You’re a surfer, one moment you’re riding the crest of the wave, the next you’ve fallen off the board, the wave is above you and all you care about is getting out of the eddy and breathing. You are a politician, and one moment you are the king of the mambo, winner of an absolute majority, creator of a new coalition of voters of left and right, enforcer of Brexit, popular and populist, and the next you find yourself completely discredited, condemned as a liar and a threat to democracy, and the same colleagues who feared and respected you, withdrew your pass to enter Parliament. That is what has happened to Boris Johnson.
The House of Commons committee charged with judging Johnson’s behavior during Partygate has delivered a verdict that, politically, is the equivalent of life imprisonment. It is as if the British legislature had set its sights on the example of Donald Trump on the other side of the pond after losing the elections – his refusal to accept the result, the exaltation of the masses, his role in orchestrating the assault on the Capitol-, and I would have wanted to establish a curtain of fire, a sanitary cordon so that something like this cannot happen in the United Kingdom.
It is true that what is here is not the same as what is there, among other things due to the violence of the events of January 6. But British legislators (the majority of committee members are Conservatives, from the same party as Johnson), have wanted to cut their losses. In an unprecedented denunciation of a former British prime minister, the report, apart from accusing him of lying, says that what he has done constitutes an “attack on our democratic institutions.”
Perhaps if Johnson, in a cocky way, hadn’t ripped the deck, resigned his seat before waiting for the report to be published, and humbly accepted his verdict, the sentence would not have been life imprisonment, and would have left the door open to a hypothetical rehabilitation. But the former Tory leader walked off the stage shooting with a revolver in each hand, decrying a “sham trial”, a witch hunt and a plot to reverse Brexit. A metaphor for his personal life and his political career. He has always betrayed everyone, and used his intelligence and his glibness to establish as true things that have nothing to do with reality, and get many to believe him and get caught up in his charm.
But now his colleagues in the Commons, seeing the deterioration of democracy here and in the United States, have said enough. The report into his conduct at Partygate says that it was not that he was wrong and provided false information in good faith, but that he lied like a knave when he claimed that he always believed that gatherings and parties in Downing Street during the pandemic had complied with all the sanitary requirements – some unnecessary and cruel – that he himself had imposed on the country. That he would have been suspended for ninety days, much longer than the ten he was speculating on. And that his reaction to the punishment was smears, amounting to obstruction of justice and an affront to the democratic process (the seven committee members have needed extra protection after receiving threats from Johnson supporters).
The full House of Commons has yet to uphold the verdict, but Johnson has been left with very few allies. He has attacked all the institutions (Parliament, the Courts, the press, the BBC, civil servants…), and in the end the institutions have turned against him. The British establishment has said that this is not the United States, where Trump is viable as president despite January 6, having been arrested and indicted, and the trials of various kinds that he faces. That Boris Johnson attacked democracy, and his only future would be writing his memoirs and giving lectures. But he insists that he will return. He thinks that populism still has a lot of rope left.
