So does Johnson want to be a Churchillian wartime leader, indeed a leader whose leadership role is only sustainable through war, or a more conventional PM who brings home the bacon in terms of an international deal, and then must face the consequences of secular decline dressed up as making Britain Great again in the form of inane claims to "world leading science", bestist country in the world, greatest contact tracing app in the WORLD?

The latter role is more that of a snake-oil salesman and petty patriot, a role well suited to the minor talents of Health and Education Secretaries Hancock and Williamson. But perhaps Boris thinks he has done all that in his prior incarnations as journalist and Mayor. Perhaps, now he wants to be the real deal - a wartime leader in the mould of his mentor Winston Churchill?

If that is the case we can brace for "THE BATTLE OF BRITAIN" all over again, against imaginary foes if necessary, or makey uppy ones like the evil Soviet European Union, hopeful of the USA riding to the rescue once again, with Russia or Turkey or the Middle east refugees weakening the Union prior to a successful British assault on BE Day, when the hated Union will be dismembered into its constituent parts.

History doesn't often repeat itself with the same cast of villains,  but sometimes the roles can be mockingly reversed. Witness the State of Israel's pogroms against the Palestinian people, having been founded on the horrors of the Holocaust.  Brexit is Britain's Balfour Declaration asserting its right to become an independent nation having been subjected to the imagined horrors of European subjugation for too long.

Boris can only have his place in history by going to war. Otherwise he is merely one of a long line of mostly short-lived Tory PM's managing a declining nation into oblivion.

Index of Frank's Diaries