For never was a story of more woe, than this of Boris Johnson’s second go

I am no great romantic. I do not read long saccharine novels about everlasting love. I do not watch comedies and dramas in which enemies, colleagues or friends slowly but surely realise that they were meant for each other. They’ve never appealed to me.

Still, even my icy heart struggled to steady itself over the weekend. I thought I could not be swayed by declarations of true and passionate devotion, but I was proved wrong. Take this tweet by former cabinet minister Geoffrey Cox: “A thoughtful, wise and statesmanlike decision by Boris Johnson to withdraw, reflecting the qualities that made so many of us originally put our faith in him three years ago. Putting the country and the party first.”

Doesn’t it make you melt? Hasn’t reading it made you regain some faith in the human character, and the potential for beauty our lives can hold? Aren’t you now daydreaming, chin resting in the palm of your hand, about one day experiencing something as pure and real as this?

Imagine – just imagine! – what it would feel like. You are on a lengthy holiday halfway across the world with your spouse when you really should be working instead. The person you thought should replace you in your job has crashed and burned so spectacularly that she has had no choice but to resign six weeks into the role.

You decide that a month-and-a-half is long enough for people to have forgotten that you left in chaos and disgrace, and that it is time for you to come back. You leave the glamorous jaunt someone else almost certainly paid for and get on a plane.

You never quite announce publicly that you want your own job back, but you wink and you nudge and your loyal foot soldiers rejoice at the news and begin doing what they do best. They go on the television and the radio and they tell the newspapers that you are returning. You haven’t gone public yet – but they have, oh they have.

They are telling anyone who will listen that you are the best person for the job, they are making excuses for your poor behaviour and they are brushing old allegations under the carpet. You are still saying nothing.

You wait until enough of them have debased themselves in your own good name to finally say something. You have changed your mind, it turns out; you no longer believe you could do your old job again. Sorry, no: of course you could, you have the numbers and you’d be tremendous, you just don’t want to any more. That’s right. It was your decision. No one else’s.

This should be the point at which your allies turn on you. You did, after all, make them look foolish for no obvious reason. You made them embarrass themselves in the national press, then you decided that anything but a coronation would be beneath you. They should resent you – and yet, and yet.

“I backed Boris for PM but I think he has done the right thing for the Country,” Lucy Allan tweeted. In her eyes, he can do no wrong. He was right to stand and he was right not to stand any more; there is no world in which Boris Johnson’s actions can be wrong.

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“I am disappointed that Boris Johnson has pulled out of the race to lead the Conservatives. Having secured the nominations necessary, he would have no doubt won in a ballot of party members,” Brendan Clarke-Smith posted. “However it is also important to command the support of the parliamentary party and he therefore took the dignified decision to put what is best for the country ahead of himself.”

You may bristle at the word “love” being used in this context but how else would you explain the presence of “Boris Johnson” and “dignified decision” in the same paragraph? There isn’t even a hint of irony in there, which is how you know that it has come straight from the heart.

I am no great romantic, but even my weary soul was comforted by such a display of genuine endearment. I hope that one day I will meet someone who feels about me the way these Conservative MPs feel about Boris Johnson. Perhaps it is too much to ask – to want to behave appallingly, again and again and again, and yet to still be cherished and trusted as if nothing had ever happened, but he has shown it is possible. God, I hope I’m next.