Boris Johnson Survives, for Now
Since Boris Johnson became Britain’s Prime Minister, in July, 2019, comparisons between him and Donald Trump have perhaps been overdone a bit. But the two of them undoubtedly share one trait: wanton shamelessness. So, on Monday evening, when Johnson addressed a group of Conservative Members of Parliament, shortly before a vote of confidence in his Party leadership, there was never any prospect of him sincerely fessing up to his transgressions.
The vote was sparked by revelations about how, at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, Johnson and his staff repeatedly flouted strict social-distancing regulations that they had ordered their fellow-citizens to observe. An independent report published last month detailed a number of social events at 10 Downing Street during which staffers partied late into the night, drinking heavily, and, in at least one instance, belting out karaoke.
Without naming Johnson specifically, the author of the report, Sue Gray, a senior civil servant, pointed to serious “failures of leadership and judgment in No 10 and the Cabinet Office.” The evidence that Gray gathered indicated that Johnson misled Parliament when he claimed not to know about illicit social gatherings in his office or residence, and also when he said that he was sure no lockdown rules had been breached. A photograph from November, 2020, during the deadly second wave of the coronavirus, showed Johnson standing in a room at 10 Downing Street, surrounded by other people and bottles of alcohol, raising a glass to a departing colleague.
At the meeting of Tory M.P.s on Monday evening, Johnson skated around these damaging details. According to accounts from journalists, he reminded his audience of the big election victory that he had led the Party to, in 2019, and of the fact that he had, as he saw it, resolved the long-running Brexit crisis by finally withdrawing Britain from the E.U. Then he asked, “Do you really think that anyone else would have done it?” At least one of the M.P.s present asked him about the conduct detailed in the Gray report, to which he apparently replied, “I’d do it again.” Shortly after the meeting ended, an unnamed Conservative Party source told reporters that the British public didn’t care about the COVID infractions, adding, “Is there anyone here who hasn’t got pissed in their lives? Is there anyone here who doesn’t like a glass of wine to decompress?”
When the Conservatives’ votes were tallied, later that night, they showed that two hundred and eleven M.P.s had supported Johnson and a hundred and forty-eight had expressed no confidence in him. If Johnson had lost the vote, he would, almost certainly, have been forced to resign. The Prime Minister survived, but more than forty per cent of his own party had abandoned him. After the outcome was announced, Johnson brazenly hailed it as “a convincing result, a decisive result.” The headline in the Financial Times was closer to the truth: “Weakened Boris Johnson Scrapes Through After Damaging Confidence Vote.”
Johnson received a lower share of Conservative M.P.s’ votes than his Tory predecessor, Theresa May, garnered in a 2018 no-confidence vote, which was followed, six months later, by her resignation. The current situation isn’t directly comparable because May, after her vote, was still burdened by the ongoing Brexit stalemate, whereas the COVID restrictions are now in the past. But many observers, including a number of Conservatives, think that the Good Ship Boris has been holed below the waterline. “This is the end for Boris Johnson. The only question is how long the agony is prolonged,” Rory Stewart, a former Conservative minister who now teaches at Yale, tweeted.
If Stewart is proved correct, Partygate won’t be the only thing that did in Johnson, although the scandal has certainly turned many ordinary voters against him, and particularly against his clumsy efforts to cover up the high jinks at No. 10. “In terms of partying, it wasn’t a mad party, though they were drinking and mixing when we weren’t,” Barbara Robinson, a retired pharmaceutical analyst who lives in Bury, a post-industrial town near Manchester, told the Guardian. “But to lie about it consistently and to lie in the House of Commons, that’s the problem.”
The larger case against Johnson is that his flouting of COVID restrictions is one aspect of a broad dereliction of duty that has alienated a wide range of Conservatives—from centrists to free-market Thatcherites, to even some of his former Brexit allies. Critics from Johnson’s own party have declared his government rudderless. “We have a grotesque goof clowning around as if he cannot wait to get back to the latest party in No.10,” Bruce Anderson, a veteran conservative commentator, wrote, on the eve of the no-confidence vote.
Even more damning was a lengthy public letter to Johnson issued by Jesse Norman, a Conservative M.P. and former minister who had supported the Prime Minister for fifteen years, first for the London mayoralty and then for his current post. “Under you the Government seems to lack a sense of mission,” Norman wrote. “It has a large majority, but no long-term plan. . . . Rather, you are simply seeking to campaign, to keep changing the subject and to create political and cultural dividing lines mainly for your advantage.” Norman added, “You are apparently trying to import elements of a presidential system of government that is entirely foreign to our constitution and law. But you are not a president, and you have no mandate other than as an MP, and from the confidence of your colleagues.”
The latter reference was to Johnson’s Trump-like attempts to centralize power in his own office, neutering his Cabinet as well as Parliament itself. In theory, this threatens the British system of government. But another thing Johnson shares with Trump is that his pretensions of power greatly overshadow his willingness to do the hard work of insuring that his many edicts are actually implemented. Since the great Brexit drama, his rule has been more clown show than Il Duce revival—but also has done genuine damage. Lately, Johnson has displayed a willingness to undermine parts of the 1998 Anglo-Irish peace agreement, and he has introduced some divisive and nasty efforts to shore up the Tory base by banning noisy protests and deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda, regardless of where they came from.
How much longer will Johnson last in Downing Street? Under the current Conservative Party rules, his leadership can’t be challenged again for at least twelve months. In addition, the next general election doesn’t have to be held until January, 2025, so the Prime Minister potentially has time to rebuild his standing. Even now, his raw political instincts—as opposed to his governing abilities—shouldn’t be underestimated. By shifting the Tories further rightward on social issues and leftward on economics, he is pursuing a populist strategy that is designed to splinter the opposition Labour Party’s traditional working-class base. Just a couple of weeks ago, Johnson’s government displayed its willingness to veer away from standard conservative policies by imposing a windfall tax on the pandemic-driven profits of oil companies—a proposal that, so far, has proved too bold for the Biden Administration to endorse.
Like Trump, Johnson is too self-focussed and slippery to be confined within a single political philosophy, and, like Trump, he blames the media for his troubles. But it wasn’t journalists who booed him outside St. Paul’s Cathedral, on Friday, when he arrived at a service to celebrate Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee; and it wasn’t journalists who urged their Conservative M.P.s to cast votes against him in Monday’s vote. It was ordinary people from many different parts of Britain. Before Monday’s vote, Douglas Ross, an M.P. who leads the Scottish Conservatives and represents a parliamentary constituency in the largely rural Highlands and Islands region, issued a public statement. “Having listened closely to people in Moray who re-elected me to represent them,” he said, “I cannot in good faith support Boris Johnson.” Who could?
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