‘Kamikaze’ Boris sets his sights on Sunak revenge

Boris Johnson, like every other tedious narcissist you have met, knows no other way of being than to make everything about him.

He wrote a biography of Churchill, yet managed to make it a biography of Boris Johnson. He has been paid a huge advance to write a biography of Shakespeare, and is regularly mocked for still not having submitted it, more than half a decade beyond the deadline.

Your entry-level pisstake is that this is because he is lazy or disorganised, though neither of these criticisms is especially true. The real answer is that, be it consciously or subconsciously, he has been busy accumulating what he imagines will be the required life experience to make the Shakespeare book, also, a book about himself.

And it is self-evidently true that he hopes that what is surely set to be one of the longer books of the last few years, the eventual report of the Covid inquiry, will also be a book about Boris Johnson.

The toing and froing over the disclosure and non-disclosure to Baroness Hallett’s inquiry of ministerial WhatsApp messages is profoundly tedious.

My always-right colleague John Rentoul was even more right than usual when he wrote last week that the Covid inquiry will be a colossal waste of time and money if it is done, or merely even appears to be being done, solely to heap vengeance upon those who have already had their verdict delivered on them. In Johnson’s case, this means being removed from office – a profound humiliation.

But what is happening currently is even worse. Everyone and everything touched by Johnson finds itself debased or degraded in some way. It is shocking, but not surprising, that this should now include a judge-led inquiry into the deaths of more than 100,000 people.

There are two parts to the tale. In the first, Johnson was angry that his prime-ministerial diary, containing details of possible law-breaking parties at Chequers, had been passed to the police – which is not surprising, as that would have difficult consequences for him and him alone. In the second, we now learn that he’s gladly submitted his personal WhatsApp messages from the pandemic, in full, to the inquiry, and this is because he will know that whatever negative consequences it might have for him, it will be far worse for those who are still in the government, chiefly Rishi Sunak.

Johnson clearly has no problem with launching kamikaze attacks on Sunak – not least because, to stretch the analogy beyond its breaking point, he himself is already, in a sense, dead. There is no aspect of politics or public life that is any more than just a game for Johnson, and taking Sunak down with him would certainly count as a victory.

Naturally, there is legal advice doing the rounds that it wouldn’t necessarily be good for WhatsApp messages between cabinet colleagues, sent with a vague assumption (though surely not a complete expectation) of privacy, to become public and thus jeopardise cabinet confidentiality.

But if the messages do become public, the drearily thrilling soap opera of who said what to whom, about whom, and when, pored over for a few days, will confer one key lesson: never trust or even associate yourself in any way with Boris Johnson, because the outcome is always the same.

The faux candour of the last 24 hours carries the nauseating whiff that is the essence of the man. It’s all bulls***. It’s always all been bulls***, it’s just a case of whose turn it is next to clean it up. And if Sunak’s evasive, repetitive, non-answer interviews on the subject appear to show a man who is worried that he hasn’t had his turn yet, then frankly, he’s right to be worried.