But operation "Save Big Dog" - a campaign launched by his allies earlier this year at the height of the partygate scandal - failed to save Boris Johnson.

He'd hoped that a "dead cat" strategy of "red meat" policies such as bashing the BBC and sending asylum seekers to Rwanda would save him.

But it failed and now he's "dead meat", with Tory MPs not prepared to tolerate his lies and dodging the rules any longer.

Johnson has also been compared to a cat with nine lives, surviving endless scandals and crises.

However, in the end it was the three Ps - Paterson, partygate and Pincher - that meant he used up those nine lives.

So what were the nine lives of Boris Johnson?

Not long after joining "The Thunderer" as a graduate trainee at The Times, Johnson wrote a piece that included a made-up quote attributed to his godfather. The editor, Charlie Wilson, a hard-as-nails Glaswegian known as "Gorbals", who had a face like thunder when angry, found out and sacked him.

But the P45 turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because Johnson moved to The Daily Telegraph, where his journalistic career took off spectacularly.

He became Brussels correspondent and achieved notoriety for stories such as the EU banning prawn cocktail crisps, standardised condom sizes and straight bananas. By now, he was famous.

While editor of The Spectator and MP for Henley, he had an on-off affair with columnist Petronella Wyatt, during which time she had an abortion and a miscarriage.

When the affair was exposed he denied it, calling it "an inverted pyramid of piffle". Tory leader Michael Howard, as tough a boss as Charlie Wilson, sacked him from his relatively obscure post as shadow arts minister.

Then there was an affair with journalist Anna Fazackerley. When he was London mayor, he had an illegitimate child with art consultant Helen Macintyre.

Much more high-profile was Jennifer Arcuri, a flamboyant and extrovert American businesswoman, who claimed she had a four-year affair with him, from 2012 to 2016, and that they slept together in a flat where she had a pole dancer's pole.

In 2020, he divorced his second wife, barrister Marina Wheeler, and last year married Carrie Symonds, a former Tory press chief.

Boris Johnson has made some cringeworthy gaffes, most of which have one thing in common - the accusation that they were racist or, in some cases, homophobic.

For example, he called black people "flag-waving picaninnies with water melon smiles" when he mocked Tony Blair's foreign travels.

He accused Papua New Guinea of "cannibalism and chief killing", he accused Turkey's president Erdogan of "sex with a goat" and called him a "w***erer" from Ankara".

During the 2016 Brexit referendum, Johnson claimed President Obama had a "part-Kenyan dislike of the British Empire" and also compared the European Union to Hitler's Germany.

He has also called gay men "tank-topped bum boys" and claimed Muslim women wearing burkas "look like letter boxes".

Jailed Iranian-British dual national, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, was released by Iran in March after spending six years in detention following her conviction over an alleged plot to topple the Tehran regime.

She worked for the Thomson Reuters Foundation - a charitable body campaigning for media freedom. The Iranians claim she was peddling "propaganda against the regime", but she says she was on holiday when she was arrested.

Nazanin and her husband, Richard Ratcliffe, have been heavily critical of Johnson's handling of her case, and failure to secure her release sooner.

Johnson's blunder, while foreign secretary, was to tell the Foreign Affairs Select Committee in 2017 that she was "teaching people journalism", which was not true.

His critics claim it showed carelessness, a slapdash failure to master his brief and a cavalier disregard for Nazanin's safety.

This was seen as another crass and insensitive remark made by Boris Johnson when he was foreign secretary.

He said it at an event for EU diplomats in London when asked about corporate concerns over a hard Brexit. It revealed his contempt for pro-EU business leaders, and particularly for the strongly pro-Remain and anti-Brexit Confederation of British Industry (CBI).

That contempt was laid bare once again during a shambolic fiasco of a speech at the CBI conference last November when, clearly ill-prepared, he got his notes jumbled up, totally lost his thread and started rambling about Peppa Pig.

He gave the impression he didn't care about offending the CBI and regarded them as a bunch of unreconstructed 'Remoaners' and enemies of Brexit.

Prime ministers have form for enjoying freebie holidays in luxury locations, but Boris Johnson likes to get Tory donors to pay for his.

