Boris Johnson’s Brexit spin can work only for so long – he’ll soon be hoist with his own petard

Boris Johnson isn’t the man Amber Rudd wants driving her home at the end of the evening. Or, it would seem, driving the nation off a cliff. Maybe in one of the wine-crate buses that the prime minister once weirdly claimed to make in his spare time, with us, the British public, as his little cork people, smiling our painted-on smiles as he vrooms the rickety wooden vehicle towards the precipice.

The resignation of the former work and pensions secretary may not have saved us from this peculiar fate. But it capped a week that began as a thriller, middled out as farce and finally assumed the dimensions of tragedy. Johnson lost his majority, his votes, his friends, his family, and finally his s***. He was rambling like a haunted satnav as he delivered the most bizarre prime ministerial speech anyone can remember in front of the West Yorkshire Police on Wednesday. By the time his literal brother Jo Johnson resigned, he was said to be fighting actual tears.

Johnson is well versed in Greek tragedy; my school only stretched to Shakespeare. Imagine getting the thing you’ve always wanted, only to find yourself lonelier, more mortal than ever! “How can you say to me, I am a king?” moaned Richard II. He may have worn the “hollow crown”, but did he not also take bread, feel want, taste grief, need friends? It’s a relief, in a way, that Johnson is such a terrible person, otherwise you might be tempted to feel sorry for him.

Rudd was hardly Ms Principle, but she did provide a homeopathic dose of sanity in Johnson’s ghoulish cabinet. People who know them say Johnson will feel her resignation “like a dagger in the heart”. Rudd admitted on The Andrew Marr Show that they had once been “close”. And Jo Johnson’s resignation clearly meant something too. Rachel Johnson, an out-and-out Remainer, reportedly wept for her brothers fighting like Cain and Abel. It begins with your family and soon it comes round to your soul.

Or, as another great man said, heavy is the head that wears the crown – only Stormzy clearly puts more faith in his friends than the prime minister does. “Pray I never lose and pray I never hit the shelf/ Promise if I do that you’ll be checkin’ on my health.”

Is anyone checking on the prime minister’s health? Johnson clearly has his fanboys. William Cash, the society writer who alleges he helped raise one of Johnson’s fecklessly abandoned children in bizarre circumstances, describes his former lover-rival as a “heavyweight champion when it came to conquests, a veteran swordsman and super-hack paid £250,000 a year for one newspaper column.” Yes, we get it, the upper-classes are strange, but does anyone actually care about Johnson? Would Elizabeth Hurley find room on her Gloucestershire farm for him?

I’m not really asking for his benefit. Johnson seems keen on dying in ditches and if he wants to do so, haunted by abandoned children, former mistresses, Stuart Collier, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, bendy buses, etc, that’s fine by me. But he should do it in his own time, not when he’s supposed to be leading the country.

But as bad as all of this looks, all the while Johnson remains in No 10 – and while the Conservative party is polling 35 per cent compared with Labour’s 22 per cent – we must be mindful of the method in this madness. “I essentially am not in madness/ But mad in craft,” said Hamlet. It is quite likely that Dominic Cummings learned of Rudd’s resignation and licked his lips in glee.

In normal circumstances, a cabinet minister resigning the party whip is a political tragedy. At this stage, Rudd is just a statistic. The culling of the moderates was no accident, either, but part of a grand strategy of which Rudd is a minor piece of collateral damage. Hamlet’s genius idea was to put on a show to flush out his enemies. In the age of digital marketing, it is no longer enough to use your own eyes and ears. You must consider how others will see it too.

So for the Brexit Party ultras whose votes Cummings is desperate to win, the bet is that Rudd’s resignation will only underline the treachery of Remainers. Jo Johnson’s departure might seem harder to frame. Remember how damaged Ed Miliband was by his own fraternal flim-flam? “BRO JO DUMPS BO JO” is easy enough to understand. Not even his brother trusts him! But the notion that Johnson is prepared to put Brexit before his family could just as easily be seen as a plus point.

Likewise, you might watch the mad police speech from your liberal metropolitan twitter bubble and see a man who has lost the plot. But the BBC news headlines only showed five seconds of it – and it consisted of Johnson insisting Brexit was “do or die” backed up by a load of cops. Even his rambling incoherence can be reframed. Look! Johnson is just as frustrated as you are by all this nonsense! JUST LEAVE!

But there are limits. Some of the more conspiracy-inclined corners of Remainia are now convinced that the wine-crate bus ramble, and the police word-salad, were also part of some grand Cummingsean masterplan. Johnson was feigning madness so that when anyone googles “Boris Johnson bus”, they don’t learn how much money he wasted as London mayor; and when they google “Boris Johnson police”, his screaming arguments with his girlfriend Carrie Symonds aren’t the top result. We all see what we want to see.

In the end, however, I think Rudd and Jo Johnson’s resignations will matter. It shows that there is a limit to the amount of madness that “normal” Conservatives will stand. They are marginally less spineless as a breed than US Republicans, which isn’t saying much but it is saying something.

As for Hamlet – well, it didn’t end very well for him, did it?