Read: Boris Johnson meets his destiny

To the 90,000-odd Conservative Party faithful who elected him (a “selectorate” that forms less than 1 percent of the British population), none of this matters. Johnson has told them that everything is going to be okay, and they want to believe him. More than anything else, they are bored with discussions of trade deals, nontariff barriers, and regulatory orbits. He promises entertainment and novelty instead. In this reading, the greatest flaw of Theresa May, Johnson’s predecessor on Downing Street, was not just failing to pass a Brexit deal, but doing so in such a dull, repetitive fashion. The possibility of a No-Deal Brexit is exciting, in the way that stories about the Second World War—and Johnson’s hero, Winston Churchill—are exciting. It is a viewpoint that can flourish only now that so few people remember the reality of that time: rationing, air raids, death. There’s a reason that “May you live in interesting times” is considered a curse.

Johnson’s addiction to optimism is reminiscent of Donald Trump’s promise of endless victories. “We’re going to win so much, you’re going to be so sick and tired of winning,” the U.S. president said in April 2016. The new British prime minister offers a similarly enticing prospect: a world without compromises or awkward concessions, a world where Britain is once more recognized as a great power (back to the Second World War again). It is patriotism on protein powder.

So perhaps his No Deal preparations, directing the civil service to ramp up planning for such a scenario, are not a bluff. Today, he repeated his campaign promise to leave by October 31, with or without an exit deal, “no ifs, no buts.” (It is a phrase with an unhappy history: Former Prime Minister David Cameron used it in 2011 when making his pledge to lower net migration into Britain to fewer than 100,000. He failed repeatedly.)

Read: The perils of leadership based on charisma instead of strategy

The rest of the speech proved that he has two modes: buffoonery and boredom. It was light on jokes. There was, mercifully, no Latin. It merely dabbled with the self-satisfied wordplay that filled his newspaper columns, such as calling the four nations of the United Kingdom the “awesome foursome.” Parts of it sounded like May’s own Downing Street speech after she became prime minister in 2016: high aspirations about social justice, all eaten by the relentless grind of European negotiations.

The tragedy of May’s speech three years ago was that it barely mentioned Brexit, the issue that consumed her premiership and led to her downfall. At her last Prime Minister’s Questions today, she tried again to create a different legacy. She saw her success in “the opportunity of every child who is now in a better school, in the comfort of every person who now has a job for the first time in their life, in the hope of every disadvantaged young person now able to go to university, and it is in the joy of every couple who can now move into their own home.” This is how she would measure her record, she said. She will be the only one to do so. To history, May will be the prime minister defeated by Brexit.