Enter Boris

Boris Johnson is about to enter 10 Downing Street. After he takes up residence there, the adventure will begin. Andrew Rawnsley writes:

He will have to learn how to be prime minister. The schoolboy who wanted to be “world king” has spent many years lusting after the job, but that is entirely different to doing it. Many previous tenants of Number 10 will testify that no other role is an adequate preparation for the demands of the premiership. Tony Blair, a highly accomplished leader of the opposition before he moved into Downing Street, once told me that he didn’t really get the hang of it until he had been doing it for four years and he had the shock absorber of a landslide majority while he was learning on the job. Gordon Brown arrived with a decade as chancellor under his belt, but floundered desperately as prime minister. Boris Johnson has never been in charge of a public service department and was an embarrassment in the one cabinet position that he has held.

The civil service is not waiting eagerly for Johnson's arrival:

The civil service is paid to help and will usually look forward to an exhausted premiership being replaced by a fresh one. Contrary to some popular tropes, civil servants respond well to purposeful political leadership. In this case, though, Whitehall is preparing for the Johnson premiership by adopting the brace position. Is this because he is infamously cavalier about detail, bored by complexity, known to react peevishly and sometimes with a ferocious temper when frustrated or contradicted, and has a notoriously casual relationship with the truth? All that and more. The core fear about a Johnson premiership is that officials will not feel confident that they can speak truth to power.

The members of the European Union will try to be diplomatic -- but they fear the worst:

They want an orderly resolution to Brexit, but there is no reservoir of trust for a man who rose to journalistic fame by confecting fabrications that toxified British attitudes towards the EU and who then fronted the mendacities of the Leave campaign. The chances of striking a bargain have been made slighter by the way in which he has campaigned for the leadership. He might have used his dominant position in the contest to introduce some realism into Tory minds about what can be achieved and give himself some scope for manoeuvre. He has instead upped the ante on himself by declaring that Britain will be out on 31 October, “come what may”, “do or die”, deal or no deal. In the closing stages of the campaign, he made reaching an agreement even harder by saying that he wants the Irish backstop ripped out of the agreement altogether.

Sometimes you can see a trainwreck coming. And you can do nothing to stop it.

Image: Sydney Morning Herald