Here Comes Boris Johnson!

by Amy Davidson Sorkin @ NewYorker.com, June 20

[....] Johnson, so far, has given very few interviews, sending out proxies to do the talking. One of them is Johnny Mercer, M.P., who was recently faced, on the program Radio5Live, with a question that he was not willing, or perhaps not able, to resolve: “How many children does Boris Johnson have?” The answer is surprisingly hard to pin down. (And yet it seems worth answering, for reasons that go beyond curiosity, such as transparency about a potential P.M.’s financial obligations and possible conflicts of interest.) Johnson, who turned fifty-five on Wednesday, is in the middle of a divorce.

There is also the matter of Johnson’s casual bigotry. On Wednesday, Ian Blackford, the parliamentary leader of the Scottish National Party, denounced Johnson in the House of Commons as a “racist” who “had a record of dishonesty” and was “not fit for office.” He cited Johnson’s comments about Muslim women in hijab (“letterboxes”), Africans (“watermelon smiles”), and Scots, whom Johnson once said should not be allowed to serve as Prime Minister. In the nineteen-nineties, when he was the editor of the Spectatormagazine, it published a poem that referred to Scots as a “verminous race” of “tartan dwarves” who should be wiped out. Brexit has already inspired calls for a new referendum on Scottish independence. Johnson’s ascendancy would offer another reason to get out while the getting is good.

If all goes according to plan, the Tories will name Johnson as Prime Minister on or before July 22nd. His mission will then be to figure out Brexit by October 31st, at which time the U.K. is due to leave the E.U., with or without a deal. He is even less popular in Brussels, though, than he is in Scotland. And who knows if he’ll even last that long? “He could have a confidence vote on his first day and be prime minister for ten minutes,” a Conservative Party source told the Guardian [....]