Putative British PM Boris Johnson inspires vitriol from his former editor

It looks like the end of a long association between colleagues, Max Hastings, The Spectator, June 22:

I am besieged by media folk asking when I shall make good on a four-year-old threat to flee to Buenos Aires should Boris Johnson become prime minister. How can I get on to a flight, I ask, when so many other voters are already wait-listed? … But there will be infinite historical curiosity about how the Tory parliamentary party could scramble to deliver Britain into the custody of a man whom few of its members would entrust with their wallet, handbag or spouse … colleagues recognise the egomania that precludes concern for the interests of any human being save himself.

Former newspaper proprietor Conrad Black, who hired Johnson and Hastings, The Spectator, June 29:

(Boris) had his lapses, but he was capable, successful and reliable when it counted, and he is, as he appears, a pleasant man. Max is an ill-tempered snob with a short attention span. He has his talents, but it pains me to report that when he (was) seriously tested, he was a coward and a flake.

Michael St George, The Conservative Woman website, June 26:

Now Sir Max is a fine historian, but an implacable Establishment Remainer. I wonder why he felt it expedient to omit why, if Johnson was so useless, he employed him for so long when he was editor of The Daily Telegraph, and why he so enthusiastically backed Johnson’s 2008 campaign to become mayor of London.

More velvet fist from Hastings, London’s The Guardian, June 25:

I have known Johnson since the 1980s, when I edited The Daily Telegraph and he was our flamboyant Brussels correspondent … while he is a brilliant entertainer who made a popular (mayor) for London, he is unfit for national office because it seems he cares for no interest save his own fame and gratification.

Master in college at Eton Martin Hammond in a letter to Boris’s father Stanley, April 10, 1982:

Boris really has adopted a disgracefully cavalier attitude to his classical studies … Boris sometimes seems affronted when criticised for what amounts to a gross failure of responsibility (and surprised at the same time that he was not appointed captain of the school for next half): I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation which binds everyone else.

Cabinet minister Amber Rudd speaking during a 2016 debate before the Brexit referendum:

Boris, well, he’s the life and soul of the party but he’s not the man you want driving you home at the end of the evening.

Martin Fletcher, The New Statesman America, June 11:

It will be the ultimate betrayal of their country. Having gravely weakened and diminished Britain through their blind pursuit of Brexit, Conservative MPs and party members now look likely to make Boris Johnson, a leading architect of our nation’s present misery, prime minister. They will do so not because they believe that Johnson can heal the country, or has an outstanding record of public service, or embodies the qualities of duty, honesty and integrity expected of a national leader. They will do so because they believe that he alone can neuter the rival Brexit Party by out-Faraging Nigel Farage.

Sean O’Grady, The Independent, Thursday:

By the end of a chaotic, crisis-ridden Johnson government … the red wine stains on (girlfriend) Carrie’s lovely sofa will be as nothing compared with the red ink he’ll have spilled on the public finances and the downgrades in our credit rating … Tories should ask: would you lend Boris Johnson a tenner and expect to ever get it back?