Goobye and good night, Boris Johnson, by some distance the most disastrous UK prime minister of our lifetime. His premiership will go down as an object lesson in leadership and management failure. 

Being prime minister is one of those in-the-public-eye jobs where, as the Queen pertinently put it, you ‘have to be seen to be believed’. Unfortunately, in Johnson’s case the visibility that he always courted does him no favours, because what you see is someone who has only to be seen not to be believed. 

Any post of this nature has two components: leading and managing. Peter Drucker, who was quite terse about leadership, maintained that it and management were poles on the same spectrum. Some roles, or people, had larger leadership requirements than others, which were more about management than leadership. What you couldn’t be is just a leader or just a manager. A leader without grounding in the management of the business loses touch with its reality and with it relevance, eventually undermining the organisation. Likewise a manager sans leadership qualities can offer no motivational energy or forward momentum.

For Drucker, for whom managing yourself was a prerequisite for managing anything else, a leader has to play to his or her strengths. Johnson got by during Brexit because he didn’t have to manage. He could leave that to Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings. In the 2019 election, trading on the successful effrontery of Brexit, he just had to segue to ‘getting [insert task here] done’, and the electorate believed him, or at least gave him the benefit of the doubt, because his cheek, and his ability to speak a different kind of language from conventional politicians, seemed to suggest the possibility of change – any change. 

Which they did – but unfortunately not in a good way. By the time of the pandemic, it was clear that Johnson was incapable of managing anything, particularly himself, and that in the absence of strong principles of his own he was taking his tactical cues not from his avowed hero, Winston Churchill, but from the erratic and impulsive Donald Trump. Witness his flippant initial dismissal of the seriousness of the disease (quickly reversed when he fell ill himself), then in the chaotic response.

The Tory party bears some responsibility for Johnson’s failure. ‘Cakeism’, Johnson’s preferred policy option of having his cake and eating it, was always a delusional solution for the party’s divisions over Northern Ireland and Europe, and the economic demands of its new and traditional voters. But it was an alluring one. The sheer carelessness of what ensued, though, was all his own: the cronyism of the contracting and the furloughs during the pandemic, the massaged figures around testing, the bold initiatives followed by hasty U-turns, were already in plain sight during his time as London mayor – remember his here-today gone-tomorrow bendy buses and the never-used second-hand German water cannon? – and in the made-up quotes and loose way with facts that he deployed in his previous career as a journalist. More concretely, £37bn spent on testing ‘that failed to make any difference’ and £4bn literally going up in smoke as useless PPE is re-routed for the crematorium are hardly trivial entries in the management ledger.

With hindsight, it seems predictable, indeed inevitable, that he would be brought down by another episode of monumental carelessness. Leadership, Drucker said, was a means to an end. When the end was Brexit, Johnson had followers to put himself at the head of (Drucker’s other leadership qualification), and a team of believers who were easy to motivate.

But by the time Partygate broke the dubious glow of Brexit had long since gone, leaving the illegal parties as not just the latest in the line of poor management decisions, but the encapsulation of the entire dysfunctional culture that Johnson trails around him like a miasma – the blithe insouciance about constraints that apply to other people, and that anyone with a gramme, or should we say ounce, of management sense would have taken into account before clinking champagne glasses in the garden of number 10; the subsequent denials, evasions of responsibility, brazening out of conviction for a criminal act and sacrifice of junior staff, all straight from the Trump playbook; and above all, betrayal of the fact that his only end, and the only end of his supine cabinet, was to stay in power.

That self-serving purpose was increasingly obviously out of sync with the extravagant and damaging means, such as proroguing parliament or repeatedly trying to change the law if it stopped him doing what he wanted, that he used to fulfill it. The cynical attempt to replay the Brexit card by weaponising the Northern Ireland protocol, the attention-seeking if welcome display of support for Ukraine (a desperate appeal to Winston), and repeated attempts to invoke divisive culture wars (the BBC, the National Trust and statues, immigration – the list goes on), were the same ploy in more recent disguises. 

In the end, with no credible purpose or management qualities to steady him, and no reserves of trust to draw on, Johnson simply ran out of leadership resources. With every week bringing a new example of his astonishing lack of personal judgment, Carriegate and Pinchergate being the final dismal straws, support gradually drained away, whether among officials (Lord Geidt, the second independent ethics adviser to throw in his hand, and the chairman of the Tory party), voters and belatedly, in an abject flood, his own cabinet, until suddenly he was bankrupt.

Leadership is to a large degree situational: Churchill, a notorious chancer as a young man, was redeemed by being handed a supreme purpose by Hitler, to which he was mostly equal, only to be handed his cards by voters after the wartime episode was over and a peaceful purpose took priority. Although Johnson’s day was mercifully shorter, the mayhem he caused will be hard to repair, and his graceless exit, blaming everyone else for his own character failings, was entirely consistent with what had gone before.

Toxic to the last, Johnson’s final act of anti-leadership was to comprehensively poison his succession. He had already purged his cabinet of its more competent and calmer heads. He now leaves his successor, already discredited in the public eye for not having acted sooner to remove someone whose character flaws should have disqualified him from ever holding serious office, a noxious populist agenda of Brexit (not just unfinished but barely begun), culture wars and tax cuts, which can only worsen the country’s dire economic problems. The first commandment of leadership is to leave the organisation in a better state than you found it. Johnson’s legacy is to have done the opposite. In evaluating people, Warren Buffett once said, ‘you look for three things: integrity, intelligence and energy. And if you don’t have the first, the other two will kill you.’ It is a fitting epitaph for Boris Johnson’s leadership tenure.