Sunak replacing the bumbling Johnson marks the return of the traditional, serious Tory leader

Boris Johnson might seem like the paragon of a Tory prime minister. It is easy to assume – from the other side of the sea – that the bumbling, quaffing, foppish man is a lodestar to which all of his contemporaries aspire. But this is not true: Johnson is an anomaly, a blip, a quirk in the system. The true nature of the modern Conservative Party is not reflected in its most difficult son.

Rainforests have been felled in attempts to understand and articulate Johnson’s psyche. But there are a few obvious qualities: he is slapdash, he is disinterested in the detail, he is scruffy, he is overflowing with charisma, he is untrustworthy, he was born into the libraries of Oxford but forged in the corridors of Westminster.

Those who are repulsed by the Tories might find it expedient to pretend that Johnson is their archetype. But that would just be an exercise in satisfying one’s priors. And the same goes for the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg, another man taken as the standard bearer for all of the Conservatives’ worst instincts. But even Rees-Mogg sticks out – with his oversized double-breasted suit, six children and cadence of a Victorian butler – as an odd entity among his peers. These men are far from paradigms of the British right.

Instead the party has seen a return to form in recent months (after years of Johnson and the short-lived Liz Truss-paroxysm). Rishi Sunak has stepped in to remind the Conservative Party what it really is: staid, managerial, bureaucratic, decorous and sedate. Sunak and his allies might self-style as the grown-ups in the room – setting themselves apart from the few low-tax populists still pining for Johnson – but in reality they are just the convention.

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Before Johnson there was the awkward Theresa May and her humourless chancellor Philip Hammond. Current chancellor Jeremy Hunt looks far more comfortable in a suit in the cabinet office than perhaps he ever would in a Barbour jacket with a shotgun. It’s hard to imagine Sunak swilling brandy by a fire in a gentlemen’s club. Even Matt Hancock – for all of his strangeness – was nothing like Johnson. Details, policy and serious negotiation are all back on the table.

But Boris-mania felt new and exciting only because it was a deviation from the standard

This distinction is not just skin – or smoking jacket – deep. The Johnson project altered the contours of the party for several years, the aftershocks will be felt for even more. May’s own party turned against her after months of frustrated stagnation – the deal wasn’t bold enough, it could never work, she had been dragged across the coals enough times, she was weak. The moment – so the party thought – was ripe for a change, a new dawn. All of this was a petri dish perfectly designed to generate the conditions for Boris-mania.

But Boris-mania felt new and exciting only because it was a deviation from the standard. His swashbuckling confidence and generalised belief that everything would work out injected a different energy into a party that was deflated. Only the exceptional circumstances of an impossible-to-work-out Brexit gave space for an exceptional, Johnson-shaped response. And he sailed into No 10, securing a historic majority, on the back of the ill-fated Get Brexit Done mantra.

This mantra was a statement of intent, it was not a signal that Johnson was prepared to roll up his sleeves and get into the details. In hindsight, it was perhaps exactly at this moment that the Johnson project became doomed to fail. Because that mode of politics just does not make sense to the European Union (or to Ireland, for that matter). It was out of character for the party to premise a piece of legislation on the idea that it could all be worked out via a so-called “fudge” over Northern Ireland later down the line. And it ultimately threw the Tories into a profound identity crisis. Johnson may have excited them, but he confounded all of their instincts too.

This is why it took so long to arrive at the current position – 2023, only now with a potential route out of the quagmire. The spirit of the EU – that it rigidly adheres to its systems and rules, often with profound inflexibility – eluded Johnson.

But now the party is back in its natural habitat – traditional, serious, unsexy – it is clear that Sunak understands the brief better than Johnson ever could. He has softened feelings on the Continent for the United Kingdom, and cleared the path to the Windsor Framework via his diligence, scrupulousness and well pressed suits.

It may be boring. Johnson – for all his failings – was alluring. And, as Financial Times columnist Simon Kuper writes, he was in possession of an uncanny political asset: “being all too easy to write about”. I am sure he will be missed in a strange way.

But now the Conservative Party has shed his influence, it is on its way to understanding itself again. Perhaps Johnson was never really one of them to begin with.