The treatment of EU nationals will be a litmus test of Boris Johnson’s Brexit

What makes Boris Johnson an improvement on Theresa May? Those of us who cheered him on into 10 Downing Street have a long list. He backed Brexit, so would stand a far greater chance of getting it done. He’d hire better people, who could outwit and outmanoeuvre his parliamentary enemies (as we have seen this week). He is acting with a pace and with a daring that is extraordinary – and commensurate with the challenge he faces over Brexit.

But the real point of Boris as leader is that he promised to give his party a better chance of healing the divisions of the referendum and uniting the country. This might sound fanciful, when his enemies are howling over the prorogation of parliament and referring to him as a dictator. But the ever-wilder allegations are impossible to reconcile with his record and his character. Fundamentally, he is a liberal: someone for whom Brexit is an opportunity to think globally, to lift our sights to more distant horizons.

So he might, in time, persuade others that Brexit is not about the hoisting of drawbridges or snarling at immigrants. He is acting decisively now because to do otherwise is fatal. If you believe that Brexit is the biggest domestic challenge in the post-war years, it follows that nothing else matters much. His biggest threat, now, is MPs voting down his government to call an election: it’s about the only tool they have left. So if it looks like he might win an election and return stronger than he is now, there’d be no point voting down his government. It’s the old story: for peace, prepare for war.

But this has brought about some strange outcomes, and a subtle but unwelcome change in tone. We have heard strikingly little about his vision of a ‘global Brexit’, his great theme as Foreign Secretary and his supposed agenda for what comes after 31 October.