After Boris: what will politics look like?

Boris Johnson has so dominated politics for the past few years that it is hard to imagine things without him. His premiership, though relatively brief, has been both eventful and consequential. With him in Downing Street, there was a constant – and exhausting – sense of drama, with frequent cast changes and plot twists. But next week Johnson’s run as Prime Minister will come to an end.

Of course, he will not disappear entirely. There will be speeches and memoirs and his comments are bound to attract attention, which will make his successor nervous. Johnson, as previous Tory leaders will attest, knows how to disrupt the news agenda. Already he is trying out ways to avoid answering the question of whether he thinks a comeback is possible or not.

What is certain is that it won’t take much for some of his loyalists to start talking about the Tory king over the water. What is also worrying for whoever succeeds him is that polls suggest Tory members regret his departure. The by-election losses in formerly safe Conservative seats and the broader collapse in trust appear to have been forgotten.

All this means it won’t take much to get people speculating about a return to frontline politics for him. Even the more level–headed of those in his circle regard a comeback as unlikely but not impossible. (Of course, there is a massive obstacle to this: by the end the Conservative parliamentary party had so lost faith in Johnson that the outcome of a second no-confidence ballot was regarded as a foregone conclusion.)

But however many column inches are still devoted to him, Johnson will no longer be PM. His absence will reshape the political landscape because his presence defined it.

In the final months of Johnson’s premiership, as the odds that he would not survive until the next election grew, Labour tried to broaden its attack from him to the Tories collectively.