The fall of Boris Johnson

Boris Johnson used to arrogantly claim that he thrived on scandals and crises. But he couldn’t survive the series of resignations of his cabinet ministers which started from his chancellor and health secretary, Rishi Sunak and Sajid Javid, and exacerbated by the dramatic resignation by Bin Afolami, the vice-chairman of the Conservative Party, live on air in the wake of another scandal.

The latest scandal was about Johnson apologizing for appointing the ex-chief whip of Tory Party, Chris Pincher, to a role involved in party welfare and discipline despite the information that Pincher had been the subject of complaints about sexual misconduct. In the last week of June, the Conservative Party lost two seats in the by-elections, which were triggered by the resignation of two Conservative lawmakers involved in sex-related scandals. While in the first week of June, Johnson survived the no-trust motion over Partygate, the hostility within the Conservative Party towards Johnson touched the ceiling and more Tories demanded his resignation.

The situation posed a huge challenge for Johnson to survive; the now-former UK PM was still determined to cling on to power despite the apparent erosion of his support base within the Tory Party. “The job of a prime minister in difficult circumstances when you’ve been handed a colossal mandate is to keep going. And that’s what I’m going to do,” declared Johnson at the weekly session of Prime Minister’s Questions in the UK parliament, after the wave of resignations from his cabinet.

A few days back, while talking to the media at the Commonwealth summit in Rwanda, Johnson expressed that he was much hopeful to remain in power till 2035. It certainly took an enormous amount of audacity for any prime minister who had narrowly escaped a no-trust vote just a month ago and lost two key by-elections to claim that he was planning to stay in power till the middle of the next decade.

But Johnson’s desperation to remain in power till 2035 was not hidden. “At the moment I am thinking actively about the third term and, you know, what could happen then. But I will review it when I get to it,” he told journalists at the summit. When asked to further elaborate, he boastfully replied: “About the third term ... this is the mid-2030s.”

Undoubtedly, he won the December 2019 elections with a thumping majority. But, in the last two and a half years, he committed a number of self-destructive mistakes that gradually eroded his grip on power. The last few months had not been good for him. He was embroiled in an unending series of scandals and political setbacks one after another. The Partygate scandal caused the biggest blow to his popularity and also forced a kind of revolt within the Conservative Party, leading to a no-trust motion against him last month.

Ignited by alcohol-fuelled parties held during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021 and attended by Downing Street staff members and in some cases by the PM himself, Partygate was unique. Reports about lockdown-breaching gatherings at a time when millions of UK residents were not allowed to socialize with friends or even visit their dying family members, kindled country-wide anger and a big chunk of parliamentarians from the Conservative Party moved a no-confidence motion against Johnson once it was established that a culture of rule-breaking was prevailing in the Downing Street under him.

Although Johnson survived the no-confidence motion, 41 per cent of the 359 Conservative legislators voted against him. This huge opposition to him within the party suggested that he was fast losing his popularity that was soaring high in December 2019. Immediately after the no-confidence episode, Johnson had to face another setback in the by-elections that were triggered by two high-profile resignations of Conservative legislators due to their involvement in ugly scandals – one was convicted of assault on a teenager boy and the other was proven guilty of watching pornography in the House of Commons.

The defeat in the by-elections further spurred his opponents within the Conservatives to demand his resignation, but Johnson, for the longest time, did not appear to be affected by these setbacks and, instead, partly blamed the media for months of reporting on Partygate. On his defeat, he said: “People were fed up of hearing about things I had stuffed up, or allegedly stuffed up, or whatever, this endless – completely legitimate, but endless – churn of news.”

The ‘casual way’ in which Johnson tackled the serious challenge to his leadership within the Conservative Party is not surprising. His trademark style of blithe politicking became more profound as his problems piled up. The apparent reason behind his overconfidence, despite his defeat in the by-elections in a deeply Conservative constituency, was the party rule that protected him for one year from another no-confidence vote. But this is undoubtedly the most testing time for Johnson’s leadership at home as well as in the domain of foreign policy.

While Britain is facing the deepest cost of living crisis in decades, with inflation at a 40-year high, Johnson, in addition to battling his detractors in his party, faced immense international challenges, particularly his feud with the EU bloc. The ‘Get Brexit Done’ theme won the biggest tally for the Conservatives in three decades in the 2019 polls. For obvious reasons, after the series of scandals and political setbacks and to divert the attention of the British people, he willingly intensified his feud with the EU over trade rules for Northern Ireland, the only part of the UK that has a common border with the EU.

The festering row over customs checks on goods entering Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK has glinted a political crisis in Belfast, which is disrupting the already delicate balance between Irish nationalist and British unionist communities – and thus threatening Northern Ireland’s peace. Britain and the EU blame each other for refusing to compromise. However, in order to divert the public focus from the new wave of resignations, Johnson deliberately became more aggressive on the law to supersede the three-year-old Brexit agreement.

If Johnson had his way on this matter, which seemed quite difficult because of the rising wave of Tory revolt against him, the law would have enshrined a new principle that international agreements and treaties signed by the United Kingdom were worthless, which might have all the potential to create a new crisis by allegedly violating the international law. With his plan to unilaterally overrule the international agreement, instead of a more moderate approach of negotiating a middle-of-the-road solution over the Northern Ireland Protocol, Johnson tried to bolster his dwindling image and placate the disillusioned Brexiteers.

He was shrewdly projecting himself as an aggressive leader who sincerely wanted to build a ‘Global Britain’ – with a clear intention to distract the attention of the British people from his unending tribulations and scandals. After all, he had plans to remain in power till 2035, and he thought that he could easily thrive on scandals.

The writer is a freelance contributor.