Source: Politics<\/p>\n
Boris Johnson always wanted to be Winston Churchill. Now, he\u2019s emulated his hero in at least one respect: He has been dragged from high office amid scandal.<\/p>\n
He fought until the bitter end, surviving lashings in the press, investigations and a narrow confidence vote last month. Even as the walls closed in around him, he remained defiant.<\/p>\n
For weeks, the man who won the prime ministership by insisting on Leave simply refused to. \u201cFuck that\u201d was his pithy reply to a colleague who asked if he considered resigning Tuesday, The Times of London reported<\/a>.<\/p>\n It was Johnson\u2019s willingness to fight \u2014 for Britain\u2019s exit from the European Union \u2014 which won him the keys to Downing Street, and for which his legacy will be chiefly remembered.<\/p>\n Perhaps if the world gets its act together on climate change, he will also get a hat tip for locking Britain into its net-zero emissions path, overriding his conservative base. He will not be remembered kindly for his bungled initial Covid response \u2014 which almost cost him his life<\/a>.<\/p>\n Johnson will be missed by many who dislike traditional politicians: His insults were often hilarious<\/a>, when they didn\u2019t tip over into racism. Who else would dare turn up for tea with the Queen looking like he just rolled out of bed<\/a>?<\/p>\n But Johnson is an extremely calculated politician: The messiness was by design. And so was the dramatic flair that sometimes led him to overstep.<\/p>\n Johnson earned a special place in hell in the eyes of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, when as mayor of London he dismissed the former president as \u201cpart-Kenyan\u201d in Britain\u2019s biggest-selling newspaper in 2016. Johnson was responding to Obama urging Britain to vote to stay in the EU, calling it \u201ca symbol of the part-Kenyan president\u2019s ancestral dislike of the British Empire.\u201d<\/p>\n He had a special knack for insulting world leaders \u2014 winning a competition for writing the most offensive poem<\/a> about President Recep Tayyip Erdo\u011fan that referenced the Turkish leader having sex with a goat.<\/p>\n Johnson\u2019s ejection from Downing Street is not a rejection of Brexit, or a sign that British conservatism is changing course. It\u2019s a rejection of a populist who became unpopular and often lacked a moral compass.<\/p>\n That the leading contenders to replace Johnson are female members from his Brexit wing of the Conservatives \u2014 Penny Mordaunt, a trade minister, and Liz Truss, the foreign secretary \u2014 says a lot about where Britain is.<\/p>\n In Johnson\u2019s rise and downfall, it\u2019s hard to escape the parallels to Donald Trump.<\/p>\n But compared to Trump\u2019s playbook \u2014 from Twitter abuse to sexual misconduct to impeachment and insurrection \u2014 the details of Johnson\u2019s scandals can appear baffling.<\/p>\n While Johnson\u2019s myriad scandals are not all directly of his own making, they add up to a culture of disregard for ethics and standards of good governance.<\/p>\n This culture presented as one rule for most, another rule for Johnson\u2019s friends, and no rules for Johnson himself. Bellwether columnist Alice Thomson wrote in the Times of London that for the sake of Britain\u2019s democracy, enough is enough<\/a>.<\/p>\n In the latest Westminster sex scandal \u2014 there were nine others in 2022 alone<\/a> \u2014 it turned out that Johnson knew for three years that his loyal lieutenant Chris Pincher had been accused of sexually assaulting young men on multiple occasions. Senior staff warned Johnson in person<\/a>, but he promoted Pincher anyway. Another assault took place in June, according to multiple witnesses.<\/p>\n Though Johnson often acted like he was not bound by gravity, the British prime ministership constrained him in ways the American presidency did not constrain Trump.<\/p>\n Britain doesn\u2019t have a written constitution and the prime minister is not directly elected. The role is barely mentioned in British law \u2014 meaning those who occupy 10 Downing Street are merely first among equals in the British Cabinet, and staying there is a confidence game.<\/p>\n By the end, virtually no one in Britain retained confidence in Boris Johnson.<\/p>\n Only 18 percent of voters wanted him to stay and he\u2019d lost the country\u2019s powerful media editors, including at the top-selling conservative tabloid The Sun, which labeled him a \u201csquatter\u201d on Thursday’s front page. The final blow came from his own appointed ministers, as around 40 senior officials resigned<\/a> in a single 24-hour period this week.<\/p>\n The tsunami began with Finance Minister Rishi Sunak and Health Secretary Sajid Javid quitting within minutes<\/a> of one another Tuesday evening, forcing Johnson into a late night Cabinet reshuffle<\/a>.<\/p>\n More loyalists jumped ship Wednesday morning<\/a>, and another group of five resigned together after Johnson\u2019s defiant performance in Parliament on Wednesday afternoon. His most senior defender \u2014 Truss \u2014 was nowhere to be seen, jumping on a plane to Bali, Indonesia, for a G-20 meeting. Johnson\u2019s new chancellor, Nadhim Zahawi, was in the job less than a day before turning on him.<\/p>\n As former Conservative minister Rory Stewart noted, while the dominoes were falling: \u201cIt will be almost impossible for Boris Johnson to replace and fill his ministry positions.\u201d<\/p>\n Even as his ministers deserted him throughout Wednesday, Johnson was accumulating further political problems: He admitted to a cross-party group of senior MPs \u2014 after years of denial \u2014 that he met former KGB agent Alexander Lebedev while foreign secretary in 2018<\/a>, during the Skripal poisoning crisis, without officials or security present.<\/p>\n Johnson has united every other political party to the extent that no one batted an eyelid when Labour Leader Keir Starmer, a former prosecutor, called the remaining Cabinet members \u201cnodding dogs\u201d during Parliament debate Wednesday.<\/p>\n Now, with Johnson\u2019s forced resignation, the question becomes: Who will replace him?<\/p>\n Candidates will come from two camps: the Tory centrists who supported EU membership, and the more radical Brexiteers who made up Johnson\u2019s base.<\/p>\n The man presumed to be Johnson\u2019s replacement \u2014 Sunak \u2014 undercut his chances when his heiress wife was revealed to be avoiding British taxes<\/a> via a special \u201cnon-domiciled\u201d tax status while Sunak was finance minister.<\/p>\n Sunak\u2019s errors have opened the door to former Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt and former Finance Minister Sajid Javid to position themselves as the leading centrist contenders.<\/p>\n The Brexit wing of the party has carried the most political weight in recent years, and will likely offer at least three female candidates, all in their 40s.<\/p>\n Suella Braverman, the attorney general, has already announced her intention to stand in the leadership race. But the race to represent the radicals is set to be between Truss and Mordaunt.<\/p>\n