‘Trust me, I’m Boris,’ the PM had said, and to his astonishment 322 MPs decided they didn’t
Boris Johnson isn’t good at deferred gratification. Sulk wants. Sulk must have. Jennifer Arcuri had driven him mad by insisting he stick to Google Hangouts when he’d been dying to move on to spreadsheets. But today of all days he had been certain nothing could spoil his triumph. He’d looked the EU in the eye and he had blinked first. It took some skill to go back to Brussels and negotiate an even worse withdrawal agreement than Theresa May, but somehow – against all the odds – he had defied the gloomsters and pulled it off.
So this was to have been his Super Saturday. A day to go down in the history books, when parliament met for the first time on a weekend in 37 years and he, the World King, would be carried aloft along the Tory benches as the “Man who Delivered Brexit”. OK, it would almost certainly be a short-lived triumph once everyone realised that he’d promised polar opposites to different groups of MPs and the real arguments would only emerge once the UK had left the EU, but he could live with that. He wasn’t a man used to taking responsibility for the long-term consequences of his actions.