The current Westminster consensus that Boris Johnson is the next Tory leader and prime minister raises all sorts of thoughts. Among them is to speculate about the sheer terror this consensus should strike in the man himself, given that Westminster consensus has been wrong about basically everything in the last three years.
For what it’s worth, I also think Johnson is the favourite to replace Theresa May, but I also thought Remain would win the referendum, that May could never be PM, and that she would win her general election with an increased majority. I suspect most of the people now sagely tipping Johnson as a dead cert made similar predictions.
But we are where we are, and so all the chat around the Commons is about prime minister Boris Johnson. Would he govern as a reckless populist, delighting the Tory membership by driving Britain out of the EU without a deal? Or would he carry out a “Nixon to China” reverse-ferret, pivoting to a softer Brexit position by way of a second referendum or even revoking Article 50 and starting again?
Rachel Sylvester’s column in the Times
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