Special relationship: Will Boris make Britain great again?

Then, after 41 minutes, a tall woman in a black dress makes her way to the microphone.

“My name is Flora,” she says. “I am undecided, but leaning Boris, but one thing gives me pause and it’s this question: Does a good prime minister need to be a good husband and father?” For five seconds the only sound is that of several hundred well-heeled Conservatives emitting irritated groans, followed by a smattering of boos.

No one is surprised. Least of all the candidate, who responds: “I’ve been asked all sorts of questions over the last 20 or 30 years, and I just don’t comment on that stuff, if that’s all right, because what people in this country want to hear is what my plans are to get Brexit over the line —”

Applause overtakes the rest of his answer. This audience has heard enough of allegations of affairs, illegitimate children, and a loose relationship with the truth that have surfaced since Boris, as Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is universally known, entered politics two decades ago.

So it is that an overweight man with flamboyant blond hair, enthusiastic support from his party’s grassroots, a back catalog of racially controversial language, and a shifting cast of lovers, armed with a promise to seize back control of the country from foreigners, is on the brink of becoming Britain’s next leader. He was even born in New York. Remind you of anyone?

“Boris has become Britain’s reluctant Donald Trump,” ran a recent headline in the Daily Telegraph, the newspaper that still employs the politician as a columnist for more than $340,000 a year.

Sonia Purnell, a former colleague of Johnson’s and author of Just Boris, outlined the similarities: “They are populists for whom the absolute truth doesn’t seem to be a necessity, for whom detail doesn’t hold any interest, and who don’t mind whom they offend.”

Both started on the outside, cartoonish figures made for and by television. Yet 2 1/2 years after beginning an unlikely presidency, Trump has remodeled American politics in his own image, seizing control of the Republican Party while delivering jobs and tax cuts. He has persuaded NATO allies to spend more on defense and intensified pressure on Iran. Even his opponents admit he was right to identify an immigrant crisis on the southern border.

With that comes the big question that looms over Johnson as he prepares to move to No. 10 Downing St. Can this most unlikely of politicians transform himself into a statesman? Can he make the same transition as Trump did from punchline to heavyweight?

Answering that question means understanding Johnson’s rise, the challenges he faced, and the way he turned them into successes. How did a Conservative mayor win the love of London, a Labour Party bastion, and impress skeptical diplomats who feared a bumbling foreign secretary could wreck Britain’s place in the world?

The formative parts of his life have been well picked over. The early peripatetic years were spent following a father who moved from job to job frequently in an apparently unending quest for financial stability. The young Al, as he was known to his family, lived in 32 homes in 14 years, according to his biographer Andrew Gimson.

His intelligence was apparent at age 13, when he became a King’s Scholar at Eton College. It marked him as among the very brightest at England’s most prestigious private school, propelling him on to a scholarship at Oxford. There he began preparing for politics by winning election as president of the Union, a debating club where students rub shoulders with world leaders.

He arrived at the Times newspaper in 1987 where he was put to work shadowing David Sapsted, who was then a reporter, who found his amiable charge unable to connect with ordinary people and largely uninterested in doing so. “He would never have made a frontline reporter — facts have never been his forte,” said Sapsted.

The experience went wrong within months. He was fired, accused of fabricating a quotation from a prominent historian for a front-page story. It did not help that the historian was his godfather.

He landed on his feet at the Daily Telegraph and was dispatched to Brussels, where he found a rich seam of stories bashing the bureaucrats of the European Commission, setting standards and regulations for European Union nations to follow. Johnson invented a genre of Euro-scare story, reporting plans to ban prawn cocktail-flavor chips, introduce a one-size-fits-all condom, and reclassify snails as fish.

That they were not, strictly speaking, true did not matter, wrote Martin Fletcher in the New Statesman decades later. He would know. He was one of the correspondents tasked with trying to mimic Johnson’s outrageous scoops.

“They were colorful and fun,” he wrote. “The Telegraph and right-wing Tories loved them. So did other Fleet Street editors, who found the standard Brussels fare tedious and began to press their own correspondents to follow suit.”

He returned to London on the up. In the years to follow, he became editor of the Spectator, the country’s leading conservative magazine, and was elected to Parliament. But just like Trump, it was his appearances on a prime-time TV show that made him a household name and created the image of Boris — he is now known by just a single name — a cuddly, confused figure bumbling through life with an air of amused detachment.

