Theresa May should put the brakes on Boris Johnson’s backseat driving

You don’t need to have worked in, say, a call centre or a car plant or a hedge fund or an undertakers or a Premier League football team to know the consequences of a senior member of staff publicly slagging off the boss and undermining the company.

The company, wishing to be a successful company, would very quickly show said member of staff the door.

It is understandable to wonder then, why such uniformly accepted norms do not apply to politics. How a senior member of the government can seek fatally to undermine the government, how the nation’s most senior diplomat can engage in a course of action so pyrotechnically undiplomatic and yet arrive on Monday – and fresh from a long weekend of making the problem worse – ready to diplomatise some more.

The answer is that the UK is blessed with what analysts mysteriously describe as a “sophisticated political culture”.

Sophisticated cultures tend not to exist in call centres or car plants. People are promoted to senior positions in the hope that they will be good at them, and the company will therefore succeed. Only in the sophisticated culture of politics, the one in which all the decisions that govern our little lives are made, are people promoted to positions in which their bosses actively hope they will fail. It is just over a year since Boris Johnson, David Davis and Liam Fox, the so-called Three Brexiteers, were given senior jobs for which most serious analysts and observers considered at least two of them completely unsuitable, yet simultaneously described the appointments as “genius”.

By putting Brexiteers in charge of Brexit, Theresa May, a Remainer, would apparently be shielded from the consequences of its failure. But those who offered this analysis, and Lord Heseltine in particular, did not give very detailed instructions for what happens next – when that failure becomes increasingly clear to see.

On Monday morning, the Prime Minister’s official spokesperson could not have done more to not engage with the consequences of the Foreign Secretary’s magnum opus on Brexit, delivered to the nation right as two dozen London commuters received treatment for minor burns that should have killed them. “The Foreign Secretary’s views are well known,” she said. “He expressed them very clearly in the referendum last year.”

Of course, the Prime Minister was stripped of all her authority at precisely 10pm on 8 June, but even from within in the most baffling depths of “sophisticated political culture” it is not immediately clear to see why Theresa May has evidently come to the view that Boris Johnson is unsackable.

If she wants to reboot relations with Europe in Florence on Friday, well nothing would make the power brokers of Europe happier than to see the back of the man they believe did more than any other to destabilise their union through nothing more than an unswerving willingness to lie and insult.

It has been suggested that she could not afford to have him undermining the Government from the back benches. Well he is currently undermining them from the front.

Anyone with any political wisdom whatsoever should have come to realise some time ago that making predictions has become utterly pointless. It is like predicting the result of a sporting contest without even knowing not merely the competitors but even the rules.

Even so, if the next 12 months or so follows even closely to the path of the foreseeable, there is a course of action that looks increasingly likely: that no deal with the European Union is forthcoming, a hard Brexit is all that is on offer, and the decision of whether or not to take it splits the Conservative party and brings down the Government.

As the Foreign Secretary drives from the back seat, effectively agitating for hard Brexit, it may be that the Prime Minister wishes to avoid accelerating any harder toward that particular horizon. Now would surely be the right time to remove him from the car altogether.