Boris Johnson is not a man currently without, as he might put it himself, a slew of significant botherations. But his biggest problem now, according to his biographer Tom Bower, is simply where he is going to live. “I think it’s extraordinary that no one has cottoned on to this but his greatest problem is his own domestic arrangements,” said Bower. “He let out his homes in London and Oxfordshire because he thought he wouldn’t need them for many years to come.”
What the wallpaper is like in the couple’s £1.3 million townhouse in Camberwell, southeast London isn’t a matter of public record. But even assuming it is tolerable, Johnson is used to having his housing, transport and a large part of his living costs covered by the taxpayer on top of his £155,376 salary as prime minister. Now, without even a car of his own to his name, the soon-to-be former prime minister is looking decidedly ill-equipped for life in the outside world. Of course, all prime ministers who leave Downing Street unexpectedly have to think quickly about these things: when David Cameron resigned in 2016, his Notting Hill house was still let out. Cameron, however, had the advantage of having a close friend in Sir Alan Parker, who stepped in to lend Cameron his spare £17m Holland Park house. Johnson, in contrast, is a loner who might have to bear the indignity of renting a property. For a man who bears grudges, it is the sharp bang back to earth that he will mind most keenly. “He is going to have a very tough time of reckoning in the coming days and weeks,” Bower said. “Psychologically, the threat of homelessness, not having all the flunkies, not having power, not having Chequers and not having authority is going to hit him very badly.”
The violin, however, is a small one – financially, experts agree, Johnson will bounce back in a very short time. He’ll be on the phone to his agent within the week, asking them to set up speaking engagements around the world and to scope out corporations prepared to pay half a million a year or so for the privilege of rolling him out to impress their clients. Andy Coulson, the Conservative party and Downing Street director of communications from 2007 to 2011, has predicted the fastest-produced prime ministerial memoir in history, followed by well-remunerated newspaper columns. “He will be shameless as an ex-PM,” Coulson wrote in the Times. “He understands – just as his idol Churchill did – that controlling the narrative of your failures as well as your successes is the absolute key to life beyond No 10.” There might, however, be a slight hiatus in him being embraced by the American lecture circuit. When the world thought he would make a dignified exit from Downing Street, the smart money was on him being embraced by Republicans and Democrats alike across the water. But commentators now question whether the similarities between Trump and Johnson needing to be dragged out of office by their heels as their fingertips clawed at the walls will make many American Democrats less keen to hear him talk. “Although there’s lots of differences with Trump, there is the sense of an unnecessarily protracted, slightly ludicrous and constitution-testing exit,” said Tom Clark, a contributing editor at Prospect magazine. “All of which is an obvious enough parallel with Trump to make middle America view him with a bit more distaste than they otherwise would have done.”
The distaste, however, won’t last for long: within a few months, the attention of even the most ardent Democrats will have moved on from something they only half-noticed at the time, and the invitations from the US lecture circuit will come rolling in. “Johnson has never got his just rewards,” said Clark. “There’s no reason to think he’s going to start getting them now.” Whether his reputation at home is as easily recoverable depends on the direction of the Conservative party in his wake. In the unlikely event that a loyalist such as Nadine Dorries won the hot seat, for example, it would be because they positioned themselves as someone who stood by Johnson to the end and made a virtue of continuing to sing his praises. In this case, said Clark, Johnson would find it easier to slide back into the public sphere. But if Jeremy Hunt or another rebel succeeds to the premiership, then rubbishing Johnson’s reputation will be part of their modus operandi as they put the party through a period of purging. “That will continue to throw up news stories about the bad stuff Johnson did that they’re moving the party away from,” said Clark. “That would damage the ‘roguish joker’ character that’s vital to the success of Johnson’s brand.” But Giles Edwards, who spoke to many former world leaders about their lives after leaving office for his book The Ex Men, sees no hiatus in Johnson’s financially glittering future.
“I don’t think there’s any sense in which the end to his premiership will have harmed his life after government,” he said. “From everything I understand about how this works, there will immediately be huge demand for him. “There’ll be loads of people who will pay to hear his insights about governance or politics, certainly in the first couple of years. What can he tell them about dealing with President Biden or President Trump? What can he tell them about the war in Ukraine? He has seen a big country through really, really important things.”