Perhaps only to be contrarian, and perhaps entirely incorrectly, I have always taken a dim view of the achievements of Sir Ernest Shackleton.

His great voyage across Antarctica set off three years after the South Pole had already been reached. His boat was crushed by sea ice long before Antarctica had managed to raise itself above the horizon. Miracle. Nevertheless, he somehow compelled his men to paddle their way to safety at South Georgia Island, in tiny lifeboats, 720 miles across freezing ocean.

To which the correct response is: so what? Why should we be expected to find heroism in taking oneself and others deliberately, and pointlessly into the jaws of danger, but managing to escape unscathed? It is little more than the 21st-century equivalent of the YouTuber, seeking fame and fortune by pointing his GoPro at himself whilst hanging one handed from the 18th floor of a half built skyscraper. Who, frankly, cares?

And thus we turn to Boris Johnson, and the breathless reports from Biarritz, from “well-placed sources” that there is “movement”. Paris is moving. Berlin is moving. Brussels is moving. The ground beneath the backstop is starting to shift. A “deal” could yet happen. EU officials, we are told, are talking of seeing a “serious politician”, a man “trying to find a solution to a problem”.

This, of course, is the story Johnson seeks to write himself. The hero who saved his nation in its hour of need. Johnson is a straightforward narcissist. He has delivered a crisis for himself to solve. The little lives of others are merely the pages on which he believes himself entitled to write the Boris Johnson story. The needless man of the pointless hour.

He has joked and japed his way around Biarritz, jabbing his finger, smirking at the television cameras, as ever, unable to compute that, 34 years on, he is not still in the Oxford Union. He has swum around a rock, and told the EU, it has a hole in it, “but you won’t see it if you stay on the beach”.

He is, as ever, his own tragic Churchill tribute act. There was, to his great regret, no darkest hour waiting for him, so he switched off the lights himself.

The “backstop” is not a serious problem. It is one that has been invented to ameliorate the vandalism of Brexit – Johnson’s personal vandalism, done because he is too straightforwardly execrable to understand the nation is not the back room of an Oxfordshire pub, for him to smash up for fun.

