Boris Johnson is out of the race to be PM after a day that was dramatic even by recent standards. Political editor Chris Lloyd watched the plot unfold

IT is 400 years since William Shakespeare died, but his characters are still very much alive.

Yesterday, as the post-referendum plot took the most unexpected twist, Lady Macbeth could be sensed in the background, urging her husband – Michael Gove – to screw his courage to the sticking place and to treacherously knife the anointed king.

The victim was, of course, King Boris of Brexit.

It was Boris Johnson’s force of character and strength of personality that helped Leave to victory. If the out campaign had been led solely by the nerdy Mr Gove and the frequently-beyond-the-pale Nigel Farage, it is unlikely that we would now be quitting the European Union.

And so, it was generally assumed, the crown of power would be placed on Mr Johnson’s tousled blond hair with Mr Gove cast in a supporting role, like that of Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Mr Johnson probably deserved it – he had gambled his career on backing Brexit, and so to the victor the spoils…

Yet there have always been doubts about Mr Johnson. To many people, he is good fun, always up for a jolly jape, but he can also be a dangerous buffoon. In fact, he often seems to prefer a wizard wheeze over whiff-whaff to a principled battle over our borders.

That’s why the French paper La Liberation had him on its front cover on the day after the referendum: its picture showed a corpulent Mr Johnson trussed up like Billy Bunter in a suit, Union flags in his hand and a hard hat on his head while he drooped forlornly from a broken zipwire. The headline was a simple message to Britain. “Good luck”, it said.

Deeper than that, some Brexit supporters also began to wonder how truly committed Mr Johnson was to their cause as he wrote about compromising with the EU so Britain kept its place in the single market and its borders open to immigrants.

It was this sense of slide that prompted Mr Gove’s wife Sarah Vine, a columnist on the ultra-Brexit Daily Mail, to write a private email to him, girding his loins for his discussions with Mr Johnson, and urging him: “Do not concede any ground. Be your stubborn best. GOOD LUCK.”

The email, conveniently, went to the wrong address, and Ms Vine became Lady Macbeth, forcing her wimpish husband to act.

And so yesterday he did, giving Mr Johnson just five minutes notice of his intention to stand as Conservative leader.

Mr Johnson viewed it as the ultimate betrayal, the stab in the back from a supposedly loyal colleague, and he veered into Shakespeare to show it. This, he said stealing words from Julius Caesar, is “a time not to fight against the tide of history, but to take that tide at the flood, and sail on to fortune”.

Of course, in Shakespeare’s play, Emperor Caesar is unexpectedly knifed by his honourable pal, Marcus Brutus, mouthing the ultimate words of betrayal as he died: “Et tu, Brute.”

But don’t worry about Mr Johnson. He will sail on to a fortune – probably from television. He could even replace Ant and Dec: “The Conservative MPs have been voting…and Michael Gove…it is not you…”

Yesterday’s events show how the Brexiteers had no post-referendum plan, no clear strategy for how they might extricate the country from its greatest constitutional crisis. They recklessly pushed Britain to the brink, and now Mr Johnson is departing the stage.

But Mr Gove is also damaged – Mr Johnson was not his first victim, as he also knifed the man who was his best friend for 20 years, David Cameron, effectively ending his career. Not that many teachers will be surprised. When Education Secretary, Mr Gove famously claimed to smell the sense of defeatism in east Durham schools without ever visiting, and he became so widely disliked that Mr Cameron had to move him in July 2014.

So Theresa May suddenly steps into the spotlight as the front-runner to become the next prime minister. Just as she rose above the ridiculous hyperbole of the EU debate, so yesterday she stood coldly aloof from the bloody betrayals.

But she also delivered the day’s most devastating line, with such a perfect understand of plurals that it could have been written by the Bard himself. "Boris negotiated in Europe," she said. "I seem to remember last time he did a deal with the Germans, he came back with three nearly-new water cannon."

Because this is Shakespeare, there is a sub-plot which provides a little light relief from the main events. It features Bottom, a figure of fun played by Jeremy Corbyn, and the rude mechanicals squabbling over the future of the Labour Party. Mr Corbyn, who does not have enough cast members to fill even half the roles in a shadow cabinet, is clinging to the hope that his democratic mandate – he was elected by 250,000 members of the Labour Party – can trump the 9.3m votes won by Labour MPs at the last election.

Of course, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Bottom ends up wearing an ass’s head…

That, though, is a comedy – Shakespeare would surely think that what is happening to our country is a tragedy.