You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones, and I'm talking today to my colleague James Butler, a contributing editor at the LRV, who has a piece in the new issue responding to Boris Johnson's resignation as leader of the Conservative Party,

though he'll continue as Prime Minister until September.

An early version of the piece appeared on the LRB blog last Wednesday.

Hello, James, and thank you for joining me.

Hi, it's a pleasure.

So not so long ago, Boris Johnson was talking about a third term, a decade in power.

He'd survived scandal after scandal.

It didn't matter that he'd said let the bodies pile high when hundreds of people

a day were dying of COVID.

It didn't matter that he was going to parties in Downing Street.

Well, most people weren't allowed to go to funerals.

So what changed in the last few weeks?

Well, I mean, the longer term kind of question with this stuff is things really changed with

the Partygate reports.

And I think it had become very clear to people within the Conservative Party that this was

starting to look like an electoral liability for them.

So when they held, if you recall, they held an initial confidence vote within the party,

which Johnson won quite handsomely just a few weeks ago.

And, you know, the unspoken consensus within the party at that time was, you know,

now he has to turn it around, he has to behave differently, he has to take seriously. Sorry, I'm laughing

because of course this was a completely ludicrous thing for anyone to believe would happen. But I think

what has become clear in the intervening period was very much that there had been cut through

...