As guest host of the satirical game show Have I Got News for You, he would lose track of the questions, the answers, and the points as the contest degenerated into farce. “Boris, you edit a magazine? What on earth are the editorial meetings like?” ran a typical interjection as the host’s harrumphing and stammering indignation brought the house down.

Those performances are credited with transforming Johnson’s political career. Seven years after becoming an MP, he was elected mayor of London, powered in part by name recognition to an unlikely victory over the incumbent, who portrayed the Tory as a toff and a bigot.

Arguments rage about his legacy, but Johnson won reelection, and his two terms saw the crime rate drop by more than 20%. It also offers evidence of clearly defined political philosophy, a Johnsonian version of compassionate conservatism, in contrast to Trump who was elevated to high office with no previous record of service or consistent politics.

Guto Harri, who served as Johnson’s spokesman during his first term, said: “He’s a Thatcherite on basic economics — balance the books, cut waste, cut taxes where possible — but a Keynesian or a Roosevelt in terms of investing in infrastructure, such as extending the Tube and buying new trains or buses.”

He abhors government interference in private life. “Private money, private parts — none of the business of the state,” said Harri, pointing out that Johnson was the first senior Conservative to back gay marriage. “Never preach personal morality, which is why he is largely untouchable on his own personal conduct.” Which is just as well.

His critics say it is a mistake to treat Johnson as a harmless clown. In recent weeks, they have trawled three decades of columns to accuse him of racism and trivializing criminals and warlords. He has written about black people in Africa bearing “watermelon smiles,” repeatedly used the term “picaninny” to describe African children, and compared burka-wearing Muslim women to “letterboxes.”

Questions of character briefly threatened to derail Johnson’s campaign to become prime minister. Police were called last month to the home he shares with 31-year-old girlfriend Carrie Symonds. Neighbors in south London said they had recorded the sounds of an ugly row. Symonds can reportedly be heard on the recording telling Johnson to “get off me,” and “get out of my flat.”

Depending on your point of view, the tape was either a nothing burger produced by left-wing neighbors or a revealing insight into Johnson’s woman problem. Think either alleged “pee tape” or Access Hollywood for a Trumpian comparison.

Purnell wrote in the Times, “His attitude to women — endless affairs leaving a string of women and at least one pregnancy termination behind him — has long been one of entitlement and lack of respect.” Even counting his children has been complicated. He has four from his second marriage. The existence of a fifth from an affair with an art consultant was confirmed in 2013 when judges rejected an application for a gag order, saying it was a matter of “fitness for high public office.” The same ruling also said it was not the first time he had fathered a child in an adulterous affair.

None of which has dented his political ambitions so far. His second big job came in 2016, when he was appointed foreign secretary as Prime Minister Theresa May assembled her Cabinet in the wake of the shock Brexit referendum result. She needed a prominent “outer” to help her plot a European exit.

His period in office raised questions about his suitability for power. Relatives of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe blame Johnson for a bungled diplomatic intervention that left her locked in an Iranian prison for the past three years. He told MPs that the mother had been in Iran “teaching people journalism” despite her family’s insistence that she was visiting relatives.

It has since emerged that May restricted Johnson’s access to the highest levels of classified intelligence even though he was doing a job in which he had oversight of MI6 and was expected to approve sensitive operations. One explanation was that he was the victim of interdepartmental territory wars. Another was that his freewheeling style raised concerns that he would inadvertently let slip state secrets.

Yet the clownish image is only part of the story, according to diplomats who worked closely with him. They saw an energetic negotiator, the sort who would pick up the telephone even when the risks would have deterred less-spirited figures.

“My opinion of him definitely changed as a result of him being foreign secretary,” said a senior British diplomat who was aghast at Johnson’s appointment but came to praise his ability to connect with world leaders.

When diplomats were working the phones to strengthen the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, or OPCW, after attacks in Syria and in Britain, they found Johnson’s WhatsApp account had better contacts than the Foreign Office.

It was the sort of negotiation Britain had long shied from. Russia outright opposed it, making it difficult to achieve the two-thirds majority needed for reform. OPCW was an unsexy, almost unknown institution. The upside was modest; failure would certainly have generated headlines about Johnson presiding over diplomatic chaos.

