Like The Roman?

Comparisons are being made between Boris Johnson and Enoch Powell. If you doubt that Johnson's career is over, then read that sentence again. Comparisons are being made between Boris Johnson and Enoch Powell.

Johnson is nowhere near as clever or as hardworking as Powell was, and he has nothing like the previous Ministerial achievements that Powell had by 1968. Nor is Johnson an original thinker, as Powell could be. Johnson has managed the remarkable feat of writing a book that is utterly conventional even by the standards of a popular biography of Winston Churchill.

But Powell lived another 30 years after the Rivers of Blood speech, also delivered in his mid-fifties. He never held a front bench position again. He was rarely permitted to write for the papers or the current affairs magazines. 

Within six years of that speech, Powell was out of the Conservative Party altogether. Immediately upon its delivery, he became confined, as he would remain for the rest of his life, to the fringe audiences of the Monday Club, the National Front, and an Ulster Unionist Party that was more like today's DUP (which has itself moved quite considerably during the same period).

Powell ended up a complete crank, attracting universal derision in his eighties by hawking around his potty theories about the origins of the Gospels. 

Johnson may have been able to have articles by both his father and his sister published in his defence in yesterday's newspapers, a state of affairs that we accept as normal in this country. But in the coming decades, he awaits at least as tragicomic a fate.