For all his bluster, Boris’s premiership has the lottery ticket holder’s chance of a happy ending

The Queen Elizabeth II Centre didn’t exist when I was at school nearby. In the earliest days of the Thatcher imperium, all that stood on the undeveloped ground opposite Westminster Abbey was a red phone box, and a kiosk serving weak tea, “coffee” to test the elasticity of the Trades Descriptions Act, obscure brands of fizzy drinks, and sweets.

A friend and I nipped to it one day for Mars bars, and were surprised not to find its previously omnipresent proprietor, a splenetic chap known to himself and everyone else as Greasy Joe, at his post. Where, we asked his replacement, was our nakedly ungenial host?

“Greasy Joe cannot be here today,” we were told. “He’s in court. He’s been had up for w****** in the telephone box.”

Had you told me then that an event on that site would one day invest the misdemeanour with a dignity it may not strictly deserve, I’d have enquired after the whereabouts of your carer.

Yet 40 years later, Boris Johnson’s coronation in the building on that site seemed an act of self-abuse to make Joe’s look elegant by comparison.

The Conservative membership chose to pleasure itself in public view by plumping for the shambolic svengali with the Satnav to their G-spot. For them, as for him, the post-petit mort melancholy cannot be far behind.

It surely won’t be many weeks before they realise their mistake, and his accusations of Brexit treachery boomerang towards him.

In his flawlessly vapid valedictory, Johnson dismissed the idea that no incoming peacetime PM has been greeted by such a lethal welcoming party of insoluble problems.

No shock there. That observation falls under a header with which Johnson so famously struggles. It is the plain and simple truth.

As Marvel’s Avengers saga approached its endgame, Benedict Cumberbatch’s Dr Strange nipped into the future to calculate that there were 14,000,000 possible ways to go - and precisely one would bring the desired result.

This is loosely where Johnson is today. Massage the facts as fervently as he likes, he has the lottery ticket holder’s chance of a happy ending.

Inserted into a labyrinth with no discernible exit, tasked with cooling a civil war he brought to the boil himself, he is pincered between the implacable crazies of the ERG and the refuseniks led by David Gauke, Rory Stewart and Philip Hammond.

If he offends the former by flirting with Brexit compromise, however minuscule, they will dust off the Chamberlain metaphors, anathematise him as an appeaser, and destroy him as they did Theresa May.

If he provokes the latter by clinging to the do or die tale, as inspired by the Light Brigade, it will take only five of six (assuming a few Labour Brexiters wish to support whatever is dignified as “his Brexit strategy”) to bring down his government.

If he believes the default optimistic braying will square that circle, let alone seduce the EU27, he will be disabused soon enough.

But does he believe it? Does he believe anything, other than in his God-given entitlement to occupy centre stage? He spent half a century dreaming about this moment, and apparently less than half an hour thinking about what to do with it.

If ever a human being devoted a life to rescuing the saying “it is better to travel than to arrive” from sustained assault by Michael O’Leary, it is him. He has meandered through two careers tailored to exhibitionism for so long that he cannot tell them apart.

“Journalists should never be let anywhere near politics,” someone quoted at me the other day. “They think writing something means it’s actually happened.” Johnson cannot write his way out of this.

The only silver lining about this mass collective act of Tory onanism is that Johnson’s Downing Street memoir will be readable. Whether that will compensate for the chaotic national humiliations ahead, who can predict? Swings and roundabouts there.

Barring a miraculous confluence of luck and timing, the memoir will also be brief, and closer to a leaflet than a book.

His only viable escape route from paralysis is a snap election in the early autumn, before Halloween tests his ambition to restore parliamentary sovereignty by denying parliament its voice.

His best chance to win it would be by coming to an accommodation with Nigel Farage. If he believes that rival egomaniac would risk irrelevance by agreeing a pre-Brexit electoral pact on spec, the very best of British to him with that.

Chumps like me have got most things wrong in the intervening years, and may be wrong again. Perhaps Johnson will prove to be more than a very naughty boy. Albeit the kind of Bizarro World saviour who would nail the rest of us to the cross to save himself, maybe he is the messiah.

The Tory members whose self-abuse sent him to No 10 certainly think so. For now they will forgive him more than being late for a coronation that somehow felt more like a political funeral. How long their faith in the fantasy will survive exposure to the cauterising sunlight of reality is quite another matter.