Persuading the country that only Boris Johnson can save it is an act of national vandalism

10.30am. 24 June 2016. In a small room halfway up a small skyscraper just up the Thames from the House of Commons, there is an other-worldly atmosphere. No one has been to bed. A prime minister has resigned. No one knows what the future holds.

A smallish crowd of journalists are waiting to hear from the man who is meant to be the hero of this febrile dawn. Boris Johnson has made his way here from his house in Islington, where members of the public have gathered to riot on his doorstep. They have smashed on the bonnet of his car, shouting, “Scum! Scum! Scum!”

He has pulled off the most dramatic political victory quite possibly in the history of his country. But there are no signs of jubilation, at all. When Boris Johnson eventually shuffles on to the stage, he looks, as The Guardian’s John Crace unimprovably put it at the time, “like a man coming down from a bad acid trip to discover he has murdered his best friend”.

It is clear to see, in hindsight, that it was in that moment that the man who is now a few hours away from becoming prime minister came into being. He didn’t say much, that morning, beyond the observation that, “It is clear that this referendum has been the most seismic political event of any of our lifetimes.”

In the Marvel universe, this would be the moment that the Johnson character mutated. Still indolent, still a mumbling, bumbling joker, still care-free with the truth and the thoughts and feelings of others. But such was the volume of hatred unleashed in that explosive moment, that no one in its blast radius could hope to emerge the same essentially lovable rogue they had been before. And Boris Johnson did not.

It had not always been this way. I first encountered Johnson when I was a very, very junior assistant on The Andrew Marr Show in 2008. It was shortly before the London mayoral election and both he and Ken Livingstone were being interviewed one after the other. Johnson did not do as most, in fact all, guests do and wait his turn in the green room, or the production office. Rather he skulked in the dark perimeter of the studio floor, almost, it seemed to me, trying to eyeball his rival while Livingstone was live on air and he was not. A moving camera on a crane kept breaking his line of sight, and as it did so Johnson bobbed up and down like an automatic traffic bollard.

I watched his turn in the gallery, with one of his advisers. His hair was significantly tidier than usual. This was because she had just finished combing it for him.

“There’s votes in how you look,” she said to me. “Probably not many, but there’ll be a few, and they all count.”

She carried on. “When he gets flustered, he ruffles it. He knows it drives me mad. We have an ongoing bet. Every time he plays with his hair on air, he owes me twenty quid.”

By the end of the interview, he was, by my count, £60 down. I never saw any money change hands.

He won that election easily, and, ever the politician, promptly made himself not merely the face but the name of London’s new cycle hire scheme, planned and introduced by Ken Livingstone but promptly christened “Boris bikes”. Such was his devotion that he took to cycling everywhere and made his mayoral aides do the same. On one occasion, I recall waiting for him to arrive at some event or other. One of his aides confided that Johnson was an extremely slow cyclist, but he would be angry if they arrived at events significantly ahead of him, so for them a meeting across town usually involved several pointless laps around the block, waiting for the boss to catch up.

In the year I spent covering the build-up to the London Olympics, I wonder if there was a single primary school in central London in which I didn’t see him perorate to seven-year-old children about Pericles of Athens. Even his biggest detractors would not be telling the truth if they said that children and adults alike, in those less fraught times, didn’t love him.

He did nothing to deliver the Olympics. He had no role in winning London’s right to host them, and no executive role in their delivery. But, when the time came, he was the games’ biggest, most enthusiastic booster. On a sunny September Monday, all of Britain’s Olympic and Paralympic heroes gathered outside Buckingham Palace for a final parade. The crowds chanted, “We love you Boris, we do! We love you Boris, we do!” That really happened.

On that broken morning of 24 June, even the events just weeks before felt like they had happened in a different universe. It had barely been a month earlier, in a sheet metal factory in Dorset, when one of the aides from the Vote Leave campaign became tremendously excitable.

“Before the speech, there’s going to be a thing,” he said, bouncing up and down with glee. “I can’t say what it is. But you won’t want to miss it.”

The small smattering of journalists were given little choice but to go and wait by a roped-off area at the other end of the warehouse. A large bedsheet was pulled away from a wooden board, at least five metres wide, to reveal 21 sheets of newly rolled steel. “£350,000,000 per week!” they said.

Then the man who is about to become Britain’s next prime minister appeared, head to toe in protective clothing: steel-capped boots, thick long gloves and a face mask that looked like it had been borrowed from Bane from The Dark Knight Rises. He was brandishing an angle grinder. And as we dutifully snapped, and tweeted away, the next prime minister set about them.

Sparks flew. Metal ground against metal. Even this task he set about in a deliberately haphazard, clownish way, like a child writing his name with a sparkler. It was an entirely pointless exercise. His endeavours achieved no more than to leave some minor squiggles on the P of “per week”.

