What a strange country we live in! Conservative MPs and Ministers force Boris Johnson out as an electoral liability, rather than for blatant sleaze and incompetence.

Having at long last decided that Johnson was unfit for purpose, they kept him in post for three months, free to destroy evidence of mismanagement.

His party may think he’s a lame duck, but a former Tory Prime Minister, John Major, fears for the future of the Conservative Party, saying it is a “dangerous” move. Johnson is now at liberty to mobilise allies for or against for the leadership contenders while abandoning any semblance of governing the country.

Having helped to depose Johnson, the leadership contenders now praise his “achievements” in the hope of winning over his few remaining allies.

They mention Covid, on which their government wasted billions of pounds on dubious contracts and useless equipment. Johnson got the timing of lockdowns wrong, a failure which caused thousands of unnecessary infections and deaths. He falsely claimed that Brexit enabled the faster development of anti-Covid measures.

The successful vaccination programme came from NHS efficiency, not private business or political decisions. To some, Covid must have seemed like an opportunity to secretly loot the public finances on a grand scale.

‘Getting Brexit done’ is another dubious ‘achievement,’ because Brexit is very far from done, and continues to devastate the country’s economy. Its economic impact is at least twice as damaging as that of Covid.

People also single out Johnson’s handling of the Ukraine war, but as Tory grandee Lord Heseltine and others have pointed out, any British Prime Minister would have done the same – except that Johnson used it for publicity purposes to avoid confronting the chaos he has caused in Britain.

In fact, all these ‘achievements’ seem charades in which Johnson shamelessly exploited his position. He trailed round his publicly funded photographers to produce photos which media reproduced to enhance his popularity, but without examining the reality behind the photos. The leadership contenders must have known and understood what has been going on since 2019.

They were embedded in so many of these big lies.

Claiming to be a Johnson continuity candidate by praising his ‘achievements’ is hypocrisy, an appeal only to the 100,000-200,000 Conservative Party members who will decide our next Prime Minister.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson's 'achievements' are charades - Yorkshire Post Letters