The exchange was meaningless on its face, nothing but mild fun for Johnson and his aides, who chuckled along with him. The answers were part of the toffish, intellectual act he has perfected since school. But they did offer something deeper about his campaign—and a glimpse of Johnson the man.

This, after all, was classic Johnson, giving the appearance of chaotic joviality—freedom—while saying nothing to distract from the campaign script. Had he offered a genuine insight into how he relaxes, he would have risked headlines and the creation in the national consciousness of an image beyond his control. Cameron, who woke before dawn every day to work through his official papers, cultivated a reputation for “chillaxing” that was both unfair and revealing. With Johnson, everyone in Britain knows him, or at least the character he has created, but very few appear to understand him.

Since becoming prime minister, Johnson has run a focused—even boring—campaign to turn the minority he inherited into his own majority. This is more like the real Johnson. Beneath all the hair and clothes, missives on Greek philosophy, and endless parking tickets is a man obsessed with his own elevation, who has won every popularity contest open to him, from school to university and on into politics, through to this moment, the only race that has ever really mattered to him. He is a man who exudes chaos, but has proved again and again that he is prepared to show enormous discipline, gather experts around him, empower them, and listen to their advice. He will bristle at and ignore anyone with real authority over him—whether a party leader or newspaper editor (he was previously a journalist)—but once he is the authority, he does not hesitate to ask for help. In the words of one former colleague who worked with him closely, he is a terrible team player, but a good team captain.

Read: Boris Johnson thinks he’s in control

The past seven weeks are the culmination of a lifetime’s work to become prime minister and win a general election. Johnson ran a campaign of comparable rigidity to the one his predecessor, May, tried and was lampooned for in 2017. May stuck to the script—that only she offered the “strong and stable” leadership required to see through Brexit; similarly, Johnson insisted that only a Conservative majority under his leadership could “get Brexit done.” Like May, Johnson also promised voters an end to the austerity of the Cameron years. Johnson was spreading the same message against the same Labour opponent as May. And yet the two campaigns achieved markedly different results. Why?

First, the “strong and stable.” Counterintuitively, perhaps, Johnson’s campaign was more disciplined than May’s, which had the outward appearance of structure, but was divided on strategy and fatally undermined by ego, hubris, political naïveté, and, ultimately, her weakness of subcontracting leadership to competing aides and advisers. Johnson’s campaign was more tightly gripped, took the opposition more seriously, and showed more political ruthlessness in shutting down problem areas exposed during the May campaign.