Boris Johnson Faces a Swift and Bloody Nemesis

Retribution? Johnson has played with his country, treating it like one of his many dalliances, with a sloppiness and fecklessness no wit or charm can excuse. He backed a British exit from the European Union on a whim — in the expectation it would be rejected — and has since become a pawn of the Brexit ultras, the crazed little-England monomaniacs who have now delivered him to 10 Downing Street.

It is a moment of perfect symbolism: a man without a conviction for a country without a direction, a man of self-destructive tendencies for a country in the vise of a crippling decision. The gods, when they are most cruel, also laugh.

In Donald Trump, consuming vanity is coupled with consuming ignorance. Johnson is equally vain but not equally ignorant. Trump’s wacko meets Johnson’s eccentricity.

Johnson has lied, pandered and guffawed his disheveled way to the highest office in the land, aping the bumbling buffoon and doing great damage. But he’s no fool. He knows his comeuppance is upon him.

Unless Johnson, who once penned a book called “The Churchill Factor,” is suddenly inhabited by an access of statesmanship, he could well become the shortest-lived prime minister in British history.

A single issue awaits him: Brexit. (Well, Iran may raise its head.) His deadline for British extrication is Oct. 31. By then he must pull off the do-or-die miracle he’s likened to a moon landing.

Mr. Can-Do — on a good day, maybe, when the emptiness at his core is not gnawing — either pulls a rabbit out of his hat in the form of a new Brexit deal better than his predecessor’s, which was rejected three times by Parliament; or he embraces, as pledged, the après-moi-le-déluge option of a no-deal Brexit with its accompanying economic and administrative mayhem — a course that would further batter the pound, sever essential supply chains, maroon Boris’s pals in Chiantishire, and face stern parliamentary opposition.

Johnson’s three months and change are in fact more like two. Europe goes AWOL in August. The patience of the European Union with the British farce is about exhausted.

Yet the incoming prime minister believes he can, in such short order, secure meaningful changes to Theresa May’s deal, including in the “backstop,” an insurance policy to preserve an open border between the Irish Republic (remains in the European Union) and Northern Ireland (which leaves with Brexit). The backstop has enraged hard-line Brexiteers, who see it as a Trojan horse for keeping Britain in the customs union forever.

The Brexit question is also an Irish question. The peace agreement of 1998 yielded an open border. It’s a United Kingdom question. Why should a pro-European Scotland not favor independence over association with England?

It’s a Boris question. “Brexit means Brexit” is all Theresa May was able to muster. Is Johnson prepared to lay out why he actually believes in this folly?

Does he really want to be Trump’s poodle begging for some trade accord to offset Brexit’s cost to British commerce? Does he really want to cozy up to an American president who says he could, if he chose, wipe Afghanistan “off the face of the earth,” killing “10 million people”; portrays himself as a potential mediator in the Kashmir conflict with an outright lie; and resorts to a racist outburst repudiated by the German chancellor?

Or will Johnson, at the last, listen to reason? Brexit has proved undeliverable because it is. As John Major, the former prime minister, put it, Johnson “must choose whether to be the spokesman for an ultra-Brexit faction, or the servant of the nation he leads. He cannot be both.”

Johnson has many enemies, a paper-thin parliamentary majority, and the tightest of deadlines. His chances of getting a new deal through Parliament by Oct. 31, or actually propelling Britain over the cliff of a no-deal Brexit, are slim to nonexistent.

So what then? He can call an election, but a Tory victory looks unlikely with the electorate split between Nigel Farage’s jingoistic Brexit Party, Jeremy Corbyn’s awful Labour Party, the resurgent pro-Europe Liberal Democrats and Johnson’s Tories. It would, in any event, be a leave-or-remain election, so why not call a second referendum? After three years of inconclusive chaos, with all Johnson’s lies in 2016 now exposed, Britons deserve a chance to say if they really want to leave.

As Fintan O’Toole has pointed out in The New York Review of Books, Johnson is a self-styled “akratic” — that is, per Aristotle, “a person who knows the right thing to do but can’t help doing the opposite.”

If Johnson remains in character, his nemesis will likely be swift and bloody. Or, just possibly, he could choose to be remembered not for his manifold faults but for a single act of bravery. He once wrote a book about that.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.