The U.K. Election: You Can’t Be Serious
A Conservative win in the U.K. shows how the modern populist formula works. Americans beware.
Two days before Britons elected a new parliament, Prime Minister Boris Johnson drove a bulldozer through a wall in Stafford, England. It was a stunt. The wall was made of Styrofoam bricks, with the word “gridlock” printed across it. Printed on the front-loader’s bucket was the Conservative Party’s electoral — and existential — rallying slogan: “Get Brexit Done.”
No such thing will happen, at least not in the short term. Withdrawing from the European Union will take years. As soon as legislation is passed to formalize Britain’s exit from the EU, more negotiations will begin. Decades of policy regarding trade, immigration, security, food, pharmaceuticals, and on and on and on, between Britain and the EU, will have to be settled anew. The reality of the Tory slogan is likely its exact opposite. Brexit won’t be done; it will begin.
All of that only matters if you take things seriously, which Boris Johnson does not. Johnson is famous for building a public persona by lying about Europe. While working as a Brussels-based reporter in the 1990s, he wrote elaborate dispatches about how the Europeans were set to ban prawn cocktail-flavored potato chips or regulate the curvature of…
