The defenestration of Boris Johnson was a “very British affair”, says Adrian Wooldridge in Bloomberg: drama at Prime Minister’s Questions; machinations within the 1922 Committee; scandal at a private members’ club. Yet “for all the local colour”, this was just a British variation on the global story of populism. We’ve seen it all elsewhere: a charismatic leader wins power promising to champion the little people. He breaks not just “sartorial and behavioural codes”, but constitutional norms. He frequently achieves what “convention-bound politicians deemed impossible” – but always, inevitably, “crashes and burns”. Johnson was relatively lightweight as populists go – his rule-breaking paled in comparison to that of, say, Donald Trump, Silvio Berlusconi and Bolivia’s Evo Morales. But populist he was.

British democracy just “giggled its way into crisis”, says Janan Ganesh in the FT. Boris Johnson, a man who once agreed to assist the potential assault of a journalist, was able to “banter his way to the top” via newspapers and panel shows. Raising any ethical qualms about him got you labelled a prig. This “nihilistic unseriousness” – a way of dealing with post-imperial decline, according to Martin Amis – isn’t all bad. “No electorate with a sense of the absurd would obey a moustache-twirling goon in epaulettes.” But humour can lead to national ruin of a different kind. Britain’s “plausible future” may well be “Mediterranean per capita income with northern European weather”. Laughing cavaliers like Johnson and Nigel Farage, who “waved aside the economics of Brexit as a nerd’s concern”, are partly to blame.