Boris Johnson resigns
I guess the pressure to resign was finally too much for Johnson:
After resisting calls to step down for nearly two days, Johnson admitted to the world’s media outside No. 10 Downing Street in London that “it is clearly now the will of the parliamentary Conservative Party that there should be a new leader and a new prime minister.”
“The process of that should begin now. The timetable should be announced next week,” added Johnson, who went on to thank British voters who propelled the Conservatives to their largest House of Commons majority for nearly four decades in the 2019 general election — a result Johnson had repeatedly cited as he sought to cling to power.
Things can change very quickly in politics.
Johnson was elected because of Brexit, and in a way that was his single mission and his raison d’être. He is a flamboyant and unusual character, and some of that is what brought him down. At least, that’s the superficial reason. The deeper one may be that once Brexit had been done, he seems to have governed mostly as a liberal.
That’s certainly what Mark Steyn thinks:
Interesting essay in Quillette on Johnson’s departure: the writer references Charles II, Cromwell, and Charles I in analyzing BJ’s character flaws:
https://quillette.com/2022/07/08/king-boris-from-restoration-to-regicide/
I’ve seen 3 or 4 Brits, including Nigel Farage, make the same point as Mark Steyn. Other than Brexit, Boris Johnson acted like a liberal. I bolded “acted” to include Johnson’s hypocrisy with respect to Wuhan virus restrictions.
as I proposed a few days, this ritual exercise was ‘full of sound and fury signifying nothing’ the worse perpetrators against the british people, were the likes of home secretary javid, who treated citizens like cattle, and health undersecretary zahwari, they carried out the policies without complaint, yes johnson is still addicted to clean energy phantoms, as is most of the political class, and this made England Airship One to riff on Orwell, or citing ‘sympathy for the devil’
And what triggered this, at this time, was reportedly Tory MPs looking at the prospect of losing their seats. It will be interesting to see if the next party leader of the Conservatives is, well, conservative in any real sense.
well that cake is already baked,
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/07/08/boris-johnson-resign-news-tory-leadership-tugendhat-ben-wallace/
I can’t help but wonder if Mark Steyn realizes that he’s just made the argument that the UK also has a UniParty?
What a waste of a massive electoral mandate.
@ Frank B > “What a waste of a massive electoral mandate.”
Kind of reminds me of the way that the GOP RINOs, having gained both houses of Congress and the Presidency, then fought against every conservative policy they had championed on the campaign trail.
@ Geoffrey > “I can’t help but wonder if Mark Steyn realizes that he’s just made the argument that the UK also has a UniParty?”
Staying tuned – he didn’t have to say the words to describe the concept.
Maybe that will be the subject of another post.
Boring picked one issue to be tough on: Brexit. But he never wanted to do the hard work of building support for any other conservative policies. He’s always had assistants to do that while he lounged back doing Churchill impressions.
He desperately wanted to be the prime minister. He didn’t want to be the bad guy an effective PM must be, sometimes.
@ Gordon > “Boring picked one issue to be tough on: Brexit.”
And he (more or less) succeeded.
If his Party wasn’t competent enough to make good on the other expectations of its (new and old) voters, that’s not entirely his problem.
However, I do think Steyn is right: the entire Tory Party is not what we over here think as conservative.
Neither is the GOP.
It’s hard to get things done in politics and hard to change course once you’re elected. Britain isn’t going to have a Conservative government that American conservatives would approve of, and while voters may want “change” in general, they aren’t so enthusiastic about specific changes governments want to make.
Yes, Boris never found an issue or program to replace Brexit. He lacked the “vision thing,” but that fault seems to be more systemic than unique to him. Voters are discontented, but it’s not clear what they do want or what changes they will support or put up with.