Moderate Conservatives now face the starkest choice of their political careers

Greetings, Britain. Welcome to your worst nightmare. Life doesn’t always have a happy ending, and sometimes the most undeserving among us find success while other far more honest and capable people languish without recognition or reward.

Boris Johnson’s picaresque journey through the world of the media, politics and light entertainment, which this week stages its vaudeville climax on the steps of 10 Downing Street, represents a total indictment of Britain’s class system, structural inequality and insouciant decay. Only a country which revels in the latter could install as its leader a man so careless of the responsibility. An ego made flesh tomorrow becomes prime minister.

The Conservative Party today presents itself as a personality cult deep in the ecstasy of its own imagined power, but not everyone has turned up to the rave. The moderate Remainers who have not yet abandoned either hope or the whip must now make some decisions.

They may consider the character of the person who now assumes the most powerful position in the land. Johnson has based his entire career on not taking anything seriously. He became famous on a TV panel show because everything was a game: politics, his personal life, and as things turned out, the future of the country. He knew he could say anything because none of it really mattered, and the views of people who did think it mattered didn't matter either. Becoming prime minister would simply be the final round in the most exclusive game of all. Ambition for the sheer hell of it: something to have accomplished without asking or knowing why.

They may reflect on the language he uses—about money to investigate child abuse “spaffed up the wall,” or women in burkas as letterboxes, or Theresa May “wrapping a suicide vest around the constitution,” and ask what kind of a person would seek to cause such gratuitous offence and why. They may look at the more outwardly humorous language as well. Why did Johnson, in his most recent Telegraph column, ask why we could land a man on the moon in 1969 but not resolve the Irish backstop in 2019? He is not a stupid man and would not have said something stupid for no reason. Why, before his premiership has even begun, would he have sought to enrage our closest neighbour by belittling its existential concerns and obscuring the political sensitivities?

Next, these sensible Tories may consider the national interest—specifically on a no-deal Brexit, the policy Johnson seems to have been elected to implement. In recent weeks he has escalated his language. Whereas at first no-deal was “a million to one against,” now he rejects even the possibility of time-limiting the backstop—though parliament has consistently indicated that this would be sufficient to approve a deal. Crucially, the EU has in any case rejected such a time-limit; why then would Johnson so dramatically raise the stakes? Is it so an attempt, after all, to adjust the backstop rather than jettisoning it entirely will now appear reasonable in comparison? It is a terrifying insight into his whole approach: breezily reckless, cavalier with the livelihoods of others, ignorant of his own weakness and wholeheartedly unconcerned with the history, perspectives or interests of anyone else.

Johnson’s schtick has always been optimism, fun and confidence. When he calls upon Britain to exercise self-belief, as he did in his curiously uneven victory speech, he of course leads by example. But it is now time for the wiser heads in his own party to judge that unlimited self-belief against verifiable fact. The EU is not going to indulge the vanity of a man who loathes it, and who it loathes in return. It is not going to time-limit the backstop. And it will certainly not abandon it altogether. That guarantees one destination alone for Britain: the senseless, calamitous wreck of a no-deal crash-out.

Now, more than ever, is the moment to put country before party. The moderate Tories know this crash is coming. They can see the driver approach the car door. They in fact hold the key he needs to open it. That key is the confidence of the House of Commons, and each day they hand it to him is a day he can do more damage. The moderates may take fright at the scale of Johnson's victory today. They may take the tactical decision to appear conciliatory and give him enough rope to hang himself over the summer. But they should remember that Johnson arrives in Downing Street with the direct endorsement of just 0.14 per cent of the population. And that if they wait too long, there will in the end be enough rope to take the rest of us with him.