Clowns belong in the circus – but unless we take politics seriously there will be more like Boris Johnson | John Kampfner

The former prime minister was a symptom, not the cause, of a political culture that gorges on spectacle and trivia

Politicians, journalists and assorted hangers-on have been regaling each other with their risque Boris Johnson anecdotes for as long as I can remember. Boris" this, BoJo" that. Even his detractors used his first name. The braggadocio, the enjoyment of watching his ascent, reached a peak during his tenure as mayor of London. Commentators, even those on the left, joked about how fun it was to have a Conservative in charge of the capital city who whizzed around on a zipwire.

The bonhomie suddenly turned to buyers' remorse when he embraced the Brexit cause in 2016. What, I ask now, as I asked then, took people so long? It was abundantly clear to me from the moment I met him (he and I were foreign correspondents at the same time for the Telegraph) that Johnson was a charlatan. While I was covering the collapse of communism from Moscow, he was in Brussels inventing stories about straight bananas.