India, July 24 -- It has been suggested that Boris Johnson (who became the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom yesterday) is what you would get if US President Donald Trump had been educated at Eton and Oxford. Maybe, although there is a great gulf between Trump's bombastic self-promotion and Johnson's self-deprecating, rather shambolic persona. There is such a thing as a national style and Trump's shtick would fail as badly in Britain as Johnson's would in the US. But questions of style aside, the two men are almost identical.
They are both inveterate, shameless liars. They are both what lay people call narcissists and the experts call "sociopaths": Men (they are mostly men), who accumulate numerous wives, girlfriends and children as the...