Which implies that his kind of bumbling attitude in popular politics might very well be calculated, i.e. he's not a fool, he's brilliant.
I'll buy that he's borderline genius with the populist bits, but I also believe basically everyone in international politics who say he's a clown, totally unprepared, never serious. Some of the things serious entities have to say about him are pretty bad.
Apparently, people 'like him' and his sheer popularity I think is most of the driving force behind his success.
Anyone who's paying attention (small minority in reality) seems to regard him as a complete idiot, however.
The Financial Times, his former editor at the Telegraph, obviously the Guardian - any serious writing about him is seriously derisive.
These are harsh words [1]
The thing I don't understand is what the Conservatives are thinking at this time? Are they simply looking at the polls showing him as clearly the most electable in an election? Because I can't believe that conservative MP's don't realize he's a fool as well. Maybe they think they'll be able to combine him with a solid Brexit negotiator, but I don't see that working. I just can't fathom Boris Johnson sitting down with Merkel, and whoever the new EU President is going to be, and doing anything material.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jun/24/boris-...
Conservative members put Brexit above the union (with Scotland and Northern Ireland), above the survival of their party, and above the economy. The only thing they put above Brexit is keeping out Corbyn.
Edit, here it is: https://monevator.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/YouGov-Tory...
I would note that all three of these are extremely anti-Brexit. Lots of people believe (rightly or wrongly) that Leave wouldn't have won without the support of Johnson and blame him personally for Brexit, which they see as an abomination. They aren't going to be even handed in their judgement of him: really, I'd say anything they write about him is going to be a smear.
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/0/heres-where-britains-...
Ultimately, though, that's a sideshow. He has no principles, forethought, or plan. So I struggle to understand how he'd improve the UK's position.
Since the Brexit vote the only people at the helm have been serious establishment types who saw the entire process as a damage limitation exercise, and who couldn't stop telling the country that what they had been offered and requested wasn't actually possible, the sky would fall and so on. Many such serious people made very serious predictions, most notoriously, the Treasury predicting that the vote would trigger an uncertainty-based recession that'd wipe out half a million jobs. Obviously the reality was very different.
Boris isn't an idiot. He is popular because he did a good job in London and comes across as a man who believes in Britain and wants to get things done. Whether he will or not is an entirely different matter; his party is still against him. But he's widely liked for understandable reasons.