Why Western Europe keeps producing weak leaders

The first time I saw Boris Johnson, he was dangling in mid-air in a safety helmet, Union Jack flags fluttering above him and his polished shoes tucked awkwardly beneath him. He looked like Mr. Bean after being accidentally ejected from an aircraft.

I couldn’t believe that this was the new prime minister of Britain, so I checked other photographs, assuming it might be Photoshop. But it wasn’t, and there he was, sitting in the same office once occupied by Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher.

That image has stayed with me because it captured something larger and made me ask what’s happened to Britain’s political elite, and to Western Europe’s more broadly?

Britain has changed prime minister repeatedly in recent years, and each new arrival has seemed more insubstantial than the last and compared with the major figures of the past, many of today’s leaders look lightweight and strangely unprepared for the seriousness of the offices they hold.

Elsewhere in Western Europe, the picture is no better, such as Emmanuel Macron who looks the part in a well-cut suit, but appearances only go so far. The photographs from his youth, the theatrical poses and the carefully managed presidential image all speak to a politics increasingly dominated by presentation, while even scenes from his marriage, such as the now-famous footage of Brigitte Macron appearing to strike him on a government aircraft, would have been almost unimaginable in the eras of François Mitterrand or Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.