As a child, outgoing British Prime Minister Boris Johnson reportedly said he wanted to be "King of the World". He ended up in a somewhat humbler role, was rejected by his own party's members of parliament for his mendacity, corruption and incompetence, and will hand over to his successor, Liz Truss, on Monday. But the Fat Lady still hasn't sung.
"I think Boris will come back," said a random interviewee in the street. "It's going to be like Trump in America." British voters couldn't be that stupid, you might think, but Boris thinks they are. His strategy requires electoral disaster for his own Conservative Party at the next election, but why would he care about that?
He had accidentally prepared the ground for this strategy already by purging his party of most of its senior members for being insufficiently enthusiastic about Brexit. That left only second- and third-raters like Rishi Sunak and Ms Truss to compete for the succession, and none of them seems remotely ready for the coming storm.
