The Worst, Best Prime Minister

And just like that, he was gone. Well, ish. Boris Johnson finally gave up this morning and announced that he is quitting as prime minister following a tsunami of resignations from within his own government that have made his position untenable. “When the herd moves, it moves,” he said today outside 10 Downing Street. The “brilliant Darwinian system” of British politics, as he called it, had got him in the end. He will stay on until the Conservative Party has picked a new leader, who will then become Britain’s prime minister.

The events of the past 24 hours are a sordid and quite extraordinary almost-end to a sordid and quite , one that was profoundly inane in one respect and incontestably historic in another. He is perhaps the worst prime minister in modern British history but also the most consequential, leaving a legacy without an - or a following, but one that will outlast anything