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Abandoning a "submarine" strategy after three days of front-page headlines about his private life, Johnson tore through British television and radio studios Monday and Tuesday.
But the glare of the journalistic spotlight exposed the reason why his campaign had been keen to keep him quiet. Johnson, you see, has a unique ability to make bad situations much worse. His vague answers on Brexit and unconvincing answers about his lack of personal transparency have merely led to more negative headlines.
"To say Johnson's character is deeply flawed is like saying water is slightly wet. If he becomes prime minister, he will be the man most deficient in probity ever to hold the post," Simon Heffer, under whom Johnson worked at the Daily Telegraph newspaper during the 1990s, told CNN.
But even on the substantive issue of Brexit, Johnson comes up short. People who have followed Brexit closely know that his plan is entirely at odds with the political reality in both London and Brussels.
Johnson claims that where May failed, he can succeed because the politics on both sides have changed. "I think on both sides of the Channel there's a really different understanding of what is needed," he told Kuenssberg.
And if he didn't get his way? Johnson was clearer than he has ever been before -- he would take the UK out of the EU without a deal on October 31, "do or die, come what may," as he told TalkRadio.
While that hardline message might play well with the Conservative party members in Britain who will ultimately choose between Johnson and his rival, Jeremy Hunt, it is being shot down in Brussels.
"It is deeply disturbing that Boris Johnson, a high priest of the Brexit movement, still doesn't seem to understand the most basic aspects of his project, or the consequences of the whirlwind of populism he unleashed in the UK," Sophie In't Veld, a liberal member of the European Parliament told CNN. "It is likely he will now have to deliver on the undeliverable promises he made during the referendum campaign; Europe will not assist him with these matters,"
It's not just Johnson. The only other candidate left in the race, Jeremy Hunt, has been making equally evidence-free claims that he can get some kind of new deal on the basis that he used to be a businessman and is good at deals.
This is what Brexit has come to. Three years since the UK voted to leave the EU, it's becoming abundantly clear that those at the very top of the political elite have either not understood or chosen to ignore the lessons Theresa May learned the hardest way imaginable.