Boris Johnson’s claim that £30bn from the divorce bill will be ours to spend after no-deal Brexit is shameful

Editorial: Donald Tusk, Angela Merkel, the prime minister himself and absolutely everybody else knows that no deal will not free up a single penny for the UK economy. It will cost it untold fortunes

Politics and public discourse have very little safeguard against politicians who wish to strip them of their basic dignity. For several years now, the world has frankly had no idea how to respond to a US president who customarily makes remarks that were recently thought not merely unsayable but unthinkable. Rival politicians who are people of colour should “go back to where they came from”. A critical TV host has been “bleeding pretty hard from a facelift”.

The rest of us have no choice but to engage with these debasing words and we are lessened as a result.

Sadly, the world stage now has another such person on it, and he is our prime minister. Reporting on the G7 summit in Biarritz, one German journalist described Angela Merkel looking upon Boris Johnson, “just as one looks upon a rare beetle”. Johnson, like so many of his ilk, has reached the age of 55 without ever coming to understand that the world at large is nothing like a British public school.