Boris Johnson's famous relatives Show all 11 1 /11 Boris Johnson's famous relatives Boris Johnson's famous relatives 1. King George II of Great Britain and Ireland, Elector of Hanover (1683 to 1760) Boris Johnson is a Hanoverian, and, thus distantly related to the Queen, David Cameron (via William IV) and Danny Dyer (via Edward III), among others. Boris's paternal grandmother, Yvonne Eileen Williams, known in the family as "Granny Butter" and whose family name was de Pfeffel, was a descendant of Prince Paul Von Wurttemberg. The German prince was, in turn, a direct descendant of George II. Discovered by genealogists f other BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are, Johnson commented, in 2008: "I felt I was the product of newcomers to Britain so it is totally bizarre, surreal in fact, to be told that in fact my Great x 8 Granddad is George II. But don't neglect the point that he shares that distinction with 1,023 others – there must be several thousand other people out there in the same position.” National Portrait Gallery Boris Johnson's famous relatives 2. The “Mummy of Basel”, Anna Catharina Bischoff (1719 to 1787) Last year, scientists in the Swiss city of Basel solved a decades-old mystery over the identity of a mummified woman. DNA extracted from the mummy’s gig toe indicates that the female is a great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother of Boris Johnson. The body was uncovered in 1975 while renovations were being done on Basel's Barfüsser Church, and was buried at the altar, wearing fine clothes, indicating she was at least well-to-do if not nobility. High levels of mercury in her remains suggested she had been treated for syphilis (the metal also helped preserve her). National Gallery of Basel Boris Johnson's famous relatives 3. Ali Kemal (1867 to 1922) (Pictured with wife Winifred Brun) For a man who made so much capital in the 2016 referendum on the prospect of Turkey joining the EU and its 80 million citizens thus enjoying free movement to the UK, Boris Johnson sometimes makes a surprisingly big deal of his Turkish Muslim great-grandfather on his father’s side, who he claims was an asylum seeker. Ali Kemal, according to his famous descendant, came to Britain because it was “a beacon of generosity and openness”. I t might be overstating it, but he did live in exile in England for a time. Unknown Boris Johnson's famous relatives 4. George Williams (1821 to 1905) Sir George, as he became, is the great (x4) grandfather of Boris Johnson, and was one of the founders of the Young Men’s Christian Association or YMCA, in 1841. An evangelical apostle of “muscular Christianity”, George took it upon himself to organise some fellow drapers and establish a safe place for young men where they could be shielded from the debauchery and the temptations of the flesh and the grape. No sofas would suffer red wine stains in the hostel. Since then it has gone global, today assisting 58 million people across 119 countries, which is almost as many as Boris helps. A social visionary of his time, George was knighted for his works by Queen Victoria in 1894. National Portrait Gallery Boris Johnson's famous relatives 6. King Friedrich of Wurttemberg (1754 to 1816) Though stocky of build, and handy in a game of rugger, Boris Johnson is not especially heavy or tall. This ancestor was. King Friedrich stood 6 foot 11 inches, and weighed 31 stone (2.12 metres/200 kilograms). Napoleon remarked that God had created the Prince to demonstrate the utmost extent to which the human skin could be stretched without bursting. There are rumours that he was bisexual and enjoyed the close companionship of young noblemen. This added to the strains on his marriage to Augusta, who was the granddaughter of King George II. One of their four children, Prince Paul is the link to the Johnsons, via an illegitimate daughter he fathered in Paris with an actor named Friederike Margrethe Porth. Ludwigsburg Castle Archive Boris Johnson's famous relatives 7. Professor Elias Lowe (1879 to 1969) Elias is Boris Johnson’s mother Charlotte’s great grandfather. The distinguished Princeton scholar and student of ancient scriptures (palaeographer) , Elias arrived in the United States as a refugee from Lithuania in 1891, and was affine of Albert Einstein. Jewish, Lowe came for a line of revered rabbis. Although he cannot be counted Hallachially Jewish, the Jewish Chronicle makes him 5 per cent Jewish on their reckoning. Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences Boris Johnson's famous relatives 8. Helen Lowe-Porter (1876 to 1963) Helen Tracey Lowe-Porter. is Boris Johnson's mother Charlotte’s great grandmother. An American, she married the Lithuanian-born academic Elisa Lowe, and is said to have been probably the most prominent literary translator in the English-speaking world working from German to English in the twentieth century. However, not necessarily the best and in such circles her reputation is contested. In any event, she retained for 50 years the exclusive rights to translate the works of her friend Thomas Mann. Her and Elias’ daughter Beatrice is Charlotte Johnson (nee Fawcett’s) mother. Lowe-Porter family Boris Johnson's famous relatives 9. Sir Henry Fawcett MP (1833 to 1884) Before Boris and Jo Johnson became MPs and minsters, there was Sir Henry Fawcett – Britain’s first blind MP. He was the husband of the famous suffragette Millicent Garrett Fawcett, and thus an ancestor of Boris on his mother’s side - though the family tree isn’t clear on how close they are related. Glasgow University Boris Johnson's famous relatives 10. Prince Paul of Wurttemberg (1785 to 1852) Odd looking, an amusing womaniser (remind you of anyone?), this minor German aristocrat was the progenitor of the Johnson’s posh pedigree, such as it is. His affair with an actress is Paris, Fredericke Porth, gave rise to a daughter (out of wedlock as they used to say) provided the link back to the royal families of Wurttemberg and Hanover, and thus of Great Britain. By the same token it means that Stanley, Boris, Rachel, Leo and Jo, and the rest of them along that branch of the tree, are also distantly related to most of the royal families of Europe including the Russian Romanovs – Johnson stands connected, albeit tenuously, to the Belgian, Danish, Dutch, Luxembourg, Norwegian and Swedish families, plus the German Kaiser. Paul had five declared children, and two illegitimate ones, at least that are known about. National Archive Holland Boris Johnson's famous relatives 11. Fredericke Porth (1777 to 1860) When, on the BBC show Who Do You Think You Are? Boris Johnson discovered the identity of his 4x Great Grandmother, Fredericke, he was just a touch chauvinist: “An actress, could be a euphemism we may be about to turn up a prostitute here. Not that I mind. I want you to know they can get up to anything, my ancestors, they have carte blanche to commit whatever acts of fornication they want as far as I am concerned, but I want to know”. It seems Fredericke Margarethe was indeed an actress for most of her life, and was widowed by the time her illegitimate daughter, the product of her affair with Prince Paul of Wurttemberg was born, in 1805. Born Porth, Fredericke was married to a man named Vohs until 1804, and, in 1818, remarried to a man named Werdy. She was described as a “Royal Saxon Court-Actress”. Alamy Stock Photo Boris Johnson's famous relatives 12. Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847 to 1929) Disappointingly, the ancestor who is sometimes mentioned as a stands as a standing genealogical reproach to Boris Johnson may not be a related at all. As a pioneering feminist and suffragette, she’d surely disapprove of Boris’ attitudes towards womankind. As President of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), the largest component of the suffragette movement, she did as much as anyone to get women into the political life of the nation, and the Fawcett Society, still fighting for equal human rights, is named in her honour. Millicent lived just long enough to see the vote being granted on an equal basis to all women, and said this when it was finally enacted in 1928: “It is almost exactly 61 years ago since I heard John Stuart Mill introduce his suffrage amendment to the Reform Bill on May 20th, 1867. So I have had extraordinary good luck in having seen the struggle from the beginning.” Bain News Service/Elliott & Fry

The Troubles in Northern Ireland were a serious problem. Hundreds of people died. They were brought to an end, 20 years ago, through the dedicated efforts of actual, great men, of the type Johnson is just too narcissistic to understand that he is not. He has imperilled his nation for no greater reason than to seek to augment his own personal place within it.

Should any kind of deal be forthcoming, Remainers will cling to it as a semi-salvation. There will be no fuel shortages, no food shortages, no medicine shortages. The pound will plummet slower than it otherwise would have done. A week in Spain for the family will remain, just about, a realistic possibility.

We will, like Shackleton’s men, have made it to South Georgia Island. There will be a celebration of sorts. But it will still have been an expedition of profound pointlessness. We will, all of us, be worse off.

Apart from for Johnson, of course. He will, in his own eyes, be a hero. The newspapers will heap praise upon him, full page posters for the malign society they uphold. And that, of course, will be what it has always been about.

There will be long years for millions of people to reflect on how they allowed themselves to be conned in this way. Debates about who holds power, and why they have so little compunction about using it for such nakedly vicious intent. Of whether more should be done about, say the billionaire Crispin Odey, who makes no secret of the fact he bets billions of pounds on Britain’s ruin, donates to the cause of its ruin with his own cash, then pockets the unimaginable profits.

The weeks ahead are uncertain, and pointless to predict, but there is every chance of Johnson emerging, as the beaming face of the greatest con that’s ever been pulled. The man who saved his country from himself.

But he will not be a hero in the long run. There is no chance of that. He is already beyond salvation.