Boris Johnson didn’t do much for Britain’s reputation. From nasty columns about Barack Obama’s ancestry, to reciting colonialist verse in Myanmar, to his betrayal of Northern Irish unionists, his critics painted him as an embarrassment on the world stage.
Yet he generously gave the foreign press one thing: a British caricature. As a scruffy eccentric with imperialist pretensions, a quick wit disguising a quicker temper, a classically-educated thug, he at least fit some sort of morbidly compelling national stereotype.
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