Well I think that Johnson has tapped into Trumpism. What I mean by that is that he saw Trump being outrageous, lying, being stupid, inefficient and downright disreputable...yet retaining, in full, his popularity. In other words, do what you like, get accused of what you like and emerge unscathed. I'd bet he sees Trump as the ideal candidate in 2024. Well that's the thing you can copy. Right down to the unkempt, overweight, ill-fitting-suit appearance and haystack hair. Boris thinks that the man in the street will chime with all this. The man in the street has his own imperfections, and will take succour from the fact that the very top man has the same imperfections as he has. So that's all right then. Boris is a Jack the lad, and, well, I want to be Jack the lad too, just like Boris. Who cares if he has affairs, doesn't know how many kids he's got, how many times he breaks the rules, how much he lies to us. That the stuff I do too, or would like to. So leave the lad alone!

Decades ago, the French loved their leaders to be a bit dodgy outside of their political lives. Having affairs, cheating on the missus an that kind of stuff were par for the course. But in those days there were limits of decorum and morality, at least in the eyes of what the public were allowed to see. Trump and Johnson have, between them, swept away those limits. At least, they think so. We can only hope that a really big mistake will be the undoing. In the past, many of the things he's done would have counted as big mistakes. These days, they're just Jack the lad peccadillos. And that's very worrying.