Has any political career fallen apart quite so quickly as that of Boris Johnson? Even if you follow the line that most end in failure sooner or later his decline is remarkable.
In early July he was installed in Downing Street following a leadership election within the Conservative Party that played out like a general election. One where Johnson was so certain of victory, he didn't bother turning up for most of the debates that whittled the field down to a race between him and then Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt.
Even this was a slam dunk for Johnson. Pit a politician popular enough to be known to press and public alike by just his first name against one with a second name that invites the inevitable play on words and there can only ever be one winner.
Taking office in that sunny Wednesday Johnson did look, if only momentarily, like the coming man, even to those of us who never bought into his mystique.
Here was mercurial energy after three years of leaden plodding; affable spontaneity after years of dutifully over rehearsed dullness. Epic promises were made, the Minotaur of Brexit would be slain by a hero without a comb.
Spin forwards two months and those epic promises have turned into a failure of epic proportions.
In short order Boris Johnson has lost six major votes in a row and stoked the fires of a constitutional crisis by suspending parliament for five weeks. Allegedly so to allow for a Queen's speech to be prepared this was a crude tactic to stifle debate on a Brexit deal ahead of our exit date at the end of October.
As a piece of political game playing this has been the opposite of a roaring success. One of those six lost votes means that attempting to push through a no desk exit, his only hope of keeping the ERG onside, could see him in court; the other two denied him the election that might have given him a mandate.
Johnson hardly helped himself by removing the whip from twenty-one of his own MPs for voting against the government, wiping out his majority and creating a stage army on the back benches with axes to grind and nothing to lose.
He also turned in a performance at the despatch box that saw the mask of bumbling amiability slip showing a less pleasuring face underneath. Thwarted entitlement is seldom pretty to behold; on that occasion it was downright ugly.
Where did it all go wrong? How did someone who has traded on his ability to read the public mood get things so wrong and end up alienating pretty much everyone?
The fault lies, as ever, with the person at the centre of the drama; the enigma in his own imagination that is Boris Johnson.
He is a man born to good fortune, not just in the material sense, though going to Eton then Oxbridge helped to shape his view of himself as born to rule. It also gave him a contacts book to die for, allowing him to flit through careers in the media and politics taking on plum jobs and when through a mix of boredom and over confidence he messed up to step from one to the next without serious consequences.
Boris Johnson has carried this expectation through into the highest political office in the land. As when he was mayor of London his modus operandi is to racket about from one photo opportunity to the next firing off scatter gun quotes to the assembled press pack.
What he has failed to realise is that that no longer works, in the past there was always someone above to deal with the fallout from his inevitable gaffes. Now he's the grown up and had to take responsibility for a whole government a big ask for a man who has never really taken responsibility for himself.
In his shirt tenure as prime minister Boris Johnson has proved to be the exact opposite of everything we need in a leader at this difficult time.
Where we needed calm, he has brought chaos; where we needed mature capability, he has brought adolescent self-indulgence. Where the country needed healing and a period of clam; he has brought division and, maybe, disorder.
It is hardly unusual for politicians who believed in their personal destiny to lead to be tripped over by the grind of what happens to happen; few have been so rapidly and fully undone by their own failings.
In 3016 the Brexit referendum changed British politics forever, even though it is certain to be delayed until January our exit from the EU will happen. The aftermath will, if hopefully not so horrific as the reluctantly released government papers about Operation Yellowhammer suggest, will surely present huge challenges.
They will need to be met by a very different kind of leader, one who operates from a basis of pragmatism, seeking to build consensus rather than trying to force things through by the faulty magic of personal charisma.
In his short time in office Boris Johnson has proved without question that he is not the type of leader we need. Discovering who is could be the most important question of our time.
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