2 years ago
Boris Johnson became the British prime minister because the Conservative party felt they had no other choice. They were, in summer 2019, on the verge of splitting — with no Parliamentary majority, no agreement on a deal to leave the EU, and the prospect of an election against a left-wing Labour leader who they felt represented an existential risk to the country. They turned to Johnson as a last resort, knowing full well his reputation for dishonesty and lack of material career achievements. But he was the only Member of Parliament (MP) who had both campaigned for Brexit and was reasonably popular with potential Conservative voters. So in desperation they took the plunge.
The hope was that he would accept being a charismatic frontman while some sensible grown-ups made the decisions. But it quickly became apparent this wasn’t going to happen. Instead we saw an extraordinarily shambolic administration, with no agenda, making announcements mostly designed to appeal to tabloid newspapers. It’s hard to think of any important or useful initiatives that emerged from his government over the past two and a half years on domestic or economic policy.
The Covid pandemic provided some cover for this lack of any coherent policy by dominating the news agenda for a large part of his time in office, but by the autumn of 2021 his MPs were getting restless at the absence of any real governing plan. Then his inability to tell the truth led to a string of scandals, most notably over parties held at his residence in Downing Street, while the rest of the country was in Covid lockdown.
By the beginning of 2022, his polling ratings had crashed. And here is where Johnson’s fate took a turn, and why he was more vulnerable to a mutiny from his party than another scandal-prone leader, Donald Trump. The differences in presidential and parliamentary systems are obviously a major reason. But so is the fact that UK politics remains less polarized by party than in the U.S. and many Conservative voters were dismayed by Johnson’s behavior. In the U.S., other identities — including racial and religious ones — have aligned with party affiliation creating a powerful driver of polarization. That’s something Trump has seized on, and which hasn’t happened in the UK where racial politics works very differently and the vast majority of people are secular. The UK also has the safety valve of third parties, like the Liberal Democrats, who unhappy voters can turn to without having to completely switch ideological preferences.
As voters turned against Johnson so did many of his party colleagues. Unlike Republican congressmen in the United States, who fear a Trump-backed primary challenge more than anything, the Conservative MPs who reluctantly backed Johnson because he was an election winner now realized he was a liability. Their support had been conditional and largely transactional — he has few close friends in politics — and it fell away fast.
By February, it looked as if Johnson was done, but the war in Ukraine intervened and politics, briefly, took a back seat. When it returned, Johnson was immediately in trouble again. He was fined by the police for the Covid parties and became the first British prime minister found to have broken the law in office. Poor local election results and the worsening cost-of-living crisis pushed Conservative MPs into attempting to remove him as party leader via a vote of no confidence in early June. He won, but barely, with 41 percent of his MPs saying they wanted him to go. Other leaders would have resigned at this point, but he has preternatural lack of shame.
Soon a series of new scandals emerged. Last week, an MP — Chris Pincher — who Johnson had appointed to a key government role had to resign after publicly groping two colleagues. Then it emerged there had been a whole series of other allegations made about Pincher before his appointment. The prime minister denied any knowledge of this, but he was lying again. A former senior civil servant went public with evidence that Johnson had known. This was too much for those MPs who’d decided to give Johnson one final chance. Two senior cabinet ministers resigned, followed by dozens of more junior members of the government.
Any other prime minister in history would have taken the hint by this point but Johnson still refused to go. He increasingly resembled Monty Python’s “black knight” insisting that he would fight on despite losing all but one limb. Eventually 60 members of the government resigned before he could be brought to accept the inevitable, including some cabinet ministers he’d appointed to replace those who’d left in the first wave of resignations.
Finally on Thursday, he gave a grudging speech complaining about his colleagues’ “eccentric” decision to abandon him and resigned as Tory leader. He intends to stay as prime minister while the party goes through the process of choosing a new head, which usually takes around two months. But even now many of his MPs are worried he will try to wriggle out of that commitment and stay regardless, which shows just how little trust is left in him. Some think he will try to make a series of announcements to regain popularity in the delusional hope of turning things around.
The UK doesn’t have a written constitution, instead making do with a patchwork of historical precedents. That system, though, relies on prime ministers behaving with honor, and Johnson has none. (Of course, even a written constitution is not enough to constrain a U.S. president rampaging through norms if he wants to.) So there remains a risk he will try to exploit the lack of rules to his benefit. For instance, some MPs still think he may try to call a general election, even though the party doesn’t want one. It’s probable the Queen could stop him but the constitutional principle that would allow her to do so is based on a letter written anonymously to The Times newspaper by her father’s private secretary in 1950.
Still, whatever Boris Johnson thinks might be possible, it is almost certain that he will now be replaced by a new prime minister, probably in early September. Like the Republicans in the United States, the British Conservatives face something of a Trumpian identity crisis. The race to succeed Johnson is wide open, with the party’s MPs divided between those who want a more traditional candidate — fiscally conservative, hawkish on foreign policy, and socially liberal — and those who want a populist choice to appeal to the more authoritarian voters who switched to them over Brexit. The current favorite is Ben Wallace, the Defence secretary widely seen as having done well over Ukraine, and a potential party unifier. But he hasn’t yet decided to run.
Whoever replaces Johnson will inherit a traumatized party, a skeptical electorate and a lengthy list of economic and social problems. With the next general election less than two years way, they will have little time to clean up the mess. The only thing they have going for them is their predecessor has set a very low bar.
English (US)