he wrote the first draft of the record of those turbulent years. With admirable speed he did so, even as he continued the work of leader of the opposition and then, once returned to office, as prime minister. In quick succession he produced six substantial volumes of war memoirs: The Gathering Storm (1948); Their Finest Hour (1949); The Grand Alliance (1950); Hinge of Fate (1950); Closing the Ring (1951); and Triumph and Tragedy (1953).

Although it’s fair to say that Johnson’s record in office hasn’t quite lived up to Churchill’s, he is also, evidently, just as keen as the old man was on self-justification. Johnson wants to protect what remains of his reputation, and burnish the myth that he was driven prematurely from office by treacherous political pygmies for no other reason than a combination of envy, ambition and blind panic.

Hence his remark at one of his earlier grand summer parties that he was the victim of “the greatest stitch-up since the Bayeux Tapestry”, a characteristically witty but self-serving line. It was also readily apparent in the not-quite-farewell “hasta la vista” speech he gave in Downing Street when he grudgingly announced his intention to resign – the references to the “herd” mentality of his MPs, and the “eccentric” decision by cabinet colleagues to denounce him.

It’s a classic version of the “stab-in-the-back” theory of history, most famously cultivated by German nationalists who insisted that Germany would have won the Great War had it not been for a cabal of socialists and Jews who conspired to ensure defeat in 1918, for various selfish and unpatriotic reasons of their own. It is the kind of myth that sustains people and nations in moments of humiliation, and you can see the attraction.

In Johnson’s case he has a band of fanatical loyalists who put his demise down to “snakes” such as Rishi Sunak (who is the first victim of the Johnson myth), “Remoaners” and, of course, the mainstream media, who spread lies and campaigned to oust him out of a sense of resentment over Brexit.

It’s all nonsense, designed to distract from the fact that his government collapsed underneath him to the extent that the whips could no longer find replacements for the 60-plus ministers who’d resigned in protest at his constant lies and failures. Things were so bad they had to appoint Peter Bone to the government. It was indeed like the last days of a defeated army whose generals had mutinied. Even Brexiteers such as David Davis and Steve Baker turned against him. In the end, even the praetorian guard of Jonathan Gullis and Lee Anderson called on him to go. He could no longer govern, and it was all down to his own arrogance and mistakes.

But it does not seem that way to his disciples, for whom the Cult of Boris was all they had. Even now there is a grassroots campaign run by Lord Cruddas, a wealthy Conservative donor, to get Johnson to rescind his resignation and to force the parliamentary party to end the leadership election. For them, and for Johnson himself, everything was going more or less fine until the panic set in, over silly things like Labour enjoying a double-digit lead in the polls, disastrous election results and the fact that the government had no evident sense of purpose beyond sloganeering. How foolish of them!

So the stab-in-the-back theory will persist for years and divide the party accordingly, just as the ousting of Margaret Thatcher in 1990 poisoned the atmosphere for decades after. It was she, after all, who also framed the story of her self-destruction as “treachery with a smile on its face” – undefeated in a general election and still sitting on a commanding Commons majority when the assassins moved in, her work unfinished. Sounds familiar.

This is the kind of myth now growing up around Johnson. And there will be no one more assiduous and able in cultivating that myth than Johnson himself. For, apart from anything else, he needs the money – educating a child at Eton and taking Carrie on lavish holidays ain’t cheap.

The lucrative newspaper columns, the speaking tours, the after-dinner gigs, the occasional intervention in the Commons (he’ll probably stay on for the salary and pension, beer money to him), and the forthcoming “bombshell” memoirs will all be used to promote his own version of history, and settle some scores. The sooner the memoirs come out the better, from the point of view of a publisher, and they should yield millions.

He will not wish to resist the temptation to get the book out in time for the Christmas trade, with a series of damaging (to his ex-colleagues) media interviews to accompany them. Plus, no doubt, a hereditary baronetcy for his father, ready for Boris in due course. Johnson has the profile and the ability to attract all the money and attention he craves in the coming years. It won’t all be good for his party.

The upshot of all this is that we have not heard that last of Johnson. He will be the ultimate backseat driver. The privileges committee inquiry into his lying to parliament is already becoming yet another proxy battlefield between his loyalists and enemies, inside his party as much as outside it. His press allies are already outperforming themselves to try and save him from sanction and a possible by-election. But even if he is eventually forced out of the Commons, Johnson will remain a dangerous force of nature. Thus, Johnson will remain a high-profile distraction, an embarrassment, and a reminder of how things went so sour for the Tories.

To keep up to speed with all the latest opinions and comment, sign up to our free weekly Voices Dispatches newsletter by clicking here

He won’t care. Johnson will provide an entertaining, if disingenuous, running commentary on the failings and contradictions of the Truss government, and he’ll be paid handsomely for it. Week in, week out, his successor will be told they’re doing it all wrong, and the public will be persuaded, he hopes, that things would be so much better if Boris was still in charge. He will hardly need to contrast his bombastic satirical style in the Commons with Truss’s leaden delivery. She will make Keir Starmer look like, well, Boris Johnson.

When Johnson goes to the Tory conference to have some fun on the fringe, the activists will be more interested in hearing from him than their new low-energy prime minister, who will need some considerable coaching to even get her up to Theresa May or John Major standards of oratory.

When she fluffs her lines on the campaign trail, they will wistfully remember Boris waving a kipper around on the steps of a bus to a delighted nation. When she stumbles in interviews they’ll recall how much better Johnson was at dissembling. She seems to be more gaffe-prone than Johnson, and no more truthful, something we weren’t expecting. It’s actually quite difficult to see where Truss will actually be an improvement over Johnson.

Truss will very quickly be seen by the Tories as an inferior version of what they had before, which is exactly how Johnson would like it to be. The trouble for her is that it’s true and Johnson will make sure, in his insidious, unhelpful, egocentric way, that the whole world knows it. How long before he tries to make a comeback?