f a leader wants to rule as if he is ruling a one-party state, the first institution he needs to bend to his will is not the judiciary, civil service or free press but the ruling party. The party gave him power and could take it away. He must turn it into the equivalent of Vladimir Putin’s United Russia or Donald Trump’s Republicans and fill it with politicians too venal and frightened to challenge the boss. Boris Johnson may not know much but he knows about power. God help Conservative MPs who injure his bottomless vanity. They all now know they will not just lose the chance of a job in his cabinet or a retirement home in the House of Lords. Johnson will attempt to destroy them. At first sight, his failure to impose the hopeless Chris Grayling as chair of parliament’s intelligence and security committee is one of the few merry moments 2020 has given us. “Only Chris Grayling could lose a rigged election,” said the Westminster wags. Johnson did not realise until it was too late that a politician who could not park a car in an empty field would be outmanoeuvred. Say what you like about Julian Lewis, the Conservative MP who manoeuvred his way to the prize, but he understands defence and intelligence and is not a creature of Downing Street. His knowledge ought to have been a recommendation, given that the quid pro quo for granting the intelligence services more powers was granting the committee the power to scrutinise them. Johnson’s reaction revealed his littleness. He stripped Lewis of the Tory whip. If he does not restore it, Lewis cannot retain his seat at the next election. Tory politicians now know that the price of angering the thin-skinned boss is a career-ending punishment. Johnson first expelled dissidents in September last year when he withdrew the Conservative whip from 21 MPs who tried to stop a no-deal Brexit. Johnson dismissed their defence that supporters of Brexit had never told the public in 2016 that crashing out of the EU without a deal was an option. (A point worth remembering as we could still crash out in January or leave with a deal so bad the result will be almost as dire.) He readmitted 11 before the 2019 election, as John Major had readmitted rebels who defied him before the 1997 election. Ten others, including David Gauke, Philip Hammond, Rory Stewart, Justine Greening and Dominic Grieve, remained banished. And that was the end of them. The attack on Lewis takes his mean-mindedness to a new level. Parties can reasonably expel MPs for repeatedly voting against the whip or refusing to support the manifesto. Lewis’s crime was merely to win a committee chairmanship with the backing of MPs from other parties. Every chair of a parliamentary committee wants to be able to say they have the confidence of members from rival parties. It’s almost part of the job description. Johnson’s desire for retribution may not be sated. Tory MPs pointed me to an exchange in the Commons when Peter Bone for the Conservatives and Kevin Brennan for Labour asked Jacob Rees-Mogg to promise the government would not use its majority to remove Lewis from the committee. Rees-Mogg dodged their questions. Conservative politicians talk about Johnson with a venom few socialists can match. It’s not that he’s a criminal like Putin, they say. He doesn’t have the balls to be truly evil. Rather, he is a pathetically insecure narcissist who turns on you if you don’t feed his craving for applause. “He’s an abject, hectoring, incompetent show-off,” said one. “If you don’t love him or can’t fake a love for him, he will go for you.” I learned this when I made disobliging remarks about Johnson for the right-leaning magazine Standpoint in the 2010s. After publication, I was trudging back from the supermarket when Johnson spotted me. He drove his bike off the road and on to the pavement straight at me. He was both angry – “how could you write that?” – and pleading – “you’re really on my side, aren’t you? Aren’t you?” The concepts of the “snowflake”, who cannot take criticism, and the “cry bully”, who plays the victim as he lashes out, had not been invented then, which was a pity as I could have used them both. I later learned he had screamed at the editor for daring to run an article critical of the Churchill of our age. Frauds cannot stand the sight of honest men and women. They must surround themselves with counterfeits who reflect their dishonesty back at them. Britain has seen so many die during the Covid-19 pandemic, and will have a European deal that will kick a bleeding country when it’s down, because Johnson forced competent and principled men and women out of the Conservative party or left them on the backbenches. He could not bear to be in their presence. And to be fair, they could not bear to be in his. The spite behind Johnson’s attempts to manipulate scrutiny of the intelligence services appears a minor point given the scale of our troubles. But the devil, like God, dwells in the detail, and this scandal shows all Johnson’s vices in miniature. He prevented the British from reading the committee’s report on Russian interference in British elections before they voted in the 2019 election. Although the committee is the only means by which parliament can scrutinise the security services, Johnson showed his contempt for parliament and for accountability by refusing to allow it to meet from December 2019 to July 2020. When he could delay no longer, he tried to fix it by installing a courtier without knowledge of the intelligence services or any discernible qualities beyond a willingness to abase himself before Johnson. When the fix failed and the more deserving candidate won, he tried to destroy him. Such is our prime minister, ladies and gentlemen. Our best hope is that he is such a useless authoritarian he will destroy himself before he destroys everyone else. • Nick Cohen is an Observer columnist