Boris Johnson was named Tuesday by British Conservative Party activists to succeed Prime Minister Theresa May. For Jon Henley, it is thanks to his "good words" that he managed to climb to the top of power.

INTERVIEW

Some call him a British Donald Trump. Pro-Brexit champion Boris Johnson was named Tuesday by British Conservative Party activists to succeed Prime Minister Theresa May. The former mayor of London and former foreign minister, who has sparked a lot of controversy over the last thirty years, will officially take office on Wednesday.

"He always did the minimum"

For Jon Henley, correspondent of the Guardian in France, interviewed Tuesday at the microphone of François Clauss on Europe 1, it is too early to say if "BoJo" will be credible or not as Prime Minister in a United Kingdom disoriented by procrastination on Brexit.

"He is probably brilliant, he is very intelligent but he never needed to make great efforts, he has always done the minimum," said the journalist. "His school reports when he was at Eton College, the most prestigious school in the country, were filled with comments that he could really do better." He always preferred to clown, find the right word, But until then all that worked for him, even as the mayor of London the jokes worked, "says Jon Henley.

It was thanks to his "good words" that he distilled in his articles when he was a Brussels correspondent for the center-right newspaper Daily telegraph between 1989 and 1994, that Boris Johnson found a place in conservatives. He invented a new way of doing politics.

Several major challenges lie ahead

"Today, he is still a columnist for the Daily Telegraph, and in the British press, the job of the columnist is to find solutions, simple arguments to complex problems, not to recognize the difficulties, the complexities, especially not to seek consensus, "says the Guardian correspondent. "That's quite Johnson's style, preferring the right word, the joke, the exhortation, and the rhetoric to really serious study of a problem."

However, several major challenges await the former mayor of London: to implement Brexit, without exacerbating the deep divisions on the issue, become the center of gravity of British society and manage the escalation of tensions with Tehran, at the highest level. after Iran's arrest on Friday of a British-flagged oil tanker in the Strait of Hormuz.