Within a few minutes, he was on a little stage on the factory floor, giving his by-now-standardised stump speech which, according to my notes from the time, contained six falsehoods about EU food-labelling regulations. But the stunt had been a success. The £350m lie embedded just a little deeper in the public consciousness. A week later, he would be smelting a giant aluminium cheque of the same amount. After that, the figure was somehow crowbarred in to the auctioning of a cow at a farmers’ fair.

They were, in their way, innocent times. Johnson took the same train back to London as the travelling journalists and, on the platform, one of them asked him about the £350m per week photo opportunity. “Quite an over-the-top way to announce your new Telegraph column deal, isn’t it?”

He and his aides laughed, a lot. On the train back, Michael Crick of Channel 4 News bounded up the carriage with his cameraman to doorstep Johnson on some spending irregularity or other.

There is one simple reason why this fatuous nonsense was so happily indulged. No one doing the indulging had indulged themselves enough to allow them to think, even for a second, that Vote Leave might win. The Vote Leave staffers going around, setting these daft stunts up, would never directly say but would gladly intimate that actual victory in the referendum was fantasy talk.

Johnson, the eternal clown, never truly believed he would succeed in bringing the country down low enough to meet him. But that is exactly what he did. No one really cared about the lies until it was far too late.

The events of the last few dismal weeks have been enabled by the dismal weeks in 2016 that went before them. They have also repeated them. Again, Johnson has been all around the country, telling demonstrable lies, making promises on which he knows he cannot deliver. But no one cares and it is already too late.

That he has been able to render his country or, more accurately, his party into such an appalling state as to require the kind of resuscitation that only he can provide is an act of national vandalism in the service of personal satisfaction that has never happened before. He has Bullingdon’d the nation.

What has delivered him to this place? There can be no doubting that the British prize a sense of humour more than most. And there can be no doubting that Boris Johnson is extremely funny. He approached the job of London mayor as to be little more than London’s biggest fan boy, and he carried it off with extraordinary success. Most journalists will, at one time or other, have been to some event or launch or other at the top floor of City Hall.

I can recall one such occasion where he was drumming up media interest for a children’s reading campaign with the assistance of Peter Andre. His four or five minute speech was entirely without meaning but entirely mesmerising. London’s mayor also happened to be one of its finest stand-up comedians. Picking up the Evening Standard, news stories about newly air-conditioned central line trains would contain quotes from the mayor promising: “Londoners will now arrive at their destinations as cool as cucumbers.” He made the city feel good, even if the air-conditioned central line carriages are, a decade or so later, yet to arrive.

But those days are well and truly gone. The idea he will, as he claims, “unify the country” is wild. He has every intention to take us to the brink of a no-deal Brexit. He may well even go through with it. A recession, which at least 48 per cent of the country will feel has been inflicted on them by the other 52 per cent, with the willing assistance of its prime minister, will not be a unified country. It will be a riot.

Whether Johnson actually wanted to win the referendum is widely disputed but it doesn’t especially matter. He certainly didn’t expect to win. Had he lost but, in so doing, cemented himself as the party’s pre-eminent Brexiteer, it would have dealt him a very strong hand in the 2019 Tory leadership contest that would have happened right now anyway, to replace David Cameron. It is fair to assume, in those circumstances, that his first task in 10 Downing Street would not be to ramp up preparations for a self-inflicted disaster.

His final column for The Daily Telegraph tells you everything you need to know about the man, not that you don’t already know it.

“If we can put a man on the moon we can solve the Northern Irish border problem.”

The only reaction that anyone with more than two brain cells can possibly have to such mendacious garbage is a kind of primal scream of despair. The people who sent man to the moon had a plan, and decades of hard work. They did not get there simply through the power of lies.

The Irish border problem was already solved, through the stunning and humbling political achievement of the Good Friday Agreement. Brexit is not struggling for a way to solve the problem. It is the problem.

Mainly, and this really is the key point, there is in those words the clear demonstration that Johnson, even now, has not yet worked out that “we” is now “he”. He is no longer the columnist. Problems, it turns out, can no longer be solved in three loquacious paragraphs.

At some point, in the next few months, he will learn that other, better people than him did indeed put a man on the moon. And he cannot solve this vast intractable mess entirely of his own making.

This country, he says, needs to get some of its “self-belief” back. But it is not about self-belief. Brexit is not the moon landing. There is, for at least 48 per cent of the population, no daring, audacious goal in sight. The goal is a worse Britain – insulated, isolated, and much, much poorer. The millions of people who don’t believe in it are not having any kind of self-belief crisis. As Johnson, will very quickly discover, it is the other way around.

We are not in Houston, but we do have a problem. Its name is Boris. It is not going to be a movie with a happy ending.