Now that Brexit is over, will Boris Johnson’s new cry be ‘What do we do now?’

In director Michael Ritchie’s brilliant 1972 satire “The Candidate”, a group of powerful US politicians need a candidate to run against a seemingly impregnable sitting governor.

They chose a candidate (Robert Redford) who they think might prove popular to sections of the electorate but will have no hope of success. Due to the manipulations of Redford’s campaign team and his growing desire to tell people what he thinks they want to hear, he proves so popular he is eventually elected as president. In a side room after learning of his election success, with crowds chanting his name outside, he turns to his advisers and says: “What do we do now?”

Of course, western political developments over the past ten years have rendered satire almost redundant but with regards to political developments over the past few months, maybe life does imitate art more than we realise.

Donald Trump’s alleged ‘apoplexy’ with Boris Johnson over the Huawei affair must have shaken Boris to the core, given the urgent need to strike a trade deal with the US. Factor in the swathes of ex-labour voters in the north of England all awaiting their new Great White Hope to do something for them in return for their votes and then Boris biting the very media hands who got him into power through his avoidance of scrutiny, all amount to something rather more than a headache for the PM.

His one-issue (Brexit) conservatism is now being shown up as an attractive right-wing political idea rather than a long-term national economic strategy.

It’s no stretch to imagine Boris in a small back room in Downing Street surrounded by propagandist-in-chief Dominic Cummings and a few of his favoured one-issue Brexiteer

Tory colleagues, looking around them desperately and asking: “What do we do now?”

D. MITCHELL Coates Place, Edinburgh

Any country less prepared than the UK for anything, would be hard to imagine. We are without the initiative and experience to basically start again on our own in a cold, hard world, with some of our European neighbours as enemies now rather than as friends. But no doubt the regaining of our ‘sovereignty’ will feed and warm us during the dark years ahead as we discover that our position in the world pecking order is not quite what we thought it was.

The only bonus is that it might take our attention away from the climate anarchists and their daft beliefs. We just don’t have time for them now. MALCOLM PARKIN Gamekeepers Road, Kinnesswood, Kinross