John Oliver Uncovers the Key to Understanding Boris Johnson (Video)

Struggling with a combination of disbelief and disappointment at the rise of his home country’s new prime minister, comedian John Oliver dedicated his monologue on HBO’s “Last Week Tonight” to explaining who the United Kingdom’s Boris Johnson is. Beginning with a few clips about the conservative leader’s teenage years at the elite schools Eton and Oxford, as well as his early career as a lying journalist, Oliver portrays Johnson as a calculated, ill-prepared, privileged man who has cultivated an image as a relatable, charming clown in order to hide his inadequacy and penchant for racist tropes and fabricated narratives. In many ways, this very image has allowed him to have his elitist racist cake and eat it too, in the sense that he can say and do whatever he pleases, and seems to be able to distract from his appalling actions and words by papering over them with his well-constructed magnetism.

Now, this very man is also in charge of negotiating the U.K.’s divorce from the European Union, after years of writing demonstrable lies about the EU, and being one of the leaders of the “Leave” campaign in the run-up to the 2016 referendum in which Britons voted to separate from the 27-member bloc. And while Johnson has been compared to his American counterpart, Donald Trump, most notably by the U.S. president himself, Oliver points out one key difference that may make the British leader even more dangerous to global stability than the American commander in chief.

Watch the full clip in the video player above.