'Hard part' begins as Johnson wins contest

Boris Johnson will become our next prime minister.

A sentence that might thrill you. A sentence that might horrify you. A sentence that 12 months ago even his most die hard fans would have found hard to believe.

But it's not a sentence, unusually maybe for politics, that won't bother you either way.

Because whatever you think of Boris Johnson, he is a politician who is hard to ignore.

With a personality, and perhaps an ego, of a scale that few of his colleagues can match. This is a man who even as a child wanted to be 'world king'.

Now, he is the Tory king, and the Brexiteers are the court.

The challenges are also of a historic scale. He'll take over a government with no real majority, a brew of politics and policy that over three years Whitehall and Brussels have failed to resolve.

And he is a politician, who even his allies who marvel at his gifts admit, struggles to make quick decisions.

One of his backers grimaced as they waited for this morning's announcement: "Now the hard part begins."