There could never be a German Boris Johnson

Germany’s Die Welt asked me to tell its readers how on earth someone like Boris Johnson could become prime minister. I gave it my best shot.

Whatever else happens to Germany, I cannot imagine a German Boris Johnson coming to power. To assemble such a creature, you would have to create conservative German whose parents bought him the best education money could buy – Johnson went to Eton, one of Britain’s most expensive private schools, and Oxford, an elite university that dominates the upper reaches of English culture with a thoroughness no German university can match.

Imagine then that he gets a job on a respected German newspaper through his family’s connections. Its editor fires him for inventing stories – as the editor of the London Times fired the young Johnson in 1988. Imagine that, far from being deterred, the editor of a conservative newspaper appoints him its Brussels correspondent, as the editor of the Daily Telegraph did to Johnson in 1989, from where he lies in the Johnson tradition about the EU threatening traditional German sausages or planning to regulate the size of condoms German men can use.