Boris Johnson Faces His Moment of Reckoning

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- It won’t exactly be a coronation — there is still the small matter of a vote by Conservative party members — but, in all likelihood, Boris Johnson will become Britain’s prime minister next month.

. The good news is that he would bring with him that most powerful of elixirs, optimism, and an energy that his party desperately wants to see. But his arrival in Downing Street would force him to confront his own multiple political personality disorder.

. The slick, disciplined Johnson of the leadership campaign — pounds shed, hair shorn, jokes used sparingly — professes to be more serious than the professional troublemaker he once was. It will soon be clear if this transformation is an act.

. It’s not just a matter of style. Johnson is a man of political contradictions: the social liberal who showed up as Mayor of London, but also the shock-jock who likened veiled Muslim women to letter boxes; the populist who helped the Leave campaign win by peddling false promises , and the pragmatist who enlisted support from all sides of his divided party; the Brexiter who attacked business and the economic liberal who championed the City of London as mayor.

. This has been his strength as a campaigner. As Bloomberg’s Kitty Donaldson and Rob Hutton reported on Thursday, Tory lawmakers meet with Johnson and believe he is endorsing their own view on Brexit. Hardliners see him as committed to leaving on Oct. 31 without a deal; moderates detect wiggle room when he says leaving then is only “eminently feasible,” or when he professes that he wants to avoid no deal if possible. He speaks in tongues.

. The Evening Standard, the London daily edited by George Osborne, the former Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer and convicted Remainer, has even endorsed Johnson. In an interview with the paper , he spoke of the good that immigration has brought Britain and of the need to heal divisions in the country.

. Johnson’s great gift, or maybe his killer insight, is to bypass the Conservative brain by appealing to the Tory stomach. While the brain leans pragmatic, eschews ideology and prizes restraint and fairness, the tummy craves the red meat of Brexit.

. In the coming weeks, there will be hustings, debates and the semblance of a competition between Johnson and Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt, the other of the two candidates Tory MPs have chosen to put to a vote by the wider membership.

. Most Conservatives know instinctively who has the better chance of leading them to an election victory. Johnson is unrivalled as a campaigner and unequalled as a political personality.

. Anything can happen, one is obliged to say, but Hunt is a much blander figure, almost in the mold of Theresa May. Had Environment Secretary Michael Gove made the final ballot, more Brexit-supporting members might have been tempted away from Johnson.

. So the man who once said he would fancy the job if the ball ever came loose from the scrum would have to fumble it badly now not to take it over the line.

. But the character attributes that made Johnson a successful campaigner are likely to count against him as a head of government. Rory Stewart , a rival knocked out on Wednesday, rightly noted that whoever wins will need to be truthful about the trade-offs that will be necessary to deliver Brexit. That would be a challenge for the populist, say-anything Johnson, and a deep low would likely follow the wild high of his election.

. In his trenchant book on the causes of Brexit, the Irish writer Fintan O’Toole observed that the Brexiter triumphs by “by teaching the English to take trivial things — the petty annoyances of regulation — very seriously indeed, and to regard the serious things — jobs, communities, lives — with sincere and studied triviality.” Johnson, as O’Toole reminds us, made food central to the Brexiter critique of Europe, often using humor. Those continentals want to control what you eat with their regulations.

. Such quips are effective — in the hands of a critic and heckler — but dangerous when deployed by those actually wielding power. To hold on to the office he has coveted for so long, Johnson will have to find his serious side.

. To contact the editor responsible for this story: Edward Evans at eevans3@bloomberg.net

. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

. Therese Raphael writes editorials on European politics and economics for Bloomberg Opinion. She was editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal Europe.

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Boris Johnson Faces His Moment of Reckoning

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