Johnson was best hope of salvaging an open liberal Britain

The Fast Show, a television comedy that tickled Britain in the 1990s, featured an office prankster called (and the name was meant to be suggestive) Colin Hunt. His grating larks flowed from an insecure character and a demand for attention. With his zany hair and needy grin, he strove to entertain but was himself the joke.

In the accelerated history that is British politics, where 10 years of news happened during one week in June, Boris Johnson has sunk from the verge of the premiership to a struggle to be remembered as more than a posh Colin Hunt. He even described his shock abstention from the race to lead the country, forced by eleventh-hour chicanery from Michael Gove, the justice secretary and fellow schemer from student days, as a “punchline”. The inadvertently telling word exposed Tory politics as a middle-aged parlour game played by frivolous strays from Fleet Street. And they call the EU a defective organisation.

The karmic comeuppance is hard to miss. We have no beam into Mr Johnson’s soul, but his body of work as a writer suggests that he never really favoured the exit from the EU for which he campaigned all too well. Counting on a slim defeat that would leave David Cameron a nominal victor but a tarnished prime minister, he hoped to slide into the job without a mess to clear up.

Instead he won, racking up implausible commitments on the way and tipping Britain into an economic limbo that may see out the decade. Aware that the spoils of victory might include a recession and a Scottish breakaway, he never looked comfortable. Mr Gove’s betrayal was his cue to desert.

The exposure of this perfidious bluffer, who talks about his work as London mayor as though the city had been on a par with Grenoble before he took over in 2008, has amused pro-Europeans. The markets lifted upon his departure. Friends of Mr Cameron are nursing abdominal injuries from all the laughter at his expense.

But what, in the end, are they cheering? When Mr Johnson retreated, so did the best chance of salvaging an open, liberal Britain from last month’s popular vote against the EU. There is something worse than feigned nativism, and that is authentic nativism. Swarming into the space left by Mr Johnson are Tories who believe in this stuff. Theresa May, the home secretary and now the likeliest leader by some distance, holds to a much more traditional conservatism than the former mayor.

As prime minister, Mr Johnson would have sought the minimum possible change to Britain’s European status consistent with his promises. This implied a bit more control over migration at the cost of slightly impeded access to the single market. Feasible or not, his intention was to preserve the ease of doing business in this country. It was his deference to continuity that is said to have spooked Mr Gove and other backers.

They would have less such trouble with Mrs May. She is not cosmopolitan by background or belief. She was as grudging a Remainer as Mr Johnson was a Leaver. Cultural conservatives worry about her failure to cut annual net immigration to the tens of thousands as home secretary, but liberals should worry about the ferocity with which she tried. The speech that launched her campaign for the leadership put migration control some way above market access and did disturbingly little to reassure EU nationals already in Britain.

If both politicians had run to lead the Tories, there was a real if slightly perverse choice to be had. You could vote for Mrs May, a Remainer, to take Britain truly out of the EU. Or you could vote for Mr Johnson, a Leaver, to keep Britain more or less in. His absence leaves liberals without a candidate.

Mr Gove talks a mellifluous game about freedom but connived in a foul campaign against European migration and has never been much moved by economics. Andrea Leadsom, the energy minister, is another candidate for whom exit seems to mean exit. Although Mrs May has clashed with Mr Gove in the past, they and Mrs Leadsom could turn out to be the iron triangle of the next government.

If so, believers in an open Britain must rely on Mr Johnson sticking around as a moderating influence, or on George Osborne (who by then may no longer be chancellor of the exchequer, or anything else), or on an opposition Labour party that is locked into a rolling crisis under Jeremy Corbyn.

Against a May premiership, against the 52 per cent of voters who crave exit, against the populists of the UK Independence party, this is thin resistance. Britain’s connection to the single market is much more precarious for Mr Johnson’s exit.

Almost all prime ministers end up as conviction politicians. The intensity of the work - the torrent of decisions that reach the Downing Street desk - rules out cold deliberation. There is not the time for it. Gut instincts are quicker, and Mr Johnson’s are as liberal as Mrs May’s are not. His humiliation on Thursday felt like justice to pro-Europeans, but the classicist in him will know that their glee is entirely pyrrhic.

He was always the liberals’ insurance policy, the prime minister who would flatter the popular will while steering away from it. Without him, they are horribly exposed.

Financial Times