Nor would they have been surprised that he would respond to calls for a Covid lockdown by shouting to his advisers that they should “ let the bodies pile high in their thousands”. Had they paid attention, they could have anticipated that this would be a man who would turn up at the UN or his own climate conference with nothing more than a few warmed-up jokes and vague exhortations, rather than a willingness to put in the hard, detailed work such diplomacy demands if it is to make a breakthrough. That casualness, that lack of empathy, was a warning to his fellow Tory MPs, one they chose to ignore when they made Johnson their leader less than two years later. But most egregious is the lack of human care, the cavalier disregard for the impact his actions would have on others.
Most obvious is the slapdash failure to master his brief, to pay attention to detail. In that act alone, you can see the essence of Johnsonism: carelessness, in both senses of the word. Three days later, Zaghari-Ratcliffe was hauled before an unscheduled court hearing in Iran, where Johnson’s words were cited as proof that she had engaged in “propaganda against the regime”. Start with his most infamous involvement, four years ago this month, when as foreign secretary Johnson told a Commons committee that Zaghari-Ratcliffe was “ simply teaching people journalism”, apparently oblivious to her insistence that she had been in Iran on holiday.
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