The casino, the Treasury and the State always win. Or almost always. Also the institutions, which in somewhat conspiratorial language could be called the system. Boris Johnson has seen it for himself, the enfant terrible and rebel without a cause in British politics, whose conduct was reproved yesterday by the plenary of the House of Commons for having lied to Parliament, intimidated some of its members and denounced a ” witch hunt”.
Now that politics and bullfighting seem to be interconnected worlds, it could be said that the Privileges Committee had put the flags of fire on him with a ninety-day penalty and the withdrawal of his pass to enter the Palace of Westminster for falsehoods about the parties in Downing Street during the pandemic, and now the full House has given him the coup d’état with a humiliation to which no former prime minister had been subjected in history.
Jesus Christ was resurrected, Lazarus was resurrected, and the Bible explains a few minor resurrections: that of the daughter of Jairus, the sons of the widows of Naim and Sarepta, that of the Shunammite woman… Johnson’s is impossible to dismiss in the future, with the rise of populism and especially if the conservatives are crushed in next year’s elections, but in the short term it is impossible. He is dead and buried.
The former Tory leader, who likes to win but most of all hates to lose, had thrown in the towel in advance, like a boxer with his eyes closed, his lip split and his nose bloody from the punches. “No more”, he said imitating the Panamanian pugilist Roberto Mano de piedra Durán after receiving a monumental beating from Sugar Ray Leonard. He asked his stalwarts, of whom there are only about twenty left, not to vote against the punishment imposed by the Committee on Privileges. He preferred to retire before another defeat.
Johnson, who turned 59 yesterday, had already resigned his parliamentary seat and was not at the session, as was Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, accused of cowardice for not getting involved in the issue and abstaining from voting on censorship, on the pretext that he had a meeting with the Swedish Prime Minister, Ulf Kristersson (that is, he literally became Swedish).
In reality, only 25 Conservative MPs and 37 from the opposition took part in the debate, not even a tenth of the total. And that the thing had medieval morbidness, the crucifixion of a leader, his quartering.
Some of them took the floor, such as ex-Eurosceptic minister Jacob Rees-Mogg (whom Johnson has made a lord along with other loyalists in his last will), calling Johnson’s punishment for lying about the holidays excessive and they ratified their conspiracy theory that this is a political lynching.
Others, such as former Prime Minister Theresa May, ratified the exemplary punishment “so that it is clear that the truth must be told in the Commons; it is the essence of our democracy”.
Much has been written about Johnson, but basically everything was said when he was just a boy, and one of his professors at Eton, after he committed a misdeed, criticized his “sense of superiority and his conviction of ‘to be above the net of obligations that bind others’.
It has always been so and continues to be so. He believed that the rules of the pandemic were not for him, and that he could lie to Parliament. But the system and the institutions it tried to undermine almost never lose.
