Boris Johnson is only man capable of putting the Great back into Britain

Boris Johnson during the Conservative leadership announcement on Tuesday. Picture: Getty Images

Now and then the British cast aside frigid formality and declare themselves on first-name terms with their leaders. Over the past century, only three prime ministers have been honoured with the democratic forename: Winston, Maggie and now Boris.

Winston Churchill saved Britain and much else in its darkest hour. Margaret Thatcher remade Britain’s economy and society in a hot minute. Boris Johnson has 100 days, the political equivalent of seconds, in which to achieve Brexit.

US President Donald Trump seems to think Boris can do it, and Johnson is adamant he can, but many of his parliamentary colleagues have their doubts, and some are ready to split the party over them.

Johnson, with typical bravura, has promised to turn the October 31 deadline into a finish line. No less typically, he has provided few details about how intends to deliver on that promise. Parliament is caught in a familiar television game-show predicament: deal or no deal.

The good news is that Theresa May negotiated a withdrawal agreement in November for Britain’s departure from the EU. The bad news is that the House of Commons voted it down three times because May consented to a deal that threatened either to sever Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK or cut it off from the Republic of Ireland with a hard border. The Brexit and Remain factions may cut across class, geography and party, but the awfulness of May’s deal — not enough Brexit for the Brexiteers and too much for the Remainers — created a fleeting sense of national unity. It also exposed profound antipathies between pro- and anti-Brexit Conservatives.

The worse news is that Brussels is adamant the withdrawal agreement can’t be modified and the only alternative is no deal at all. May’s bungled Brexit strategy has diminished Britain’s global credibility. Although Trump says Johnson will do “a great job” as Prime Minister, many MPs prefer him not to have the job at all.

Johnson was elected by a vote of Conservative Party members, not its parliamentary representatives. The party has 160,000 members, and they tend to be whiter, older, more conservative and more pro-Brexit than the candidates preselected by the party’s London headquarters. The members are Winston and Maggie’s people. They are Boris’s people too. They gave him 92,153 votes, twice as many as his rival in the runoff, Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt.

May’s government, one of the least stable in British history, was weakened from within by resignations. A parade of anti-Brexit and anti-Johnson ministers took the Roman option of falling on their swords and uttering a last word on Twitter. Alan Duncan, a minister at the Foreign Office, even tried to sink Johnson’s premiership pre-emptively by requesting a Commons debate and vote of confidence on his ability to command the house. Had it worked, this would have been a referendum on Johnson’s character.

Johnson has a lot of character. He is an English analogue to Trump: a populist with credentials from Eton and Oxford. He leads the party of law and order but has a disordered private life. He is a delegator and an entertainer, not a party man or a bureaucrat. He is better at the big picture than the petty details; right now he is talking about tax cuts and spending sprees, but not how to fund them. He became “Boris” because he is witty and spontaneous in an age when politicians are dull and false. No other Conservative could have twice won the mayoralty of left-voting, immigrant-rich London. And no other Conservative has the charisma that, at the next general election, can compensate for the party’s three-year Brexit fiasco.

Unlike Winston and Maggie, Boris prefers to split his differences, not to rub them in. He insists he can persuade Brussels to renegotiate May’s concessions over Northern Ireland, and he insists he could live with no deal, too. But he has reached a crossroads: will he fix Brexit and launch Britain into a new era of power and prosperity? Or will he be the clown who untied the UK, broke the Conservative Party, disappointed Trump, and passed the government to the Stalinist taxcatchers of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party?

Character aside, the real threat to Boris isn’t from Brussels but from his own benches. Johnson is no sad clown but an ebulliently clever one, unencumbered by dogma. He knows the only thing the Conservatives in the house fear more than Brussels’ wrath is the voters’ fury. Expect the populist to infuriate his Brexiteer allies by seeking a deal with Brussels and then, deal or no deal, putting it to the people in a general election. Only Boris can make Britain great again — or make it anything at all.

The Wall Street Journal