The casino, the Treasury and the State always win. Or almost always. Also the institutions, what in somewhat conspiratorial language could be called the system. Boris Johnson, enfant terrible and rebellious, without cause of British politics, whose conduct was condemned yesterday by the plenary session of the House of Commons (353 votes to 7 with numerous abstentions) for lying to Parliament and denouncing a “Witch hunt”.
Now that it seems that politics and bullfighting are interconnected worlds, it could be said that the Privileges Committee had put the flags on him with a ninety-day sanction and the withdrawal of the pass to access the Palace of Westminster for his falsehoods about the parties in Downing Street during the pandemic, and now the plenary session of the House has given him the last straw with a humiliation to which no former prime minister had been subjected in history.
Jesus Christ rose, Lazarus rose, and the Bible reports a few minor resurrections: that of the daughter of Jairus, the sons of the widows of Nain and Zarephath, that of the Shunammite woman… Johnson’s is impossible to rule out 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 beforehand, like a closed-eyed boxer with a split lip and bloody nose from blows. “No more,” he said, imitating Panamanian boxer Roberto Mano de Piedra Durán after receiving a monumental beating from Sugar Ray Leonard. He asked his supporters, of whom he only has about twenty left, not to vote against the punishment imposed by the Privileges Committee. He preferred to retire to a new defeat.
Johnson, who turned 59 years old yesterday, had already resigned his parliamentary seat and was not in session, nor was Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, accused of cowardice for not getting wet on the issue and abstaining from voting on censorship, on the pretext that he had a meeting with the first Swede, Ulf Kristersson (that is, he literally became the Swede). In reality, only 25 Conservative deputies and 37 from the opposition participated in the debate, not even a tenth of the total. And that thing had medieval morbidity, the crucifixion of a leader, his dismemberment.
Some of those who spoke, such as the eurosceptic former minister William Rees-Mogg (whom Johnson has made lord along with other faithful with his last will), described Johnson’s punishment for lying to Parliament about the holidays as excessive and endorsed his conspiracy theory that it is a political lynching. Others, such as former Prime Minister Theresa May, endorsed the exemplary punishment “to make it clear that in the Commons you have to tell the truth, it is the essence of our democracy.”
Many things have been written about Johnson, but basically everything was said when he was just a boy, and a professor of his at Eton, after he committed a misdeed, criticized his “sense of superiority and his conviction of being above others.” the network of obligations that bind others”. He was always like that and still is. He believed that the pandemic regulations were not for him, and that he could lie to Parliament. But the system and institutions he tried to undermine almost never lose.
