The dishonourable Boris Johnson has brought us to the brink of catastrophe

The resignation of Alexander (“Boris”) Johnson from the prestigious post of foreign secretary in Her Majesty’s government came on the very same day that his illustrious predecessor Lord Carrington died at the wonderful old age of 99.

Johnson becomes the fourth foreign secretary to have resigned since the war – all of them since the arrival of Margaret Thatcher’s revolutionary government on the British political scene in 1979, and three of them Tories – after all, Conservative foreign secretaries have had more chance to resign, since their party has been in office during 26 of those 39 years.

Three of those four resignations took place for honourable reasons. Carrington, Sir Geoffrey (later Lord) Howe and Robin Cook were honourable men – and not in the ironic way that Brutus was described as “an honourable man” in Julius Caesar.

Carrington resigned over the way the Foreign Office had mishandled the prelude to the invasion of the Falklands by Argentina in 1982 by sending misleading signals about our attitude towards retention of those remote islands in the south Atlantic.

Howe resigned in 1989 on the not unreasonable grounds that Thatcher’s attitude to – guess what – Europe had rendered his job impossible. Entering into negotiations was, he declared in a scintillating resignation speech, “like sending your opening batsmen to the crease only for them to find, the moment the first balls are bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain”.

Cook resigned over British participation in the invasion of Iraq. He had the odd misadventure while foreign secretary, and in fact had moved on to become leader of the house when he resigned. His was an honourable resignation on an extremely important issue.

He died young, but his resignation speech still reads like one of the great political speeches of the postwar years, and he goes down in history with his reputation intact. By contrast, Tony Blair’s reputation looks as though it will never recover from his having misled the nation with the “dodgy dossier”. This is a tragedy on several levels, the most recent manifestation being that few people take his pronouncements on Brexit seriously, although he talks perfect sense when saying that the best Brexit deal is to remain where we are, and forget the whole idea.

Unfortunately, the cat was put among the pigeons when, before becoming the worst foreign secretary in living memory, Johnson put his crazed ambition to be leader of the Conservative party and prime minister above the national interest. Taking advantage of his charismatic appeal to the nation – which has always amazed me: he is basically what we used to call a twerp – he opted, against what we are told was his better judgment (always assuming he has any), to be the most prominent leader of the Leave campaign, during which, characteristically, he lied continually.

Those closer to this monstrous blot on our landscape tell us that he did not expect to win, and was really a Remainer, but basically tried to outflank David Cameron and become leader.

Now, I cannot bear the way that most of the media these days seem to be more interested in which of the dozen or more candidates will at some stage take over from May than with how we avoid a national calamity – which it will be if we end up with a so-called hard Brexit and lose the huge advantages of membership of the EU, with no agreement on the various alternatives (Norway, Canada, Switzerland, Mars) currently being touted.

The ultimate irony is that the referendum result was so close that, given the charisma attributed to Johnson, many people think he could have swung the result if, to use the kind of word he seems to favour, he had not behaved like a first-class shit, with horrendous implications for the nation.

Now, back to Carrington: a few years ago a friend of mine was at a Home Counties weekend lunch party, and various young Tories were going on and on about the wonders, or otherwise, of Johnson. Carrington sat listening to all this nonsense until there was a hiatus in the conversation.

“Anyway,” said the former war hero, foreign secretary and chairman of the Conservative party, “he won’t do.”

How right he was. And how wrong is Donald Trump.