It’s over, whether the Prime Minister realises it or not. With the departure of Munira Mirza, his head of policy, the guts were finally torn out of the cadaver that is now his premiership. He may try to hang on, but these are the actions of a man driven by sheer will to power and adrenalin, before he notices the fatal wound and drops. How did it come to this?

Just two years ago, Boris Johnson was the golden boy. He had defied his most vicious critics, won a huge majority and delivered a definitive, if flawed, Brexit. Behind the scenes, his operation had drawn together old enemies and friends to work with singular discipline. The hardcore Remainers had been purged and Dominic Cummings had been lured back into government by a massive charm offensive.

Everyone knew that Mr Johnson had flaws, but the election result seemed to prove that they could be overcome. As mayor of London, he had covered for his disorganisation by installing a team of highly capable deputies (of which Ms Mirza was one) and his fans suggested he would do the same again. He might be chaotic, they said, but he knew how to hire. Perhaps, but back in 2008, it had taken him more than two years to get the right team in place. The pressures of real government and Covid would never cut him such slack.

The cracks weren’t immediately apparent, but it didn’t take long. The moment it all began to fall apart was early March 2020, when the Government took fright at the reaction to its “herd immunity” strategy and the devastating footage of overwhelmed hospitals coming out of northern Italy. The problem wasn’t just the change in policy, but the sheepish denial that anything had changed.

Still, at that point, Mr Johnson was in denial about the whole pandemic. He thought it would be over in six months. His top team knuckled down, chasing data, ventilators, testing supplies, tracing apps and PPE for doctors. When the Prime Minister announced a national lockdown, no one was more shocked by the turn of events than Mr Johnson himself.

Then Covid swept through Westminster. Alone with his heavily pregnant and Covid-stricken fiancée, Mr Johnson reached death’s door before help came. He survived, spring came and the office, emptied by Covid, filled back up. Perhaps delirious with relief and feeling themselves to be special and above reproach, several teams of advisers and officials lost touch with wider reality, in which most people were still locked at home in fear of Covid. The sociable No 10 media team, at the centre of this failure, began selectively to ignore the more arduous and contradictory rules they had imposed on the country. 

Perhaps they were given confidence by the seeming insouciance of many others in Westminster who were themselves inhabiting the grey area between work and play. Mr Johnson appears to have passively accepted this state of affairs.

Meanwhile, Mr Cummings, exhausted by his own bout of Covid, threw himself back into work, especially the project of establishing an Asian-style test-and-trace system, which was unfortunately to become the biggest boondoggle of the whole pandemic. His own personal “Partygate”, the ludicrous Barnard Castle escapade, came and went, wearing him down further.

Then, that summer, the wheels began to come off. Insiders complained of chaos in No 10, with the Prime Minister showing up unprepared to meetings without even a note-taker to hand. A series of U-turns, foreseeable fiascos like the exam results mess and a bungled press conference where Mr Johnson forgot his own Covid rules, furthered the impression that all was not well. Fingers were pointed at Mr Cummings, who was only interested in his own special projects and would neither perform the role of Mr Johnson’s consigliere, nor allow anyone else to do so.

In turn, Mr Cummings and his loyalists began to wage a well-documented war against the Prime Minister’s then-fiancée, openly mocking her. There is no workplace where this sort of thing could possibly be tolerated and it was only ever going to end one way. He was ousted because he had begun to generate more chaos than even his chaotic boss.

This gave Mr Johnson an opportunity to reset. Plans took shape for a sleeker operation that would stop sleepwalking into political booby-traps, with a reshuffle of top advisers, Allegra Stratton fronting the press team and the former civil servant Dan Rosenfield recruited from a smart City job to get a grip on the disorder that followed Mr Johnson around like a cloud. But despite some initial optimism, the jigsaw was still hopelessly incomplete.

Political advisers across Government immediately became aware of an organisational vacuum even larger than when Mr Cummings was in charge. No one knew what the mission was. Meetings inside No 10 continued to be chaotic. There was often no agenda and no structure, the Prime Minister would make throwaway comments that were carefully minuted, leaving every attendee with a different idea of what or whether anything had been decided. Even these “decisions” could be unwound if he was taken aside by someone later.

Responses to politically explosive issues like the suspension of Owen Paterson, free school meals or nurses’ pay were not systematically discussed in a forum where sceptics could play out the scenarios and work out when they were courting disaster. Instead of putting a stop to bad policy, the Prime Minister too often avoided confrontation with ministers and let the public backlash do the job.

At some point, ambitious officials just began to look out for themselves and those who might have given Mr Johnson difficult messages to head off problems weren’t even given a chance to voice their opinions. With so much of No 10’s time spent on damage control, no coherent programme for government was ever going to emerge and “net zero” alone expanded to fill the space.

Then came Mr Johnson’s catastrophic mishandling of Partygate, providing the most damaging example of his mismanagement. Issuing denials that were bound to be found out and then retreating behind a new, equally flimsy fig leaf each time one disintegrated, he has been a man on the run for weeks, rather than a leader capable of leading anyone anywhere. This isn’t going to change.

Back in 2016 after the Brexit vote, when Mr Johnson’s leadership bid was torpedoed by Michael Gove, it was because he had proved incapable of seizing the moment and appeared terrified by his own victory, hiding instead in trivialities and offering no leadership. But Theresa May’s incompetence gave him another chance. This time, the right pieces seemed to be there – his own charm and creativity, Mr Cummings’ fierce intellect and focus, and the loyalty and huge talents of advisers like Ms Mirza. But it has all come to nothing. What a terrible, terrible waste.