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At last!

Prime Minister Boris Johnson fulfils his dream

But that does not mean he will be any good

“I CAN’T imagine Boris in charge of a whelk stall, let alone the economy and nuclear weapons!” So David Laws, then a Liberal Democrat MP, dispensed with the ludicrous notion that Boris Johnson might become prime minister one day. Seven years after he wrote that quip in his diary, the joke is on Mr Laws - and the rest of Britain. On July 23rd, the Conservative Party pronounced Boris Johnson to be the winner of its leadership contest; party members gave him twice as many votes as his opponent, the foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt. Mr Johnson is due to move into Downing Street on July 24th.

Mr Johnson has made it to the top through a combination of charm, political nous and ruthlessness. He spent years cultivating an air of rumpled silliness, which looks like authenticity to many Britons. An opinion poll in September 2012 (when Mr Johnson was mayor of London and still illuminated by the Olympic flame) showed that he was by far the country’s most respected politician. He was the biggest star of the campaign to leave the EU—which probably helps to explain why he signed up for that campaign rather than the opposite one. Having failed to become leader of the Conservative Party in 2016, he set out to undermine the woman who did.

Although it is hard to remember now, Theresa May was seen as a good person to lead Britain into negotiations with Europe. Though not publicly charming, she is tough. During a long stint as home secretary she earned a reputation among her cabinet colleagues for bull-headedness; do her a favour, it was said, and you could expect nothing in return. She launched into the talks just as the Brexiteers wanted, laying down bold “red lines”, appointing Leavers to key negotiating positions and—fatally—starting the clock on Britain’s departure before the country had worked out what it wanted. Inevitably, she ended up compromising and conceding.

In Mr Johnson’s world there is seldom any need for compromise. Not because he believes that every negotiation must end in defeat for one side, but because he is uninterested in details. In 2018 he stepped down as foreign secretary in order to oppose Mrs May’s deal. His resignation letter argued that Britain had scored a bad deal because of its “needless self-doubt” and chuntered about the dangers posed to female cyclists by lorries-a problem that he inaccurately blamed on the EU. The combination of grand assertion and erroneous facts is typical of the man.

It is likely that Mrs May’s deal would never have passed the House of Commons. Her majority was too small, and her opponents (both in her own party and in the Democratic Unionist Party) too dug in against it. But Mr Johnson’s cheerleading against the deal guaranteed an enormous defeat, and accelerated Mrs May’s departure. From there, it was only a matter of seeing off a clutch of less famous contenders, and the top job was his.

It is hard to know what kind of prime minister he will be. The problem is not that Mr Johnson has left no clues in his writing or his past behaviour. It is closer to the opposite: he has left so many clues, which are often contradictory, that we are hardly the wiser. He is a pro-business tax-cutter who is reported to have said “fuck business”, a supporter of immigration who insults women in burkas. Studying his political circle does not help, because Mr Johnson does not have one. 

When he was elected mayor of London for the first time, he struggled to think of people to appoint to the important jobs. Even his brother, the MP Jo Johnson, profoundly disagrees with him about Europe, though he is decent enough to pretend otherwise. Britain has had Thatcherites, Blairites, Brownites and Cameroons. It is a safe bet that even if Mr Johnson survives as prime minister for several years there will be no Borissians.

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