This week, after years of scrabbling for power, Boris Johnson becomes the leader of Britain’s Conservative Party, and by extension, prime minister of the country. He has trod the path to power in stages. In recent years, he opportunistically sided with the pro-Brexit side in the 2016 referendum, a key endorsement that undermined then-Prime Minister David Cameron and helped push the “yes” vote to victory. Then he helped to systematically undermine the next prime minister, Theresa May, as she tried to untangle the impossible Gordian knot of Brexit. Then, he wooed enough conservative members of parliament (MPs) in the Conservative Party’s byzantine leadership election process to ensure that he would become a front-runner candidate. And, finally, he convinced a majority of the party’s 160,000 members — a disproportionately white, affluent, suburban and rural electorate — to vote for him, and his nationalistic vision of Britain, over his opponent, the current Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt. Johnson beat Hunt by a wide margin, winning 92,153 votes while Hunt tallied 46,656.

Johnson’s turnaround is remarkable for a man who found himself in the political wilderness a couple of years ago, forced to resign his position as foreign secretary after refusing to bend to Theresa May’s will over how to conduct Brexit negotiations with the European Union.

Boris Johnson has long craved power – not to implement any grand ideological agenda, but rather to show the world that he’s a big enough man to rise to the top. He is, as many critics have pointed out, without a true political core, his project more one of personal vanity than of principle.