U.K.’s new PM screws up everything he touches; this will get ugly

I read the news today, oh boy. About a lucky man who made the grade. And though the news was rather sad. Well, I just had to laugh.

— Lennon/McCartney, tweeted by Alan Rusbridger

Oh what a lucky man Britain’s new prime minister, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, was, is, and will forever be. Whatever he is called — BoJo, Bonking Boris, Britain’s Trump, the Ham of Fate, the Blonde Bombshell, Beano Boris, Boris the Menace — he’s like Donald Trump in that he got the top job, so deal with it.

Like many Englishmen born into generations of inherited wealth and inbred connections with the cream of the Eton-to-Oxbridge upper classes, with the deceptive eccentricity that passes for personality in his own rarefied sphere BoJo set out on a path already mapped for him.

It was inevitable that he would become prime minister. His schoolmate David Cameron did it almost without trying, just as he wrecked his nation with a casual referendum on Brexit, which he casually assumed he’d win and just as casually lost.

Johnson will surround himself with his former schoolmates, once arrogant boys, now arrogant men, who believe the extraordinary things they were taught in school: that they are noblemen, splendid, self-confident in their bones, Thatcherite economic purists who will take the United Kingston (as Ivanka Trump calls Britain) back to the glory of Victorian era, when Britain ruled the world. It’s nice of them, it’s noblesse oblige, you see, to rule the peasantry.

They won’t sweat over it, either. Castiglione’s 16th century The Book of the

Courtier refers to “sprezzatura,” the ability to make difficult things look easy, to make great achievements look effortless. All of Johnson’s life has been directed toward displaying this quality.

There’s only one problem. BoJo can’t even make simple things look easy. A lifelong amateur, he screws up everything he touches.

He’s a hard-line Brexiteer who wants a no-deal Brexit this fall because that is what he wants. Crashing out of the EU without a deal for the sake of shaking off brutal European masters will still look difficult, largely because it’s impossible.

With classic sprezzatura, Johnson will wear his learning lightly — he studied the Greeks and Romans — because he has none about transport, security, finance, food supply, the military, agriculture, refrigeration capabilities, looting … I envision his time in office as a P.G. Wodehouse novel, but people die.

The Times reports that Johnson was left “visibly shaken” after a briefing on national priorities should Britain crash out of Brexit: life-saving drugs come first, then medical devices and fresh food, and nuclear power plants parts over chemicals to purify drinking water. Troops may manage transport blockages and civil unrest.

Johnson’s Greek aphorisms won’t help when nuclear plants start making grinding noises. Just like BoJo, nuclear power wants what it wants so it must have it.

One thing BoJo has is charm. I defy you not to be won over by last year’s YouTube video of him “on a humanitarian mission” to offer tea (in carefully selected nonmatching mugs) to journalists camped outside his home. What a cloak is bewitchment.

Journalist Simon Kuper, who was at Oxford with BoJo and his fellows, compares them to the notorious 1930s Cambridge spies who betrayed Britain for Communism. The Brexit crew has a similar populist vision, but it’s equally doomed.

At Eton, “effortless superiority” was a phrase used widely, often without irony, about Boris & Co, even though the experience of never having had a moment’s worry about money — imagine what that is like — was their real fuel, not education or blarney.

Selected by a relatively tiny group of wealthy elderly white men from the Conservative Party’s core, Johnson is tied to democracy by only the thinnest of silk threads.