Boris Johnson, so the joke goes, will always be remembered as the third prime minister to have been brought down by…Boris Johnson. After bringing down his old rival David Cameron by campaigning for Brexit, and then helping to bring down Theresa May by campaigning against her soft Brexit, Johnson then set the stage for his own exit by presiding over the partygate scandal.

And now, last night, that scandal culminated in Boris Johnson essentially jumping out of Westminster before he could be pushed – choosing to resign as an MP before the findings of the Commons Privileges Committee, which has been investigating whether he misled parliament, are published.

I, for one, think both his party and the country would now best be served by closing this chapter

It’s certainly a calculated move: an exit designed to give him a way back into politics should he need one in the future. And it’s classic Boris.

With one eye on his future after a likely Conservative defeat in 2024, and the other on settling scores with his enemies, his resignation letter pulls no punches. He denounces the investigation as a ‘kangaroo court’. He accuses those leading it as politically prejudiced. He points out the hypocrisy of senior civil servant Sue Gray turning her guns on him only to later get hired by Sir Keir Starmer. And he takes aim at the opposition parties for ‘doing whatever they can’ to get rid of him.

He also clings to the same populist style which ran through his Brexit and 2019 campaigns – contrasting a tiny cabal in Westminster with the apparently gushing, adoring, pro-Boris masses out there in the country who are just sitting around, waiting for him to lead them once again to the sunlit uplands:

We need to deliver on the 2019 manifesto, which was endorsed by 14 million people. We should remember that more than 17 million voted for Brexit. I am now being forced out of parliament by a tiny handful of people, with no evidence to back up their assertions, and without the approval even of Conservative party members, let alone the wider electorate. I believe that a dangerous and unsettling precedent is being set.

The fact Johnson is now deeply unpopular across the country, including among a very large number of Brexit voters is, of course, conveniently ignored. And so too is much else.

Ever since he was forced out of office last summer, Johnson tells us, both his party and Rishi Sunak have lost touch with conservatism:

Our party needs urgently to recapture its sense of momentum and its belief in what this country can do. We need to show how we are making the most of Brexit and we need in the next months to be setting out a pro-growth and pro-investment agenda. We need to cut business and personal taxes – and not just as pre-election gimmicks – rather than endlessly putting them up. We must not be afraid to be a properly Conservative government. Why have we so passively abandoned the prospect of a free trade deal with the US? Why have we junked measures to help people into housing or to scrap EU directives or to promote animal welfare?

But Borisland has always been more a world of fantasy than reality. The idea Boris Johnson, the instinctive bohemian, is the ‘proper’ conservative in the room – the man who liberalised immigration, who put the pedal down on a broken status-quo, who did nothing to reform welfare, and even removed the requirement for British firms to advertise British jobs in Britain first – is bananas.

So too is his suggestion that the future of conservatism lies in more global free trade, more deregulation, more globalism, and metropolitan issues like animal rights. This is simply not what many new conservatives want, and nor is this liberal agenda being pursued by far more successful conservatives around the world.

Yet none of this will stop his dwindling army of supporters from believing, wrongly in my view, that Boris remains the one and only hope for a party that no longer knows what it believes and no longer knows where it wants to take the country.

I’ve absolutely no doubt that Johnson’s resignation is about setting the stage for yet another run at the Tory leadership in the mid-to-late 2020s. God help us.

And nor would I be surprised, at all, if he also has one eye on setting up a new populist movement which rails against the very things he targeted last night: a corrupt Westminster, a broken duopoly, and a ruling class that’s out-of-touch. Many voters would flock to this kind of message. And some of his criticisms of the dire state of British politics, the system, and the ruling class are certainly valid.

But the idea that Boris Johnson represents the answer to these challenges, represents the future of conservatism, is totally absurd. While Johnson will be thanked by many for ensuring Brexit Got Done, for pushing it over the line against a resistant new elite, I, for one, think both his party and the country would now best be served by closing this chapter.

It’s time to move on. It’s time to have a more interesting and serious debate not only about the future of conservatism but the future of Britain. It’s time to push new people and new ideas forward. So let’s do all we can to make that happen, not waste our time talking about somebody who was given a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to truly transform Britain only to then completely squander it.

This article was first published on Matthew Goodwin’s Substack.