Boris Johnson does not say that, but he knows that he is being reinstated as prime minister because many of his deputies fear that he will not be a winning letter in the next general election, early or two years from now. One of the rebel Conservative MPs justified his vote in the hours of intrigue and conspiracy on Monday afternoon by saying: “My loyalty is not to the prime minister but to the country and my constituents.”
The Queen’s jubilee lasted four days and allowed MPs to grasp the level of dissatisfaction with the erratic behavior of Boris Johnson, who won the 2019 election with a large majority of 87 MPs.
I don’t know which MP represents me in Parliament or in Congress. The British do know, and they can talk to him or her to complain or ask for improvements to the neighborhood or district. It is one of the advantages of the uninominal and direct constituency. The 148 dissenting MPs who voted against Johnson’s continuation as leader of the Conservative Party did so basically because they want to be re-elected.
My idea of ??the English is that of a balanced, sensible people who believe in the empirical nature of life and their strong distrust of theories and, even more so, of ideologies. They tend not to sacrifice anyone on the altars of abstraction and ideals. The hallucinations have always left them for writers and playwrights, but never for intellectuals, a word that, incidentally, is used with some sarcasm and as a French import.
The British Conservative Party is the oldest in the world and the most familiar with the complexities and miseries of power. The most practical of all. If their leaders do not win the election, they are expelled and look for new ones. It is a party governed by the instinct of perpetuity with every conceivable dose of cynicism and betrayal. Margaret Thatcher, John Major, David Cameron and Theresa May lost the confidence of their Conservative MPs, were visited by black men from the famous 1922 Committee, or resigned as Cameron did the day after losing the Brexit referendum on 2016.
Petrarch, Machiavelli, and Sunzi are credited with the famous saying, “Keep your friends close, but your enemies even closer.” Boris Johnson had many enemies in and around him. It closed Brexit badly and the effects of leaving the EU affect the daily lives of the British, their mobility and influence in the world. Its erratic policies without a coherent economic model have baffled an electorate that has been stunned by the revelry in Downing Street as the government dictates draconian measures to confine the English to their homes.
But as Rafael Ramos commented yesterday, the revolt of 41% of Tory MPs was also due to their vulgarity. The whistles that soared up the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral to attend the royal jubilee ceremony were a warning of the approaching storm for the Prime Minister, who won the motion of confidence, but knows that 148 of the 359 Conservative MPs do not want him at the helm of the party. They have voted against him.
How did he manage to crack that absolute majority of 2019, the largest since Thatcher’s victory in 1987? He won by running Brexit, but the supremacism that inspired a campaign based on lies and hypernationalist propaganda has pushed Scotland further away emotionally and politically from the UK and the chances of Northern Ireland deciding to promote unity with the Republic of Ireland is remote but not impossible.
Brexit has taken Cameron and May by storm, and could drag Johnson to his particular political precipice. Leaving Europe with emotional and patriotic arguments was considered without considering the effects it would have on ordinary people’s lives.
The Prime Minister will remain in office because no other motion of confidence can be tabled for a year. But within his party he is already conspiring to find a replacement who can win the next election. Boris Johnson, with his eccentricities and innocuous audacity, no longer serves. The Tories are like that. The queen, at 96, continues to collect prime ministers. And there have been 14 since Churchill in 1953.