He and then-fiancée, Carrie, went to the millionaire's playground of Mustique in the Caribbean for a £15,000 holiday at Christmas 2019.

After a luxury villa was donated by Carphone Warehouse tycoon David Ross, he was censured by the Standards Committee of MPs for failing to declare adequately who wrote the cheque. Not for the first time, the committee said.

Then there was "wallpaper-gate", when he got another Tory donor, Lord Brownlow, to pay a large part of a £112,000 bill for £840-a-roll gold wallpaper by posh designer Lulu Lyttle for his Downing Street flat.

The Tories were fined by the Electoral Commission for an inaccurate donation report and the PM's own ethics adviser Lord Geidt - who later quit - criticised him for acting "unwisely".

Last month, it was reported Johnson wanted Tory donors to pay for a £150,000 treehouse for toddler son Wilfred at Chequers. It was also reported he wanted to appoint Carrie, then his girlfriend, as his chief of staff when he was foreign secretary and in 2020 he asked Cabinet Secretary Simon Case to seek a job for Carrie with a royal charity.

The PM's Brexit ally Owen Paterson, a former Cabinet minister, was ruled by the Standards Committee to have committed an "egregious" breach of lobbying rules after being paid more than £200,000 by the private health company Randox.

In a move that caused outrage, Johnson ordered his MPs to vote against a 30-day suspension from the Commons for Paterson.

But after a huge political backlash, he performed a humiliating U-turn and backed down. Paterson then resigned as an MP, triggering a by-election in which his majority of nearly 23,000 in North Shropshire was spectacularly overturned by the Liberal Democrats.

The row left many of Johnson's own MPs furious with the prime minister for his apparent determination to defend a Brexiteer crony found guilty of a serious breach of parliamentary rules.

Dominic Cummings, the PM's former aide who was ousted from Downing Street after his notorious lockdown-busting trip to Barnard Castle in May 2020, took a brutal revenge on Johnson in a series of blogs contradicting his denials.

At first, the PM said there were no parties in Downing Street. Then, when a video emerged of former spokeswoman Allegra Stratton staging a mock news conference and laughing, he claimed he was furious and apologised.

It was revealed that an email from his close aide Martin ("Party Marty") Reynolds had told staff to "bring your own booze". In all, police handed out 126 fines to 83 people in Downing Street, including Johnson and then chancellor Rishi Sunak.

A report by top civil servant Sue Gray was devastating, declaring some of the behaviour in Downing Street was difficult to justify and some of the events revealed "a serious failure" to observe proper standards of government. There was fury from bereaved relatives who lost loved ones during the pandemic and many Tory MPs.

More lies from Boris Johnson were the final straw for Conservative MPs.

Last Thursday, Chris Pincher quit as deputy chief whip after admitting he drank "far too much" and being accused of groping two men at the elite Carlton Club.

For 24 hours, Johnson failed to suspend him from the parliamentary party, until a formal complaint was made.

Then Johnson denied he was warned about Pincher's previous conduct and concerns about his fitness for the job of deputy chief whip when he was appointed in February this year.

This was even though he had previously resigned as a whip in 2017 after being accused of behaving like a "pound-shop Harvey Weinstein" by a former Olympic rower.

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As several more allegations against Pincher emerged, it was reported that Johnson had said Pincher, a close ally who was part of "Save Big Dog" earlier this year, was "handsy" and quipped: "Pincher by name, Pincher by nature" - reports he never denied.

As the Tory backbench mutiny reached a deafening crescendo, cabinet heavyweights Rishi Sunak and Sajid Javid resigned, two weeks after Tory chairman Oliver Dowden quit after double by-election defeats in Wakefield and Tiverton & Honiton.

After Sunak and Javid - who made a blockbuster resignation statement in the Commons that MPs compared to Sir Geoffrey Howe's in 1990 - went, more than 30 resignations followed and a delegation of Cabinet ministers - including Nadhim Zahawi who'd been appointed chancellor less than 24 hours earlier - told him the game was up and it was time to go.

That wasn't the end, though. He sent the delegation away and insisted he was fighting on.
But overnight, after the number of government resignations topped 50, including more cabinet ministers, he bowed to the inevitable and announced his resignation, just under three years after becoming PM.