 Boris Johnson is now Britain's Prime Minister in the culmination of a political career which drummed twice the electorate's mayor of London before becoming the lead figure in the lead campaign of 2016. Given he fronted one of the biggest political upsets in recent history was a Tory mayor in a Labour city and is unique in having a political brand, whereas on first name terms the electorate, the question is begging to be asked. Can Boris Johnson be beaten? And if so, how? Let's start with a strategy often pursued by his critics. It goes something like this. Boris Johnson is unfit for office, he's morally bankrupt, untrustworthy, opportunistic. He isn't certain of how many children he has, compared Muslim women to letterboxes and labelled gay men bumboys. But while none of that is the kind of thing we should expect or accept from a Prime Minister, the idea that he shouldn't have the top job because of his personality or values isn't just limited, it will fail to get him out of number 10. Because here's the thing, Boris Johnson wants politics to be a TV series where he's cast as the lead character. It suits him if the national conversation converges around two opposite camps, one for, one against. That means with the help of the country's right-wing print media he can ventriloquise a fictional silent majority, appealing to British values, pointing to a sense of national myth and historic purpose, even when it isn't really there. Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi offers an example in this respect. From the very beginning of his political career he faced investigations into business dealings, bribery, fraud, even paying minors for sex. All in all he's endured dozens of court cases, allegations and trials, and this for a man who was Prime Minister three times at the age of 82 is an MEP. While the court cases were impossible to follow because of the way they played out through the media, what was obvious to most Italians was Berlusconi's response, which was typically him saying that the judges were biased and politically driven. And that sense of persecution and struggle was something that many Italians could identify with. And with the judiciary being his biggest opponent, far more so than any party political rival, this only served to reinforce the notion that judges wanted to achieve what elections had failed to do, namely remove Berlusconi from power and undo the will of the people. And surprisingly then the consequences were almost entirely negative, with existing opinion just confirmed on both sides, while faith in the democratic process more generally disintegrated. The specter of court trying to remove an elected politician cultivated apathy, which is the last thing you need if you're trying to create a mass movement for political transformation. Which kind of explains why Berlusconi is the most successful Italian politician in recent decades, and now confronting the rise the far-right leger, the Italian left is nowhere. Why? Because for a generation they stood for nothing but being against Silvio Berlusconi. Turns out that's not enough. There's a lesson there, not just the UK, but the United States with Donald Trump. As with Berlusconi in Italy, the hope for the resistance was that a special council investigation might achieve what Hillary Clinton couldn't. And yet, after years of buildup, even the NYT couldn't hold back, labelling its findings the blockbuster that wasn't. By hyping the hearings and treating Mueller's testimony like some Netflix finale, Democrats played by Trump's rules, making national politics resemble the apprentice and the electorate itself, just one more TV audience. Given those hostile to Trump expected Mueller's testimony to provide the drama one might associate with Game of Thrones, this was never going to work because what they got instead was reality, namely a 74-year-old bureaucrat speaking legalese. At the same time, Trump, like Berlusconi, claimed the entire establishment was against him in trying to undermine the democratic will of the people. And importantly, he, unlike the investigation itself, could frame his response in a register most Americans easily understand. When was the last time you saw Chevrolet in Tokyo? It's no surprise then that polling taken straight after Mueller's testimony revealed just 3% of Republican voters felt Trump should be impeached. Given there'll be a litany of legal case in the event of no deal, this is instructive. Because if you want to win over a majority of society in resisting a right-wing populist, the idea that proceeding through the courts will offer some shortcut in the place of politics is mistaken, as much as evident with Trump's approval ratings. Despite what the president himself says, they aren't great. Nevertheless, they have improved quite significantly over the last three years, despite Mueller undermining early predictions about Trump heading into 2020. The fallout from the Mueller inquiry is negligible, with establishment Democrats realising that they've failed to politically isolate Trump for three years. I mean, what would Joe Biden do as president other than not be Donald Trump? Here in the UK, we've already seen one unsuccessful attempt to bring Johnson before the courts. In the coming months, it's likely this will re-emerge as a central tactic of the campaigns to get rid of him, with revelations about finances or convert with Vote Leave, meaning various commentators can claim they have the scandal that will get him out. But like Trump and Berlusconi, this approach suits Johnson. Politics polarising entirely on the basis of a culture war around Brexit, with the accumulator resources of national myth behind his government, is just about the only way he can get this project of no deal through. Meanwhile, he will admonish the remain establishment, the liberal elite whose hidden hand undermines the will of the great British public at every turn. And if that doesn't work, there's a host of enemies within, Muslims, Scottish and Welsh nationalists, socialists, trade unions, and yeah, Marxists. Fighting against what is an extremely harsh Labour Party run by a Marxist whose sole purpose in life is to do real damage to the to the country. So if you can't defeat the politics of Boris Johnson through legal means or highlighting his lack of moral fibre, then how do you? The answer is to appeal to class interests, policies that can transform people's lives, and a coherent vision of how to take Britain into the 21st century. Indeed, such an approach, especially that focus on class, explains why Johnson's only hiccup during an otherwise underwhelming leadership contest was his promise of offering tax cuts for the rich, but not long after announcing a policy which stood to benefit only those earning more than 50,000 a year and which could have cost the Exchequer as much as 20 billion pounds, he quickly rode back. Compare that to Labour's platform of a real living wage, nationalising rail, mail, energy and water, building a half a million council houses in five years, a green industrial revolution banning zero hours contracts, free child care, scrapping tuition fees. Sounds good, doesn't it? You see, we've gotten so used to not having nice things recently, but the reason we don't have them isn't because of political necessity, it's because politicians, like Boris Johnson, have decided to use the money for tax cuts to the ultra-rich instead. And this is the way you beat Boris Johnson by keeping the political conversation oriented around the tens and millions of people that make up this country rather than one guy at the top. That is what the politics of taking back control really has to mean, because if we instead have a distant circus played out on a TV screen, Johnson will always win. The more his premiership is focused on personality, the better for him. Of course, collective myth remains important, which is why questions like what kind of country Britain is remain vital. Is it one with food banks and rough sleepers, runaway billionaires and unelected life peers, or one where kids can actually eat before going to school, where education is free because we all benefit, and young families don't need to panic about the costs of child care. Again, this shouldn't focus on Boris Johnson, but rather the interests he represents, which are no different fundamentally to those championed by Theresa May and David Cameron. It is important to channel an anti-elitist message, not because of Johnson's privileged background, but because the elite of which he is a part has rigged the system in their favour against ordinary people, and it's in the interest of those ordinary people to send him packing. That appeal to justified grievance in a rigged system in economic interest will always be a second-rate soap opera. It's not about Boris Johnson, it never was. It's about what Boris Johnson is nearly the latest MS3 of a broken model means for you. Turns out, unless you're a millionaire, it's bad news.