Yet the gamble paid off. He won praise for his role in giving the OPCW new powers to point its finger at states to blame for chemical attacks. It made him a man for the times, according to the diplomat, with the chutzpah to tackle world crises. “You can work with that, and you contrast it with the current prime minister, and it might take days to get her to make one phone call to one person because she is so instinctively cautious,” he said.

Johnson has already displayed some of his high-stakes approach, promising to lead the U.K. out of the EU with or without an exit deal on Oct. 31. It is an instinctively Trumpian piece of brinksmanship that has won approval in Washington, where the likes of Larry Kudlow, White House chief economic adviser, are known to be Johnson boosters.

Ross Thomson, Johnson’s campaign manager in Scotland, said it was time to rebuild the Special Relationship. “I think Trump never held back that he thought Theresa May wasn’t the most engaging, and he probably didn’t have the strongest of relationships,” he said. “I think with Boris, he’s got a way of resetting that relationship.”

A reset cannot come soon enough amid the fallout from leaked diplomatic cables published by a British newspaper. Sir Kim Darroch, who was British ambassador to Washington and resigned last week, described the leader of the free world as “incompetent” and “insecure” and suggested his presidency “could end in disgrace.” Trump responded with a fresh broadside against May for failing to drive through Brexit and claiming Sir Kim was not liked in the U.S. “We will no longer deal with him,” he tweeted. “The good news for the wonderful United Kingdom is that they will soon have a new prime minister.” That was curtains for Sir Kim.

The president has made no secret of his preference among the Conservative candidates. Last month, he offered an endorsement of Johnson. “I think he is a very good guy, a very talented person. … I think Boris would do a very good job. I think he would be excellent,” he told the Sun newspaper.

Johnson repaid the compliment during his campaign, saying he wanted to mimic some of the Trump administration’s “clever” tax cuts. “Look at what Trump is doing,” he told Conservative Party members during a conference call. “They’ve got growth running at 3.6%.”

Johnson allies are understood to be planning an early meeting between the two, possibly at the United Nations in September, when world leaders address the General Assembly. It illustrates a new urgency to the relationship as Britain seeks a free trade deal and closer ties on everything from security to research. “If we get what we want, which is a clean Brexit, there should be no obstacles to having a comprehensive free trade agreement with the U.S.,” said Thomson.

That leaves Johnson facing an immediate crisis when he takes office. He has bolstered his hard-line credentials by promising an Oct. 31 departure come what may, limiting his room for maneuver, according to Hugo Dixon, an old pal from Eton and Oxford who now campaigns for a second referendum.

“He is boxed in by the realities of the situation and the realities of his rhetoric and the Tory Party contest, which forced him to harden up that Oct. 31 deadline,” Dixon said.

Therein lies the challenge. For meeting the deadline will not just please frustrated Brexiteers, it will encourage Trump allies who see the styles of the two men as complementary, up to a point.

Sebastian Gorka, a British-born former adviser to Trump, said the difference was that the president had no need of the job but saw it as his mission to fix a broken political system and drain Washington’s swamp. “If Boris acts in ways that reflect and respect the will of the British people, such as making Brexit happen this year, he will be respected by the president,” Gorka said. “If he comes to 10 Downing St. and proceeds to act like just another hack politician, a Cameron with a different hairdo, then the relationship will suffer.”

At the end of his Perth appearance, Johnson shuffled off the stage. The energy of his arrival was gone. He had failed to land several jokes and forgotten to deliver the punchline to a convoluted pun involving milk protein and chocolate bars that should have ended: “Where there’s a will, there’s a whey.”

After Flora, a second questioner laid in about his fitness for office, labeling him a “fibber.” Not that it mattered. He received more applause than his rival, Jeremy Hunt, whose polished performance delivered bullet points but little warmth.

As she made her way from the hall, Wendy Maisey, who had traveled from the north of England, explained why rank-and-file Tories shrugged off the attacks on Johnson. “Ever since the referendum was won by the Leave campaign, the people in the country who wanted to remain, the ones who have all the power, have tried to assassinate his character,” she said.

She didn’t use the words “deep state” or “fake news,” but the transatlantic parallel was obvious.

Rob Crilly is White House correspondent for the Washington Examiner.