Hamlet is tormented by the ghost of his father, who cries out for revenge; in Macbeth, that of Lord Banquo, whom he had murdered and who appears to him in the middle of a banquet, a hallucination that points to his disturbed state of mind, and British Prime Minister Sunak also has one. Not the Opera House, which has continued in London’s West End since 1986, but the one in Downing Street, a predecessor named Boris Johnson who has decided not to let him sleep at night.
To the list of legendary gunslingers such as Jesse James, Billy the Kid or JoaquÃn Murrieta (the Mexican Robin Hood), we should add Johnson, the politician who took the United Kingdom out of the European Union and promised a utopian nirvana, winning an election with an absolute majority by losing much of his working-class base to Labor, and he went out in disgrace when the lies he lavished ended up taking their toll. One of the elements of Greek tragedies is the inevitability of the fate that awaits their heroes, and in this case as well. You could say it was written.
Johnson doesn’t understand nuance. For him there are no grays, everything is black or white. The music is never moderate but at maximum decibels, and it makes politics next to it like living above a nightclub. The resignation of his parliamentary seat has reopened the wounds in the Conservative Party that Sunak seemed to have healed. Two more MPs, Nadine Norries and Nigel Adams, stalwarts of the Squires, have also left, bringing up three dangerous by-elections at the worst possible political time.
It’s not so much the fact that Johnson decided to leave Parliament before being suspended for not telling the truth about his role in the pandemic festivities as the fact that he has been shooting at Sunak with a revolver in his left hand and another on the right. Accusing him of having abandoned the principles of conservatism and eliminated the reason to vote for the Tories; of having betrayed Brexit with its approach to Brussels and laid the foundations for a hypothetical return to the EU (a fallacy); of having renounced an ambitious trade treaty with the United States; of having raised taxes to their highest level in three quarters of a century; to have ruined his absolute majority and ignored the votes of the fourteen million British people who trusted him and propelled him to Downing Street, and to be on course to lose the next general election in a landslide…
Johnson has resigned from his seat for the London borough of Uxbridge in a thousand-word letter in which, as always, he is not to blame for anything, not Par tygate, not the snub of a badly negotiated Brexit, nor having damaged the country’s international reputation. Since his announcement he has not shown his face, lost in combat (it is speculated that he is not in Europe). Increasingly similar to Trump in substance and form, he denounced a witch hunt against him and a conspiracy to get rid of him.
Angela Rayner, Labour’s opposition number two, has said that, rather than a cowboy from the Wild West (like a namesake in Puccini’s opera La fanciulla del West), “he is a coward” for throwing in the towel earlier than accept a rebuke from his colleagues, a suspension of ten days or more, and the likelihood of having to run for re-election in his district. He boasts that in 26 years he has never lost a battle at the polls, and he did not want that record to be forgotten now. He doesn’t rule out returning one day, but the road to his return is filled with more and more logs blocking his way. It is easier to make a lot of money with his memoirs and giving lectures (he has earned ten million euros in less than a year). And changing diapers, if he does, because he just had his eighth official child (third with Carrie, his current wife).
It has always inspired love and hate, nothing in between. Two thirds of convinced conservative voters continue to idolize him, miss him and consider Sunak a traitor who gave him the lunge. But the rest of the country sees him as a charlatan, a populist, a liar and a brat. His escape has put an end to the attempts of the current prime minister to stabilize the ship and empty it of water. Twenty points ahead in the polls, with the economy in the ground, the Brexit disaster, healthcare and public services collapsing, more immigrants than ever and the cost of living crisis, only their own mistakes would prevent arrival next year in Downing Street from Labor leader Keir Starmer. There he would encounter a ghost that continues to make noise and drag chains. Not that of Hamlet, nor that of Macbeth, nor that of the Opera. That of one Boris Johnson.
