“THE scandal is not that we have failed, but that we have not even tried” was the closing sentence of Boris Johnson’s column in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph, and also provided the newspaper with its front page headline.

For those of you unfamiliar with the inner workings of the newspaper industry, I point out that it is not normal for the musings of the op-ed columnist to end up as the splash (or, alas, usual for the columnist to get paid £275,000 for his weekly insights). Nor do they usually end up leading the BBC’s news bulletins.

But nothing is normal about Boris, or his columns. I can testify to this as a member of what a former editor of the Scotsman, Iain Martin, and Robert Colvile, now director of the Centre for Policy Studies, call the Guild of Telegraph Comment Editors. We are among the people who have, at one time or another, had the job of getting copy out of Boris and getting it on to the page – usually about 15 minutes after the deadline he’s been given.

I call him Boris, by the way, not just because I know him, but because – another abnormality – it actually seems more unnatural to call him Mr Johnson, or the former Mayor of London, or former Foreign Secretary. It’s not just his detractors who find it slightly baffling that he has held those positions.

Despite his propensity for leaving everything until the last possible minute – quite a common failing among hacks – Boris has always recognised the importance of timing, though, like everything else, he regards it as secondary to the importance of Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.

Anyway, back to this week’s hand grenade, ostensibly about the failure of the Government to tackle the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. I wonder, however, if Boris is also mulling ruefully over the moment of his abortive attempt at the leadership of the Conservative Party and post of Prime Minister.

It is obvious that he has not abandoned that ambition. And he might well reckon that, as Tory MPs return to Parliament armed with the knowledge that their supporters think that both the Chequers Deal and Theresa May are a disaster, this could be the moment for a brutal (or as Boris would no doubt put it, a Brutal) dagger in the PM’s back.

A good chunk of the population, of course, thinks that the idea of Boris as Prime Minister is utterly, eternally, preposterous. Even Tory activists had cooled; in Conservative Home’s surveys, he was trailing as fifth choice as leader just over a month ago. But since his resignation as Foreign Secretary, he’s almost quadrupled his support and is back as favourite.

Again, it’s a matter of timing. When Andrew Gimson published his sympathetic biography of Boris in 2006 (when his subject had not yet held an office higher than shadow higher education spokesman), he concluded with speculation that he might one day become Prime Minister. Many reviewers found the idea incredible, even if they did not also find it appalling. But it looked not only entirely credible, but likely, for a day or two after David Cameron’s resignation. Then Michael Gove had a shot at the role of Brutus, and that seemed to be the end of that.

Even though no other current politician has anything like Boris’s almost supernatural ability to bounce back from, or simply ignore, setbacks which would normally end a career, he’s aware that the enormous mess surrounding Brexit and Mrs May’s unique incompetence as a leader provides a window of opportunity which won’t be around for ever. He must be calculating that the moment to have a stab at the leadership is either now, or fairly soon.

Naturally, the whole Tory Party wants rid of Mrs May but, equally naturally, practically nobody wants to be in charge of the parliamentary Tory Party which, like Gaul, est omnis divisa in partes tres. There’s no hope of reconciling the Remainers, the EEA soft-Brexiters and the hardliners until after Chequers – in which nobody except the deluded Mrs May believes – falls to pieces.

That it will is not in doubt, probably long before the Ides of March, which fall on the 29th next year. Boris’s column does not merely rubbish the Chequers plan, but rules out the EEA/Efta transitional option, aiming for “a big and generous Free Trade Deal”, which sounds a lot like the Canada +++ plan described by David Davies as the “reserve parachute”.

This has, for Boris, two advantages. One is that the EU has offered something very like it, and the other is that the ineptitude of the Government’s position has made this option more appealing to most Leavers, and particularly Tory voters – even if many MPs are much more alarmed by it.

The other consideration, judging by the change in Boris’s prospects as a leadership candidate since his resignation, is that rank-and-file Tory activists are so keen to get the issue settled that they would rather have a swashbuckling and unpredictable leader than worry about the details.

This calculation will alarm many; even those who don’t see Boris as an out-and-out buffoon may well be terrified by the sort of careering path a Johnson premiership would follow. Everything we know about Boris suggests he doesn’t so much take a broad-brush approach as dispense with the brush and get in one of those hoses for painting oil tankers.

It is telling that the politician Boris most admires, and of whom he has written a (very careless) biography, is Churchill. In it, he makes no bones about his hero’s shortcomings and failings as a politician, but he roundly endorses the “Great Man” theory of history by pointing out that much of what Churchill achieved was done by persistence, self-belief and sheer force of personality.

Not even the most lunatic Remainers have yet claimed that Brexit is worse than the Second World War – but give them time. And not even Boris Johnson’s most fervent admirer (the Right Honorable A.B. de P. Johnson, MP) goes quite so far as to think he’s in the same league as Churchill.

All the same, these are strange times. Gimson concluded: “In a world where Reagan can become President, it is not preposterous to think of Boris as Prime Minister.” And look who’s President now.