Boris Johnson will be a hard act to follow in Ukraine

‘Every human life has many aspects,’ said the novelist Milan Kundera. ‘The past of each can just as easily arranged into the biography of a beloved statesman as into that of a criminal.’ Of no one has this been truer in recent days than our departing Prime Minister Boris Johnson. To read some of the political obituaries of him – Andrew Rawnsley’s in the Observer was typical (‘disgraced the office… wild mayhem… pathologically brazen… serial debaucheries… lord of misrule’) or the round-up of panellists’ views in the Guardian (‘The stain of Johnsonism will remain for decades’) – you might think the country had until last week been governed by the secret lovechild of Robert Mugabe and Elena Ceausescu. For his detractors all Boris needed to do was round up his followers, stage a champagne-fuelled scuffle on the lawn before Parliament, and the parallels with Trump would have been complete. Indeed, you sense his haters’ disappointment that no such final contretemps has taken place.