MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Boris, the last Prime Minister of the United Kingdom?

Johnson wouldn’t be in Downing Street today if there had not been an election in Britain two months ago

By Gwynne Dyer - It has been suggested that Boris Johnson (who becomes the prime minister of the United Kingdom, UK) is what you would get if Donald Trump had been educated at Eton and Oxford. Maybe, although there is a great gulf between Trump’s bombastic self-promotion and Johnson’s self-deprecating, rather shambolic persona.

There is such a thing as a national style, and Trump’s shtick would fail as badly in Britain as Johnson’s would in the United States. But questions of style aside, the two men are almost identical.

They are both inveterate, shameless liars. They are both what laymen call narcissists and the experts call sociopaths: men (they are mostly men) who accumulate numerous wives, girlfriends and children as they go through life but never really engage with anybody. And neither of them has any real purpose in politics.

What Trump and Johnson conspicuously lack is a set of objectives that goes beyond merely winning and keeping power. Trump’s determination to expunge every trace of Obama’s legacy (healthcare, the Iran deal, etc) gives him a kind of agenda, but an entirely negative one. Boris Johnson doesn’t even have that. His only role in British politics is to save the Conservative Party by ‘delivering’ Brexit.

Johnson wouldn’t be in Downing Street today if there had not been an election in Britain two months ago. It was only an election for the European Parliament, but Britain had to vote in it because it still hadn’t left the European Union (EU) despite two postponements.

The EU election did, however, give British voters an opportunity to express their views on Brexit, and it was catastrophic for the Conservatives. On the whole, the vote was split pretty evenly between pro-leave and pro-remain parties, but the Conservatives came FIFTH, behind the Greens and just ahead of the Monster Raving Loony Party.

Panic at Conservative headquarters! Their traditional voters are mostly ‘leavers’, and they are so angry at their party for failing to get the job done, three full years after the referendum, that they are abandoning it for Nigel Farage’s newly formed Brexit Party. If there is a national election in the UK, the Conservatives will be wiped out – and, given the deadlock in Parliament, an early election is quite likely.

So where’s Boris when we need him? We all know that he’s lazy, feckless, insanely ambitious, utterly unprincipled and liable to make huge mistakes, but we desperately need to rally the troops, and he’s the one they love.

Boris generously agreed to help the party out, so they unceremoniously dumped Prime Minister Theresa May and set up a contest for a new party leader that Johnson was bound to win. That automatically makes him prime minister, as well, but he may be the last prime minister of a genuinely ‘United Kingdom’.

Better  exit  deal

Johnson can only succeed by taking Britain out of the EU by October 31. He swears that he can get a better exit deal than Theresa May negotiated (which Parliament refused to pass three times), but the EU says no further negotiations are possible. He could try the traditional remedy of shouting loudly at them in English, but it may not succeed.

If that doesn’t work, he says he’ll take the UK out of the EU anyway, without a deal.

That would inflict serious economic hardship on the British population, but true Brexiters reckon that’s a small price to pay for leaving an organisation they detest. Half the English population doesn’t agree – and TWO-THIRDS of the Scots voted to remain.

If a largely English government drags the UK out of the EU and into economic misery, then the Scots will probably decide to leave the UK and stay in the EU. The Scottish National Party is already promising another referendum on the question.

So there’s rather a lot at stake, including the 300-year-old union, and the man in charge is the farthest thing imaginable from a safe pair of hands. “Boris is the life and soul of the party, but he’s not the man you want to drive you home at the end of the evening,” Energy Minister Amber Rudd put it recently

If Parliament can stop Johnson from doing a no-deal Brexit, of course, then none of this comes to pass. But it’s not at all certain that Parliament can do that. The British are living in interesting times.