Colin Brazier: Is what made Boris Johnson popular also the seeds of his undoing?

Fifty years ago a British advertising copywriter had a brainwave.

A slogan that would make a foreign lager attractive to people who didn’t drink the stuff. “Heineken refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach.”

Until now, Boris Johnson was to politics, what Heineken was to lager sceptics. A politician who could reach the parts that others couldn’t.

He’s been an enigma to political obsessives, who couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about.

What was the attraction? Well, it’s just a guess, but I think it might be because he wasn’t a political obsessive. His life was summed up in a picture taken just before he became Prime Minister.

The interior of a Toyota Previa people carrier, coffee cups and books and children’s clothing strewn on the floor; a study of chaos.

Shambolic, but relatable. A hinterland. The lack of gloss. The daft hair. The messy love-life. Many folk find politicians insufferably pompous - and whatever else Boris is, he’s not up-tight.

Like Trump, he has a knack of making people laugh, sometimes at him, not with him, but laugh nonetheless. Once inside Downing Street, the soap opera persisted. Births, marriages and deaths.

A baby last year; a marriage to Carrie last year, the death of his mother last year. And the year before that, a close-run thing for the Prime Minister at the hands of covid.

But today, a reminder that, when it comes to what may be Boris’s Last Act – the soap opera gives way to Shakespeare. Treachery is in the air.

It started the rot for Johnson and, it may be another act of treachery that brings the curtain down.

The betrayal which started all this came from Dominic Cummings, who Johnson should’ve sacked after the Barnard Castle scandal, but who he chose to keep on.

How must he regret that display of loyalty, as Cummings, consumed with a desire for vengeance that wouldn’t be out of place in a Greek tragedy, twisted the knife again and again with his Downing Street party revelations.

And today another blue-on-blue attack. A Tory MP defecting to Labour minutes before the PM stood up at PMQs.

Betrayal, yelled Conservative backbenchers. But the wound is a deep one and it may prove mortal. The things that made Johnson popular are also the seeds of his undoing.

The intuitive anarchy; the aversion to micromanagement; the absence of enduring ideological convictions that meant, when push came to shove, there’s no phalanx of men and women, dedicated to Johnsonianism, who will lay down their political fortunes for him, as there were for, for instance, for Thatcher.

So, if this is the endgame, and David Davis may have delivered the coup de grace at Prime Minister’s questions today, who gets the gig next?

It’s being billed as a two-horse race between Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss, with Jeremy Hunt and Nadhim Zahawi on the outside rail.

Personally, I would put a side-bet on Sajid Javid, the Health Secretary. He’s got a proven track record running several big government departments.

He’s good on detail and has a back story that will, in a different way from Boris Johnson, reach parts of the electorate that others can’t get to.