Boris Johnson has had his testicles shocked with electric currents, his face slapped to chrome, his teeth knocked out, his fingernails pulled out, hung upside down from the ceiling, and his head immersed in a bucket of water almost drown him, but even so he has not resigned. He has survived political torture in the equivalent of the cellars of the Soviet Lubyanka and the Nazi Gestapo, the Argentine Navy Mechanics School, Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. He has bravely navigated interrogations at Alcatraz, Sing Sing, Angola and French Guiana’s Devil’s Island, sacrificing allies and friends without ever admitting guilt himself, but there is a limit to everything…
The resignation of more than forty members of his government (three ministers and multiple secretaries of state and CEOs) has finally made his Marvel movie hero superpowers lose their effectiveness, like the covid vaccine. Last night he clung to power by the hair after part of his Cabinet appeared in Downing Street to ask him to resign, to convince him that the time had come, that it was time to disconnect him from the artificial respirator that has kept him alive for a few how many weeks. But his response was to stop one of the messengers, Michael Gove.
Johnson has ultimately lost the trust of the Conservative Party over a mix of issues of integrity, competence and ideology (or lack thereof). Some have condemned him for the partygate and the arrogance of breaking the rules that he himself had imposed on the rest of the British; others, for not taking advantage of Brexit; or for abandoning the Thatcherite principles of a small state, low taxes and few regulations; or for lack of ideas to face the cost of living crisis; many, for his support of deputies involved in pornography and sexual harassment scandals; almost all, for not assuming responsibility for him, not even under torture.
Yesterday’s film on the giant screen in Westminster was not The Last Days of Pompeii but The Last Days (or Hours) of Boris Johnson, and the lava was not that of Vesuvius but that of lies, lack of self-discipline, inability chronicle of attention to detail, the conviction that he could have it all at once (Brexit and the benefits of being in the EU, increasing public spending and lowering taxes, proclaiming his honesty and passing the bill to a Tory donor). decorated your flat). It even seemed normal to him to ask that a little house be built on top of a tree at Checkers’ weekend residence for his son to play, at a cost of two hundred thousand euros paid by the taxpayer. “If I can’t do what I want, why am I prime minister?” he once told his former adviser Dominic Cummings. That’s his mentality.
The Tories have finally decided that Johnson, despite his undeniable intellectual brilliance, wit, creativity and sense of humour, having made Brexit a reality and obtained an absolute majority they never dreamed of, is a toxic product. He moves like a fish in water in the world of slogans and promises (almost all unfulfilled), but not in the world of decisions and programs. Like some of Shakespeare’s characters, he has a fatal flaw, and at his hand they would be massacred in the next election. So it is difficult to survive.
If he persists (as he continued to insist yesterday) in not resigning, not even despite the fact that the men and women in gray ask him to do so, the next step will correspond to the parliamentary group, with the change of the rules to make possible another motion of censure that this time he would most likely lose. And if not like that, more and more resignations, until it is impossible for him to cover the charges and his government is paralyzed. Even those who have been most loyal to him ask him to leave, and if possible, before the political vacation that begins in two weeks, to make a clean slate.
Any hope of having resolved the crisis by replacing the resigning Ministers of Economy and Health crumbled as soon as Johnson attended the parliamentary control session in the Commons yesterday and was thrashed. Not only for the opposition but for the deputies of his group. Sajid Javid, twenty-four hours after his resignation, made a devastating speech reminiscent of Geoffrey Howe’s against Margaret Thatcher, and with which he presented his credentials to the succession. Until now Johnson had been saved by the fact that there was no candidate to replace him at the head of the party, but that is no longer the case. Everyone is taking positions, including the newly appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nadhim Zahawi, who is already being talked about as a possible prime minister after just twenty-four hours in office.
The Conservative Party faces an identity problem like the US Republicans. Does it return to the tradition of liberalism, small state, few regulations and fiscal prudence, or does it embrace an English nationalist Trumpism? In any case, the opera of the British political crisis approaches the last act, the one (as in Pagliacci, Cavalleria rusticana or Lucia di Lamermoor) in which blood runs and heads roll. Johnson has overcome many obstacles as a climber, but behind one mountain came another mountain and another mountain. But he still doesn’t give up.
