PAUL SAMAEL

Well, it took over 50 resignations from his own government but he's finally agreed to go.  So goodbye and good riddance, Boris Johnson. Your many, many brazen lies have finally caught up with you.  I always thought you were a lazy, arrogant **** who was only interested in his own advancement.  Now it's finally dawned on your erstwhile supporters too.

And did we get an apology or even any hint of contrition or regret for his own actions in his resignation speech?  No.  It's much the same as bankers after the financial crash.  We never really got a "sorry" from them either - or even a "thank you" for bailing them out.  And now people see the same thing again from a morally bankrupt politician.  

I think most people accept that their leaders - both in business and politics - will make mistakes. It's a complex world out there and no one gets everything right.  But what is really corrosive of public trust is the unwillingness to recognise that a serious mistake has been made and to take responsibility for it.  

You can probably trace this back to the Iraq war, where Tony Blair may not exactly have lied about the intelligence, but he implied strongly that it was way more convincing than it actually was - and looking back on it, lots of people felt misled (I include myself in that - it looks naive after Johnson, but at the time, I genuinely didn't think a Prime Minister would be prepared to mislead the country on something as important as that, especially as it was almost certain to come out that you'd misled everyone, as it eventually did).  Subsequently, he's refused to admit it was a mistake (and that is still his position, I think).  Then we had the financial crisis (where bankers never really owned their own mistakes).  And now we have all the promises that Johnson made about the positive effects of Brexit and levelling up on the country (almost all lies and, in the case of Brexit, a massive strategic mistake that will take us years to recover from).  

Johnson has made it all worse by demonstrating on numerous occasions that he couldn't give two hoots about ethics or propriety in government.  He got away with it for years, up until the point when the cumulative effect of all the lies just became too much, even for his own supporters.  

No doubt other narcissistic sociopaths will have taken note of how long he got away with it for - and how he is probably now going to swan off into a world of lucrative opportunities involving speeches for £100K a go.  Like the bankers, he's not only failed to own his own mistakes, he's not going to suffer any meaningful penalty for making them either. 

What sort of message does that send?

PS judging from the pitches being made by most of the Conservative leadership contenders to replace Johnson, it's looking like they're as addicted to making undeliverable promises as he is.  Which further underlines the scale of the damage he's done.