As an American liberal, the schadenfreude of watching Boris Johnson’s collapse “is mixed with envy”, says Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times. A still-functioning democracy dispatched its “bombastic populist leader” because his amorality and dishonesty grew simply too much. Johnson and Donald Trump shared “certain parallels”: an appeal to disaffected working-class voters, contempt for truth, and of course “poufy yellow hair”. But the countries they operated in are very different. The UK’s parliamentary system is “generally more effective” than America’s presidential model; British people are still capable of being shocked by sexual harassment and shameless lies; there is no powerful, heavily armed faction that regularly threatens violence. The country’s government is falling apart “precisely because its society is not”.

Western governments are stuck with a grim choice, says William Schneider in The Wall Street Journal: “climate change or human rights”. As the US, UK and other global do-gooders ramp up “solar energy, batteries and electric vehicles”, they are exposing themselves more and more to “forced and child labour”. Take lithium batteries, currently the only technology on the market that will make rapid uptake of electric cars possible. Chinese firms have bought up mining facilities around the world to produce not just lithium but also cobalt, a crucial ingredient in battery anodes. Some 60% of the world’s cobalt supply comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo, “notorious for the use of child labour”.