What Boris should do next

Just what do you do with the rest of your life if, aged 58, you have been prised out of the biggest job in Britain? It is a question that Boris Johnson, having delivered his valedictory speech outside No. 10, is now having to answer. The possibility of him returning to Downing Street, as has been mooted by some supporters, is so unlikely that it can be dismissed. He said this morning: ‘I am like one of those booster rockets that has fulfilled its function and I will now be gently re-entering the atmosphere and splashing down invisibly into some remote and obscure corner of the Pacific.’ Yet for him to disappear from public life into obscurity seems too remote a prospect. ‘Like Cincinnatus, I am returning to my plough,’ he said, comparing himself to the old dictator of Rome. To what might he be returning? The Johnson plough, for the last quart century, has been furrowing itself into the nation’s consciousness.