Let’s talk about Brexit. It won’t do. I have to favour Bremain. Marginally. It’s not an ideal situation – but making choices between imperfect options is what the business of politics and diplomacy, not to mention the politics and diplomacy of business, is all about. Bremain has got the “r”, you see. The overlapping “r” makes some sense of the conflation of words. Grexit has the shared “e”, and the added bonus of assonance with the French word for Greece.

But Brexit: what’s the logic? Two letters from Britain and then the entire word “exit”? Why? If you don’t have to have even one shared character between the fused words, then why not “Bexit”, “Britexit”, “Britainit”, “Bit”, “Britaxit”, “Exitbrit” or “Extain”? It’s no wonder those who came up with the word Brexit find it hard to believe that separate entities can be united to their mutual benefit.

Of the leading Brexiteers, the main two, and the two who seem least like Batman villains, namely Michael Gove and Boris Johnson, have something in common. I need to pause for a second there, to reflect on the amazing fact that a group of real people has been assembled of whom Michael Gove and Boris Johnson seem the least like Batman villains. I reckon Michael Gove might be more like a Batman villain than the Riddler is – but Nigel Farage and George Galloway have got him beat.

Illustration by David Foldvari.

Gove and Johnson, the great bringers of credibility to Brexit, both came to prominence as newspaper columnists. Since there’s been so much discussion of their big new anti-EU opinion, this is worth bearing in mind. Because, for columnists, opinions aren’t quite the same thing as they are for other people. Columnists not only have to hold more opinions than everyone else – up to one new one every week – but it’s also extremely important that these opinions are interesting. Much more important than that they are, for example, right. Right is a bonus. Interesting is a living.

While for most people opinions are a matter of self-definition within a peer group, self-interest or, in extreme cases, conscience, for columnists they’re the medium for their art. They’re the paint with which they daub pleasing shapes on the canvas of the status quo. It takes a peculiarly self-restrained artist to choose a paint that’s the same colour as the background. And I don’t think “peculiarly self-restrained” is a phrase that has ever been applied to Boris Johnson.

“Nakedly careerist” is much nearer to most politicians’ view of the man. That’s what everyone reckoned David Cameron was getting at when he pointedly told the House of Commons: “I am not standing for re-election. I have no other agenda than what is best for our country.” I thought that was quite a cynical thing for an ostensibly democratic politician to say – that, since he was no longer being held to account by the prospect of an election, he was now free to do the right thing, rather than all the daft things the stupid electorate will vote for; that all the tedious “having to get voted in” just ties a statesman’s hands and limits the good he can do. I’ve long supposed that Cameron despises the public, but I didn’t think he’d just come out and say it. It also seemed a particularly perverse point to make in the same breath as announcing a referendum.

Johnson doesn’t strike me as the Tory right’s natural leader – they tend to go for freaky intense party loyalists

Of course, I’m joking. Cameron only accidentally rejected the whole basis of parliamentary democracy – so eager was he to slag off a rival. The fact that his control and understanding of the connotations of his own remarks are so feeble is, ironically, a much more eloquent condemnation of the system in which he has thrived than his own inadvertently expressed disdain for it.

But what the prime minister actually meant to imply was that Boris, by jumping so ostentatiously into the Leave camp, has self-servingly positioned himself at the head of a huge wing of the Tory party – nearly half the MPs and more than half the membership – and made himself their candidate to replace him. That’s a likelier way for Boris to secure the top job, the theory goes, than taking his chances against George Osborne to be the Bremainsters’ choice of successor. This, rather than a sincere desire to leave the EU, is, according to his critics, why Boris acted as he did last weekend. And anyone who plays that sort of political game when a decision of such importance is at stake is an arsehole.

This Machiavellian interpretation doesn’t convince me. Johnson doesn’t strike me as the Tory right’s natural leader – they tend to go for freaky intense party loyalists. The sort of stringy nerd who gives a shit about the grassroots campaigners (always well to the right of the parliamentary party) and is made in their wonky image. You know, John Redwood, Iain Duncan Smith, Peter Bone, that lot. Boris has never been particularly popular with the actual Conservative party. His saving grace is that he’s quite popular with the country because he’s a recognisable human being. Whatever his politics, he’s much more of a Ken Clarke than a Norman Tebbit and, whatever his image, he’s clever enough to realise that.

Then again, I don’t buy Johnson’s own explanation either – that his conscience forced him to the decision after “a great deal of heartache”. I don’t think it’s got anything to do with his heart, and everything to do with his gut. He did it because it felt right. Because the media drum roll before he announced the decision demanded it. Because the spotlight was shining and he had to step into it. Because politics is a game and, in games, when in doubt, you do what your opponent least wants you to do – and for Boris, it’s David Cameron, rather than Jeremy Corbyn, who’s his opponent. Because it meant that his Monday column practically wrote itself.

Nobody absolutely knows whether Britain will be better off inside or outside the EU. Everyone’s guessing based on instinct, experiences on holiday, previous voting patterns and who’s on which side. The liars are those who claim to be certain. We all have to take a punt, based on how we feel.

That’s what Boris did – perhaps forgetting or perhaps glorying in the fact that, as a mayor and MP and not just a columnist, his opinion is now as influential as it is entertaining. So he went with his gut. Going with my gut, that’s what I reckon. And, as a columnist, that’s as hard as I’m expected to think.