Premiership

His urbanity gained him the premiership.

There is a familiar pattern that has come to define Theresa May’s premiership. Encouraging rhetoric gets periodically wheeled out: the pledges to ease the burden on the “just about managing”; the promises to fight the “burning injustices” of social inequality. But then a few weeks later, the chancellor gets up at the dispatch box to deliver a budget or an autumn statement and it’s as if those words had never been uttered.

And for the EU a Johnson premiership would mean “a mini-Trump across the Channel, dedicated to its sabotage”. Britain would become “a hostile principality, built on social, fiscal and environmental deregulation.”