Two minutes later and Boris Johnson stood shamefaced, sheepish, that ‘caught with his hand in the sweetie jar’ look on his face. “Bollocks it’s bloody stuck,” he offered.
Not you will note “I’ve got the bike stuck”, rather “it’s stuck”, almost as if someone else put it there, and unfairly bamed him. Having ignored advice, ploughed on, and tried and failed to force a big object through a tiny gap, Johnson said “Can you sort it” and simply disappeared.
Ten minutes later I’d extricated the bike, wheeled it out of the bicycle exit, returned it to its owner and watched him pedal off in that ‘nothing to see here guv’ way of his.
I tell this story not because it wasn’t amusing at the time, it was, but because it is instructure of why, six years on, Johnson is on the way out of a different exit gate, his dream of remaining world king in tatters.
Crazy idea, corners cut, hopeless execution, a stubborn refusal to listen to others, no plan B, no need for change, responsiblity, er no and aside from a wry smile the next day, the distinct sense that it had never happened.