There is increasing speculation in Westminster that Boris Johnson is considering quitting as Prime Minister. It comes as the Tory leader has been getting a hammering in the Tory press. So, this week's edition of the Spectator, the right-wing magazine that Johnson used to edit, led with the question, where's Boris on their front page this week? So, Fraser Nelson writing about a government at sea in the Sun, True Blue Tony Parsons has described our coving testing system as the greatest national humiliation since Suez. And so, that was this week, Kent. And the Times, like the Sun, owned by Rupert Murdoch, has suggested, in a recent leader that they're growing doubts about whether the PM is up for the job. This is not the praise that Johnson craves, and that which he is used to. But details, it's not just that we can speculate, he doesn't like headlines, so he's considering resigning. There are sources quite close to Boris Johnson, who says that this could actually be on the horizon. So, I want to go to another story in the Times. This one's sort of detailing why people around Boris Johnson have doubts that he really wants to do the job. So, the headline is, overburden, underpaid, and misery on his face, Boris Johnson gets the blues, the subheading weighed down by the pandemic and personal issues. The Prime Minister is appearing ever more downbeat. And so, this article interviews, you know, a bunch of people close to Boris Johnson, who were all throwing doubts on the idea that one, he's up for the job and two, he really wants to do it. So, one of the sources is a bunch of Tory MPs who had a meeting with Boris Johnson last Wednesday. So, this was when they were sort of hammering out how Boris Johnson was going to get through the internal market bill, through Parliament. They ended up agreeing that whenever the party was going to break international law Westminster would have to vote on it. Anyway, of that meeting, the Times right. The normally abuliant Mr. Johnson, for whom Jochen Kajoling and back slapping, if it were allowed, is the default form of political operation, seemed unusually serious. Even Somba, he just seems subdued. He was engaged, but he certainly wasn't as lively as you'd expect, said one of those there. You can speculate, does that go back to the illness? Is it the way to responsibility, or is it maybe just a recognition that he's not always very well briefed on things? Most likely, it's some combination of all of those. So, there's this idea, you know, he's not really up to it. But there is a more eyebrow raising concern, which was put in there from a friend of Boris Johnson. Let's get this one up. Those in contact with the Prime Minister, both friends and colleagues say he is finding aspects of the job extraordinarily tough. They are concerned that Mr. Johnson's longstanding tendency for dark moves is being exacerbated by the pressure he is under. On the personal front, they say Mr. Johnson 56 is worried and complaining about money. He is still supporting to different degrees, four out of his six children, has been through an expensive divorce and had his income dropped by more than half as a result of fulfilling his lifetime ambition. And finally, this is the killer quote. This is the one he didn't want, and the country to be reading on the pages of Saturday's newspapers. As one friend put it, Boris, like other Prime Ministers, is very, very badly served. He doesn't have a housekeeper. He has a single cleaner, and they're worried about being able to afford a nanny. He's stuck in the flat and downing street is not a nice place to live. It's not like the LSA or the White House where you can get away from it all because they're so big. Even if he or carry want to go into the Rose Garden, they have to go through the office. As circa, Boris Johnson, he didn't expect to just have one cleaner, to have to employ his own housekeeper. He didn't expect to have to walk through an office to get into the Rose Garden. Surely he cannot take this any longer. He's on £150,000 a year, and even he's having to worry about the availability of childcare. So if that's not an argument for the availability of universal childcare, I don't know what is. I mean, look, Boris Johnson always wants to be Prime Minister. That didn't mean that he necessarily wanted to have to govern. This has been the story of his political career from the very start. Mayor of London loves the junkets and the attention and the press, and he loves being funny, Boris, with the rumpled hair. But actually, when it came to very serious things going on in our city, whether it was the riots following the killing of Mark Dougan in 2011, whether it is much deeper issues to do with affordability of public transport, nowhere to be seen, doesn't want to be a part of it. It's quite into the garden, Bridget Thou, or getting on his zip wire. He's fundamentally an unserious person who's driven by narcissism and a pathological desire to occupy the spotlight. And I've got... This is just me speculating. I think it's got a lot to do with how he was raised. The Johnson's are an absolutely abominable clan, can't stand a single one of them. And I doubt that that was a particularly healthy environment to grow up in. I was going to say more about his winging about having to support four out of his six kids. If he's struggling to do that on 150,000 pounds, imagine how tough it is being on universal credit, where there is a two-child limit, the recipient of the child's benefit portion of your universal credit. I mean, if he hadn't gone to Wheaton, if he hadn't risen up the Conservative Party, he would be the kind of person who'd be... They'd be screaming about on the front of the Daily Mail. This man complaining that he does not have enough money to pay for his six children. They'd be outraged. I don't think there should be outraged. I think we should moralize necessarily about these things. But there is a bit of a double-standard here. I suppose just a close on that Boris Johnson story. I mean, it's the kind of story that can only be written about someone who doesn't really believe in anything, right? Because you can imagine, no, if Jeremy Corbyn became Prime Minister, he wouldn't be considering resigning because he doesn't have enough money for a nanny or a housekeeper or because he has to go through into a garden, to, you know, he has to go through an office to get into a garden. The only reason you can imagine Jeremy Corbyn resigning is if he thought that his position, his role there, was not the position he could take, which was most likely to bring about the kind of social change in Britain that he wants to see. There was a political project and his career was a means to an end, to achieve it. Whereas with Boris Johnson, he's been at the front line of public life for decades. He's risen to the role of Prime Minister. And still, no one can really say what he believes in. And I do find that quite phenomenal, you know, to get so far in politics without having an obvious project. And no one in that article, I recommend you do read it. It's quite entertaining, even if some of it's quite ridiculous. No one in that article is saying the reason Boris Johnson is considering resigning is because he thinks he's already achieved what he wanted to achieve or he thinks that he's not the best person to take forward his particular project because he doesn't have any project whatsoever. The guy became Prime Minister because he's an egotist and he wanted to, you know, say he got the top job after leading the Oxford Union. He went on to become Prime Minister and sitting 10 down in street. And now it's not as entertaining as he thought it would be. He wants to resign. Politics doesn't seem to come into it at all because the guy doesn't give a damn. Anyway, I don't think we should rest our hopes on the idea that Boris Johnson is going to resign purely because, you know, he doesn't have a housekeeper and a nanny and has to walk through an office to go into the garden. I think probably we are going to have to tolerate this man for potentially up to four years. I think probably most of it, potentially even more.