Boris Johnson faces a truly unenviable job as British PM

Few incoming British prime ministers can have faced an in-tray as potentially toxic as that now confronting Boris Johnson. How he handles the contents will dictate whether his premiership survives its infancy and have an impact far beyond the potential fallout of the Brexit timebomb he must now defuse. For the past six weeks, Mr Johnson has campaigned in rhetorical overdrive, setting out his stall not for the UK’s 46-million-strong electorate, but the 92,153 Conservative party members whose votes handed him victory on Tuesday. To assuage their fears of the ascendant Brexit Party, Mr Johnson has promised Britain will leave the European Union on October 31, deal or no deal.

Yet Britain is a bitterly divided nation, half of which voted against Brexit and regards the prospect of a no-deal withdrawal as economic suicide. Mr Johnson must now walk a highwire from which he and his party risk falling in the general election that may be his only hope of securing the parliamentary majority necessary for a no-deal withdrawal. For now, Mr Johnson has the support of the US president, which is vital to the UK’s post-Brexit trade prospects. But he knows Donald Trump’s continuing blessing is dependent upon the UK toeing the line on a range of issues, the most pressing of which is Washington’s desire to tighten the Iran sanctions noose.

Mr Johnson has a poor diplomatic record, not least with Tehran. As foreign secretary, he failed to secure the release of the British-Iranian Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, accused of plotting against the government, and compounded her plight by erroneously suggesting she had been training journalists. Now much more than her freedom is at stake. In Vienna on Sunday, while the standoff in the Gulf continues to play out, British diplomats will meet with the other remaining signatories to see what can be salvaged from the flawed Iran nuclear deal.

To his foes, Mr Johnson is an Old Etonian throwback, unsuited to high office. To his allies, his buffoonery masks a Churchillian bulldog, ready to put the “great” back in Britain. Either way, there are doubts that he can fulfill the potential upon which his party has now staked its future. For the sake of his country’s economic future and its standing in the world, all Britons will now be hoping that Conservative party members have backed a winner.