Johnson will leave scorched earth. The idea that he should stay until autumn is madness | Gaby Hinsliff

The party created a monster. It should not underestimate how hard it will be to stop him, even after he is prised from power

The end, if it has indeed now come, was more graceless even than we could have imagined. Boris Johnson did not seem sorry. Not now, maybe not ever. When the Downing Street limpet was finally chiselled off his rock, it was only to deliver a parting salvo lacking in all humility or self-awareness but instead verging on the accusatory.

The prime minister thanked the millions of voters who trusted his party, without acknowledging that he had gleefully spaffed that trust up the wall for two-and-a-half long years. Instead he called his colleagues eccentric" for wanting to ditch him now, just when everything was going so brilliantly, unless of course you count the lying and the unchecked sexual predators and the crumbling public services and the grinding poverty. Johnson degraded the country he was elected to serve, and his legacy will be long painful years of fixing the damage done to almost every aspect of national life. Yet still, he wanted his supporters to feel that if anything, he's the real victim here. That poor me" note is a dangerous one for a departing prime minister to strike in febrile times.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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