As May leaves, EU’s worst nightmare, Boris Johnson, steps up
As recently as April, EU officials talked about how to ‘Boris-proof’ the decision to prevent him disrupting EU business should he become premier
Brussels — For European leaders watching Theresa May’s political death throes, a sense of inevitability has been replaced by one of fear. Rather than break the deadlock over Brexit, the departure of the British prime minister raises the prospect of what they’ve long considered their worst nightmare: a UK run by Boris Johnson, the man many inside the EU blame for causing the mess with his campaign based on false promises, then by undermining his leader. If May was predictable and her strategy clear, albeit flawed, many EU chiefs think of Johnson as a lying populist who wants to destroy the bloc. Privately, officials use his name as shorthand for a British government that would deliver, in their eyes, the most economically catastrophic form of Brexit — one without a UK-EU deal to smooth the departure. As recently as April, when EU governments were discussing whether to allow the UK to postpone its exit from the EU, officials in Brussels talked about ensuring they could “Boris-proof” t...
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