It didn’t take a genius to predict we would end up here. In December 2019, I was writing that Johnson wouldn’t see out a full term and the Tories would be back to fighting like rats in a sack. I’m surprised he lasted as long as he did. I didn’t anticipate a global pandemic, and I thought it would be the unholy mess of Johnson’s Brexit deal would bring him down. But if it wasn’t going to be that then it was going to be sleaze, and there was no reason to expect different from a man so lacking in ability and integrity.

I also wrote that if the Tories fudged the Brexit deal, Brexiteers risked handing the game to Labour and Starmer would be the one to decide the final shape of Brexit. Arron Banks mocked me for saying this, but I wasn’t far off.

The other day I wrote an article explaining why Labour won’t win the next general election, but the recent polling suggests the Tories are on track to lose working majority. There is still a chance a leadership misstep could result in a Labour led coalition. All it takes is for Brexit voting Tories to stay at home on polling day.

Lately I’ve been saying that Brexit is a dead issue, with no enthusiasm to go over old ground, but a leadership contest might well drag it out into the open. There is a great deal of resentment on the leave side that Brexit has failed to live up to its promise under Johnson, and will be eyeing up candidates with a view to pressing that agenda. This is another fight for the soul of the Tory party. Will Brexit be reclaimed for the “Brexit voting masses” or will the party be dragged back to the centrist consensus?

I think the latter. I don’t see an ERG candidate taking the top job so they’ll have to back a compromise candidate they can put up with like Truss just to prevent someone worse from choosing the curtains in Number Ten. And from there, give or take a bit of tinkering with the NI Protocol, the “Brexit revolution” is pushing daisies. The ERG has used up all of its political power. The window for their version of Brexit is long gone and soon they’ll be back on the fringes.

They’ll bitch and moan about it, but Johnson was their man. They brought down May to install him, They knew what he was, just as they knew what he was when the crowned him as spokesman for Vote Leave. A means to an end. That he ditched Brexit so quickly when the going got tough shouldn’t have surprised them. A man so fundamentally duplicitous was never to be trusted.

But then the ERG played their own part in what Brexit has become. They were all for rushing it to “get Brexit done” even if rushing it left endless loose ends. Moreover, Vote Leave never set out a plan or a list of demands, so the definition of Brexit was always in the hands of others. The writing was already on the wall. In November 2019 I wrote:

“Let’s call this what it is. Crap. This is a crap Brexit. It is without vision, without ambition and lacking any serious purpose. We’re doing Brexit for its own sake – to say that we’ve left – not to actually do anything. This is not a stepping stone. It’s an administrative chore. There is no thought to our place in the world, how we will usefully exercise sovereignty or how we will make our democracy mean something. What could and should have been a transformative event in our history will end up an electoral exercise carried out by the uninterested for short term political gain resulting in a recession and decade of stagnation. We’re going to be a sad, broken little country with asinine politics incapable of delivering for the people it serves.”

Here I can’t exactly congratulate myself for my prescience. Assuming the worst in any given circumstances in politics is my default position, and assuming the worst when you have Boris Johnson at the helm is the safest bet you can make.

It’s not even as though Brexiteers weren’t warned about this. I was far from alone in saying it, though I was in the minority on the leave side. But now they’re in denial. Johnson, we are told, was brought down by the establishment media.

Political culture in Britain is such that the media exists to topple Prime Ministers. Tory leadership contests are the thing that brings them most to life. They love it. They live for it. That’s the game. We rack ’em up, they knock ’em down. Our job is to make it hard for them to do, which is why it’s not a good idea to appoint a sexually incontinent sociopath who couldn’t tell a truth to save his life.

Johnson was always going to spend more of his runtime having to deflect and evade questions about his conduct and integrity. That should have disqualified him from the outset. If he wasn’t going to be brought down on the basis of his manifest incompetence then it would be death by a thousand cuts - as each skeleton fell out of the closet.

Ultimately Johnson was never going to satisfy Brexiteers. Brexitism was an anti-establishment movement, but Vote Leave Ltd was an establishment vehicle and Boris Johnson is the very personification of the corrupt Westminster establishment. It’s like appointing Nick Griffin as editor of the Jewish Chronicle. Brexit always demanded a leader of intellect and vision. Johnson only had personal ambition. He was always going to drop Brexit the moment something else came along and Covid produced the perfect opportunity to brush it all under the rug.

Johnson was ultimately chosen because he was available and because he could beat Corbyn when one of the ERG zealots cold not. And that actually says more about the Brexit prospectus. Brexit secured a marginal majority, but there was no outright mandate for the slash and burn year zero Brexit envisaged by the likes of Steve Baker. Opposition to Brexit was as much about stopping a radical libertarian “free trade” agenda. There’s good reason to fear what these people could do unrestrained.

That the tide of public opinion is turning against Brexit is not surprising. The ERG took ownership of Brexit, pushing it as an economic venture, rather than a constitutional revolution. But it never was going to deliver “bumper deals” and rapid growth. The central ERG Brexit thesis was built on a delusion. I warned at the time that if you promote it as an economic venture then that is the basis on which it will be judged – and it would be judged a failure.

That the Brexit revolution has lost the initiative is entirely on its architects. They pushed for the hardest, most economically unsound version of Brexit, which now leaves a gaping hole in our regulatory controls, while placing massive restrictions on our exports. Many could live with that if we could at least say immigration was back under control, but when you appoint a PM who favours amnesties for illegal immigrants, you can’t be surprised that we’re still a borderless country. Another metric by which Brexit fails.

I take the view than none of Johnson’s successors will deliver the kind of changes demanded by Brexit. Even if they want to, the Tories have burned through their political capital and squandered their mandate. If we are to take back our democracy for ourselves then it will require a new movement and one that doesn’t roll over to let the Tories take it over the line. The “revolt on the right” broke the cardinal rule of politics. Never trust a Tory.