Boris Johnson is a patsy for populist leaders – as his India visit shows

‘All heads of government use foreign visits to burnish their images, but Johnson feeds off the charisma of populist leaders to an unusual degree.’ Boris Johnson with Narendra Modi at Hyderabad House, New Delhi, 22 April 2022. Photograph: Sondeep Shankar/Pacific Press/REX/Shutterstock

Boris Johnson belongs in a Bombay film. In a photo from his recent India visit he’s pictured leaning out of the cab of a yellow excavator in a JCB factory with all the swagger of Shammi Kapoor hanging out of a moving train in the 1962 classic film Professor. There’s the same pudgy flair, the same willingness to be ridiculous in the cause of charm, and the same blithe disregard for time and place.

The day before Johnson landed in Ahmedabad, seven of these JCB diggers had been used to raze Muslim shops and homes, and the gate of a mosque in New Dehli’s Jahangirpuri area, in defiance of a supreme court stay on demolition. The municipality that ordered the demolitions was run by the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), and the brazen disregard of the apex court’s orders seemed almost staged for television.