In an age of boring politicians, he was seen as a character, his blond hair and bumbling, upbeat image, allied to formidable campaigning skills, helped him reach parts of the electorate more conventional Conservatives could not.

He won two terms as mayor of London, normally a Labour strongholdA place where one belief, or in this case one party, is widely popular. , and helped convince millions to back Brexit in the 2016 EU referendum.

He became prime minister in July 2019 without an election but four months later, secured an historic landslide victory. As 2020 dawned, his dominance of British politics appeared to be complete. 

But, in the end, it was questions about his character and fitness for high office that were his downfall. 

To some this did not come as a surprise. His former boss, Max Hastings predicted that a Johnson premiership would "almost certainly reveal a contempt for rules, precedent, order and stability".

From his earliest days, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson had a tendency to believe rules were for other people.

He was taken on as a trainee reporter at the Times, but lost his job after falsifying a quote. 

In 1999, he became editor of influential right-wing magazine The Spectator, and two years later finally achieved his ambition to enter Parliament.

In 2004, the then-leader Michael Howard ordered him to Liverpool to apologise to the entire city over a Spectator article that had attributed some of the blame for the Hillsborough disasterA fatal crush during a football match in Sheffield, England in 1989. It killed 97 people.  on the behaviour of the city's football fans. He survived "Operation Scouse Grovel", as he dubbed it, only to be sacked by Howard a month later for lying about claims he had had an affair.

Later, as foreign secretary, his enemies had a field day trawling the archives for past gaffes, which included a 2007 newspaper column describing then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as looking like a "sadistic nurse in a mental hospital". 

He had also been forced to say sorry to Papua New Guinea over a reference to "orgies of cannibalism and chief-killing" and, going further back, had apologised for using an racial slur when writing about the Queen's tours of Commonwealth countries.

More recently, Johnson was under investigation over an expensive designer revamp of the Downing Street flat where he lived with his family, which was initially paid for by a Conservative donor. 

He was ultimately cleared by his ethics adviser, Lord Geidt, but the peer later rebuked his boss for having "insufficient" respect for his role, after new information came to light that had not been revealed to his inquiry. 

In November 2021, the Daily Mirror accused Johnson of breaking Covid-19 rules by attending parties in Downing Street when indoor mixing was banned. 

There was a further bombshell just over a week later when video footage emerged of Downing Street staff laughing and joking about holding a Christmas party.

Then the Daily Telegraph revealed that Downing Street staff had held booze-fuelled parties the night before the Duke of Edinburgh's funeral. Johnson later apologised to the Queen.

The final straw for many MPs was when ministers were sent out to defend the prime minister in a row over an MP facing allegations of sexual misconduct, armed with misleading information from Downing Street. 

Yes: His abuse of power has been total, from favours for lovers to contracts for friends. He has abused everything from the honours system to international law.

No: He turned sunny politics into a potent weapon; no mean feat. Charm is a quality whose potency is much underrated in British politics.

Or...History will find it hard to disentangle the Johnson era from the exceptional circumstances in which it occurred. An upheaval in the nation's trading economy, a global pandemic, a war in eastern Europe and an inflationary crisis would test any leader.