LONDON — During the Vietnam War the American ambassador in Saigon, Frederick Nolting Jr., indignant at negative coverage, demanded of the French journalist François Sully, “Why, Monsieur Sully, do you always see the hole in the doughnut?”

“Because, Monsieur l’Ambassadeur,” Sully replied, “there is a hole in the doughnut.”

Speaking of doughnuts, Boris Johnson may well become the British prime minister this month. The United States and Britain would then be led by men with striking similarities, and not just on the hair front: two charlatans and narcissists with flimsy notions of the truth, utterly unprincipled, given to racist slurs, skilled practitioners of the politics of spectacle, manipulators of fear, nationalist traffickers in an imaginary past of radiant greatness, fabulists of reborn glory, with giant holes at their centers where conscience and integrity went missing.

So much for the leadership of the free world!

One of the great satisfactions of my life was watching Britain take its place in Europe, prejudice fall away, gastronomy and England find an unlikely accommodation and tolerance spread — until in 2016, Britain, in a radical act of self-harm, hurled itself over a cliff called Brexit. Little Englandism had reasserted itself. Johnson bobbed up to incarnate it, demonstrating the inexhaustible English fascination with the jolly good pranks of the pampered public schoolboy.

Now, if he gets his way, Johnson is going to be in our faces, like his buddy President Trump. The Tories have become a one-issue party — Brexit — just as the Republicans have become a one-man party — Trump. Each in folding has shown all the spine of a jellyfish.