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Boris Johnson’s vision for the UK is an illusion – by the Brexit deadline, there’ll be no hiding behind it

Editorial: Soon, the prime minister will have to start making more difficult decisions and hard choices. As autumn approaches, the sunny talk about ‘positive energy’ and the jokes about the ‘hamster wheel of doom’ won’t work

Tuesday 30 July 2019 19:37 BST
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Boris Johnson: The Brexit backstop is dead

A week into his premiership and Boris Johnson has solved the housing crisis. His own, that is, now that he has secured some social housing in central London, complete with a resident cat and a variety of other visitors, some welcome, others less so. His girlfriend Carrie Symonds is reputedly moving in soon, making a first for British political life – a couple in No 10 “living in sin”, though there have, of course, been some notable sinners in situ before the arrival of Mr Johnson. Apparently a dog will be acquired, giving the prime minister a more homely image.

More soberly, we may reflect on the radical shift in the style and substance of government wrought in the few days since we learnt the Queen wondered aloud why anyone would want the job anyway (the first of what may be a series of Johnson-inspired indiscretions). He has sacked most of the May cabinet, with a few of the more defiant souls quitting before he had the pleasure of handing them their cards. He has produced a cabinet that is, at least superficially, the most diverse in British history in Bame terms, but one with a depressingly more uniform outlook and privately educated background. When Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, told the British not to waste the six months grace they had been granted under the Article 50 extension, he probably did not have in mind Jacob Rees-Mogg’s new style guide and the national debate about the use of the Oxford comma.

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