This afternoon Boris Johnson sat more or less exactly where Geoffrey Howe was sitting that fateful day in November 1990 when he lit the fuse under Margaret Thatcher’s doomed premiership: on the government side, halfway back below the gangway.
Yet Johnson has a long way to go to fulfil his dream of becoming prime minister – starting by overcoming a heartfelt anyone-but-Boris sentiment among his colleagues at Westminster. For he is as disliked and mistrusted by his fellow MPs as he is adored by the activists who will ultimately have a vote in any Tory leadership contest.
Johnson resigned to position himself as the candidate who would deliver the version of Brexit he believes those activists wanted in the referendum two long years ago. Today’s “personal statement” to the House, all part of the coup attempt that necessarily included protestations of loyalty to the prime minister, echoed its opening salvo, last week’s resignation letter. Britain, Johnson said, was heading for “a state of economic vassalage” – unable to protect business, unable to strike trade deals with third countries, still subject to the European court of justice.
The technical solution he wanted in order to preserve frictionless trade between the Republic and Northern Ireland was simply waiting to be discovered, while May’s own proposals for the future trade relationship were a “fantastical Heath Robinson construction”.
“This is Brexit in name only,” Johnson declared, articulating the charge of Jacob Rees-Mogg’s European Research Group and also of many of the local and regional organisers who attended a briefing session with the party chairman, Brandon Lewis, and the prime minister’s chief of staff, Gavin Barwell, yesterday.
Nor, he warned in a swipe at his one-time ally Michael Gove – whose support for the Chequers deal has seen the environment secretary’s stock in parts of the party plummet – would it be possible to agree a botched treaty now and remake it later.
All this was merely a warm-up to Johnson’s central message: it is not too late to “save Brexit”. It just takes courage and clear thinking – of the kind May showed at Lancaster House before losing her way in a fog of indecision and compromise.
In the last 30 years, three former foreign secretaries have resigned. Each has taken advantage of the drama of a speech to a crowded Commons to advertise their cause. But this was certainly no Robin Cook speech, no profoundly heartfelt condemnation of the decision to go to war in Iraq. Nor was it any match for Howe’s speech, delivered by a mild, clever man making a rational case for Europe while taking revenge for a decade of offensive slights.
This was a speech by a narcissistic politician of overwhelming ambition running desperately down the street hoping he was not too late to cadge a lift to Downing Street before Rees-Mogg got there.
• Anne Perkins is the Guardian’s deputy political editor
