There were moist eyes around the cabinet table on Thursday as Boris Johnson began his long goodbye from British politics. “There were a few of them wiping away tears,” says one member of Johnson’s hastily assembled team. “Pathetic really. I wasn’t crying.”

Indeed beyond the loyalists clinging to the wreckage of Johnson’s broken government, there were few tears being shed among Conservative MPs after they drove out of office the man who led Britain out of the EU and who — according to his critics — dragged British politics into the mud.

After a series of scandals in which Johnson repeated the same dismal cycle of concealing the truth, retreating, then being found out, his party could take it no longer. “Enough is enough,” Sajid Javid told parliament the day after quitting as health secretary on Tuesday, a decision that triggered an avalanche of resignations which swept the prime minister away.

Johnson will remain in office, but not in power, until September, when the Conservative party elects a new leader to replace him. A lucrative career of speechmaking, journalism and book-writing lie ahead.

In some global capitals there was relief. Joe Biden, US president, could not bring himself to mention Johnson’s name in a statement on the “special relationship” after the UK prime minister announced his resignation as Tory leader.

Biden, who once called Johnson a “physical and emotional clone” of Donald Trump, was frustrated with the prime minister’s willingness to rip up his Brexit treaty with the EU — a decision, argue critics, that threatens to destabilise Northern Ireland’s Good Friday peace agreement.

“I won’t miss him,” said Bruno Le Maire, French finance minister, on Friday, echoing similar sentiments across the EU. “It proves that Brexit mixed up with populism does not make for a good cocktail for a nation.”

James Cleverly, the new education secretary and a Johnson loyalist, says the comparison with Trump clinging on to power is ludicrous. “We are not America,” he says. Yet some Conservative MPs did make the comparison, fearing Johnson could take Britain to a dark place.

The 58-year-old leader had jokingly compared his determination to cling to office to that of the Japanese soldier Hiroo Onoda, who hid in the jungle for years and refused to accept Japan’s surrender after the second world war, but others did not see the funny side.

The UK prime minister had claimed he had a direct “mandate” from the British voters — MPs had to remind him that Britain is a parliamentary democracy, not a presidential system. Briefings by some of his allies that Tory MPs would have to “dip their hands in blood” to remove him evoked shudders.

In the end Johnson went quietly. There was no angry mob, just a small band of diehard loyalists applauding him in Downing Street as he announced his resignation. Johnson blamed everybody else for his misfortune — accepting no personal responsibility — then turned on his heels and disappeared behind the famous black door.

Most of the political obituaries agreed that Johnson, and his style of government, were unique in British politics. Indeed none of the contenders to replace him have anything like the flair, charisma or devilry that made him such a compelling leader.

But his departure raises questions about Johnson’s political legacy and whether — whoever inherits his crown — the next Conservative prime minister will be operating in a landscape defined by the leader known by allies as “Big Dog”.

Few doubt that Johnson will go down in British history as a highly consequential prime minister: the leader who spearheaded the campaign to rip Britain out of the EU in 2016 and then — against significant opposition — delivered on his promise to “get Brexit done”.