Boris’ premiership has resembled a Netflix box-set, so how does it compare to the woes of some of his predecessors?

ON the day Boris Johnson became Prime Minister, he got a text from Winston Churchill’s grandson.

His old friend Sir Nicholas Soames, told me: “I texted Boris saying that when my grandfather became Prime Minister, he opened a bottle of champagne with the family.

And he proposed a toast, ‘Here’s to not buggering it up’.

“And I said to Boris, ‘I pray for all our sakes that you don’t bugger it up’. And that is my hope for Boris.”

“And what is your fear?” I asked Soames. “My fear is that he could bugger it up.”

After 907 days in No 10, Johnson knows he is on the very edge of fulfilling his friend’s darkest fear.

The story of his premiership so far has resembled a Netflix box-set penned by a scriptwriter on speed, blending Shakespeare, Monty Python and The Sopranos.

So how does the trouble that Johnson is now in compare to the woes of some of his predecessors in No 10 since World War Two — and how will his own story end?

When Labour’s Harold Wilson returned to Downing Street in 1974 there was ferocious feuding and jealousy between his three most influential advisers.

On one side was his long-term political secretary Marcia Falkender, rumoured to have at one time slept with Wilson.

Against her were his press secretary Joe Haines and the London School of Economics academic Bernard Donoughue.

Conspiracy to kill

“Marcia had a considerable hold over Harold,” Donoughue told me.

“He was frightened of her. And when she was attacking him, he would reach for the brandy bottle.”

The PM was becoming ill with the tension, and his personal doctor, Joe Stone, was always on call.

“Dr Stone came into my room one day,” Haines told me, “saying he was worried about the stress Marcia was causing Harold. He said something had to be done about it.

“Then Joe Stone said, ‘I could dispose of her. I’m her doctor. And I would write the death certificate’.”

But Haines told me: “Just imagine the headlines. Press Secretary in conspiracy to kill Marcia Falkender. Murder in No 10. So Bernard and I both said no.”

As the Western world’s first female PM, Margaret Thatcher was — like Boris Johnson — a great election winner.

But after 11 years the Iron Lady had grown rusty.

Challenged for the leader- ship by another blond bombshell, Michael Heseltine, she failed to win the first round of voting and had to decide whether to fight the second.

I shall never forgive that and I shall never forget

Theresa May

She summoned her Cabinet ministers to see her one by one. Almost all of them advised her she would lose.

“It was treachery with a smile on its face”, said Mrs Thatcher.

“If you are in politics you expect to be knifed in the back.

"What hurt most of all was I was thrown out after I had taken Britain from the depths of despair to the heights.

"I shall never forgive that and I shall never forget.”

Tony Blair came to power pledging to end the “Tory sleaze” story.

New Labour, he said, would be purer than pure.

But within months his government had granted a special privilege to the Formula One boss Bernie Ecclestone allowing him to keep tobacco companies’ lucrative sponsorship that was being banned from all other major sports.

It was then revealed that Ecclestone had donated £1million to Blair’s party.

Johnson’s own premiership has been like nothing I have ever seen in 60 years of filming Prime Ministers

Michael Cockerell

As the scandal grew, the PM did a disappearing trick.

His spin doctor, Alastair Campbell, insisted the only way out was for Blair “to go on television and get a good kicking from John Hum- phrys”.

On air, Blair protested: “I would never do anything improper.

I think that most people who have dealt with me think I am a pretty straight kind of guy — and I am.”

Not a defence one could imagine Boris Johnson using. Throughout David Cameron’s time as Prime Minister, he had a love-hate relationship with Johnson, whose charisma he envied.

When Johnson got famously stuck on a zip wire, Cameron said: “With any other politician in the world it would be a disaster.

"But with Boris, it will be a triumph. He defies all the laws of political gravity.”

And Cameron later said, after Johnson successfully led the Leave campaign in the Brexit referendum: “Boris has ruined my bloody career.”

Johnson’s own premiership has been like nothing I have ever seen in 60 years of filming Prime Ministers.

The one man who stood up to him was the notorious Dominic Cummings, whom he brought into Downing Street as his all-powerful chief adviser

Michael Cockerell

All his life, Bojo’s main mode of transport has been to fly by the seat of his pants.

And he runs No 10 not as a centre of government, but as a court — with himself as king.

The one man who stood up to him was the notorious Dominic Cummings, whom he brought into Downing Street as his all-powerful chief adviser.

But the two men fell out.

Cummings says he told Johnson: “This whole No 10 system is chaos. You are more frightened of me having the power to stop the chaos than you are of the chaos.”

The PM laughed and replied: “You’re right. Chaos isn’t that bad, chaos means that everyone has to look to me to see who’s in charge.”

As the tragi-comic tale of No 10’s culture of non-party parties, drinking, cheese eating and dancing through a pandemic continues,

Johnson will need to deploy all his legendary skills as a world-class escapologist to hold on to his crown.