The ejection of Boris Johnson from Downing Street today proves that the UK has not gone the way of Donald Trump’s United States, Viktor Orbán’s Hungary or Narendra Modi’s India. For all our faults, the strongman model of leader ends in farce rather than fascism here.

Liberal critics ought to be big enough to concede that Conservative MPs – more than any opposition party, movement or institution – saved us from populist authoritarianism. No doubt they did so for impure and self-interested reasons, but this is politics and it is deeds – not motives – that matter most.

Johnson’s failure to impose his will on his parliamentary party was his greatest mistake. He only half understood that the strongmen, who dominate so much of the world, make it their first task to ensure that they have control of their parties.

They grasp that enemies within are the greatest danger. Because they know the leader and his party intimately, they can expose failures and betrayals more effectively than any opponent. They speak the language and share the values of the strongman’s followers, and can undermine his power from the inside.

Modi, Trump and so many others have suffocated internal dissent. Trump has destroyed the careers of Republican politicians who voted to impeach him. Only three of the ten members of the House of Representatives who defied him survived challenges in this year’s Republican primaries. Meanwhile about three-quarters of Republican voters still deny after all this time and all the accumulated evidence to the contrary that Joe Biden is the legitimately elected US president. Republican politicians know that they must go along with the lie or risk the big liar’s little helpers coming for them.

Johnson tried to make his party fear him. In September 2019, he removed the Conservative whip from Nicholas Soames, David Gauke, Ken Clarke, Rory Stewart, and 18 other MPs who defied him on the terms of the Brexit withdrawal.

In March of that year, Dominic Cummings told Johnson’s allies to ignore any promises Theresa May made about Brexit in the authentic voice of a colonel plotting a coup. ‘A serious government – one not cowed by officials and their bullshit legal advice… will dispense with these commitments and any domestic law enforcing them.’

Anyone watching at the time would have concluded that Conservative MPs would stay in line, particularly after Johnson won the largest Conservative majority since 1987, a success that of itself demanded obedience. Johnson behaved as if he believed he could ignore his MPs or treat them like useful idiots. Repeatedly he sent them out to defend an obnoxious policy and then made them look like servile fools when he abandoned it.

In November last year, he wanted to protect his ally Owen Paterson over a lobbying row. He ordered Tory MPs to vote for a Conservative-dominated standards committee that might give his friends a free pass. Johnson then left his colleagues stranded when public outrage gave him no choice but to back off.

As Matt Chorley of the Times noted, ‘even if voters forget this shambles, Tory MPs won’t. Scores of them held their nose, had arms twisted, faced a barrage of abuse online and in postbags, and now Boris Johnson has made them look like bloody idiots.’ It is impossible to believe that Trump or Orbán would care about humiliating Republican or Fidesz politicians. Shame is their price of admission to the great leader’s party, and they know it.

Whatever else you wish to say about a large portion of Conservative MPs, you cannot say that. The resignation letters of July 2022 were filled with denunciations of Johnson’s failure to uphold standards in public life, and of his undermining of ‘faith in our democracy’. In a magnificent contribution, George Freeman declared that:

the chaos in No. 10, the breakdown of cabinet collective responsibility, the abandonment of the ministerial code, the defence of impropriety and defiance of parliament are all insults to the Conservatism I believe in.

Once again, you cannot imagine a politician from the ruling party in a strongman state saying words to that effect and surviving.

Other British institutions have stood up well to the onslaught. The Supreme Court ruled that Johnson’s Putin-esque suspension of parliament was unlawful. Judges and ‘activist lawyers’ have faced attacks from the right ever since. But I suspect these will pass, and historians of our time will remember that, when parliamentary democracy was threatened, the judiciary stood firm.

Meanwhile, although you cannot say a good word about the BBC without getting into trouble, it too has continued to try to do its job despite the attacks on it and the threats to its financing – as has Channel 4 News. We have had nothing like the state-dominated media Indians and Hungarians must endure.

The caveat here is that most of the Conservative MPs who defenestrated Johnson were not overly concerned about the need to protect press freedom or to uphold rights to protest and to vote. As Liz Truss is showing with her attacks on the media and the Bank of England, the favourite move of Conservatives is to pass the buck. Most Conservative politicians turned on Johnson, not on grounds of principle, but because they feared he was an electoral liability.

Johnson and his supporters are trying to rewrite the past now, as Margaret Thatcher’s admirers did in the 1990s. They are casting him as the lost leader who might have saved his party if only the pygmies had not dragged him down. Let them try. The truth they must sidestep is that by the end, 69 per cent of voters thought he should resign and only 13 per cent thought he was trustworthy.

Conservative MPs revolted because the British public would not put up with the double-standards, law breaking and privileges that strongmen leaders demand the world over. In these grim times, their rejection of Johnson is a small cause for optimism.