United Kingdom: Boris Johnson fights for his survival after the resignation of several ministers

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson fought for his political career this Wednesday. He will not resign, like Margaret Thatcher or Theresa May, his Conservative predecessors. Legally, he cannot be subjected to a new vote of confidence for one year. But the 1922 Committee, the party’s highest authority, is changing the rules to get it in these hours.

In just ten ten minutes, two consecutive resignations Finance Chancellor Rishi Sunak and Health Secretary Sajid Javid have once again put Boris’ latest malice to the test. After lying to Parliament againwhen he knew by naming his whipvice Chris Pincher in parliament to force votes in his favor he was appointing a deputy with a long history of sex offender.

Boris’s behavior and survival skills are under scrutiny, with the reign halted by the political crisis, progressing in stages like a soap opera. The next chapter of Boris’s lies. He escaped the Party Gate and his parties in Downing St during confinement, but this time his own ministers have put him on the ropes. Will he survive or not? The press accumulated this Wednesday in front of Downing St awaiting the outcome.

A parliamentary questioning at noon and another at half past four this Wednesday, when he will be questioned on the Pincher case, it will decide their political future.

question their integrity

Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor, and Sajid Javid, two heavyweights in his cabinet who could replace him in office, have questioned his integrity. In a coordinated movement and with devastating letters, they aimed at the head of the prime minister. They were tired of seeing their policies destroyed by intermittent scandals.

“We can’t continue like this,” announced in his letter Rishi Sunak, a billionaire of Indian origin and trained at Stanford University, who wanted to announce his tax policies. Sajid, a more Thatcherian, millionaire banker of very modest origins, favored the country over friendship and said that I had “lost faith” in him.

Usually in the conservative party the prime ministers in crisis resign. Margaret Thatcher did so, threatened by her cabinet, when they warned her that a new vote made no sense. I would lose it. The same fate befell Theresa May. There is a dignity in renunciation.

But as the great conservative and former pro-European Deputy Prime Minister Michael Heseltine puts it, “Boris Johnson is a thief and he will fight.” The Daily Telegraph, the conservative newspaper par excellence and where Boris wrote his articles for half a million pounds a year, warned him: “Not even Boris Johnson can win this vote.”

David Frost, the one who brutally achieved Brexit in horrendous negotiations with Brussels, said: “It’s time for Boris Johnson to leave.”

Fear of losing the election

Conservatives feel it Boris goes to the game with him and that they will not be able to win early elections, if any. Although the Labor leader Sir Keir Starmer lacks the slightest charisma.

But the social and political situation it’s so dramatic in the kingdom, with a looming recession, high inflation, with 64% thinking so “Brexit is going very badly” and with many conservatives believing that returning to the European single market will be the only way to resurrect the failing economy, Boris’s political future looks set.

The prime minister ignored last night’s cabinet crisis. “Fuck you” was his reply. He immediately appointed a British of Kurdish origin, Nadhim Zahawi, as the new Chancellor and his Chief of Staff, Steve Barclays, as Secretary of Health. In the morning the resignations continued but sub-ministers.

Boris is Boris

Boris was polite in Eton and Oxford. His family life was deeply dysfunctional and he grew up fighting. That behavior is what you will notice in these hours. A mixture of brutality with an aristocratic accent and adolescent lies, to the rhythm of those who abandon it. It is as intelligent as it is amoral.

The crisis arose because Boris Johnson said he was unaware of “specific allegations” against Chris Pincher, when in fact he was told. all his sexual abusenot only against lawmakers at the Carlton Club of London, but also when he was foreign minister in 2019.

Again he lied and once again he publicly apologized.

“I think it was a mistake and I apologize for it,” he said Tuesday.

The rebellious conservatives ask the 1922 committee and its chairman, Sir Graham Brady, to inform them that the he does not have a majority to be in charge of the government. Conservative MPs parade asking him to leave on television. But Boris insists that he won the election with 14 million votes and a month ago, with a majority of 63, a vote of confidence that allowed him to continue.

Seven out of ten Britons believe Boris should step down. Eleven points higher than the last YouGov survey. For the voters of him, the prime minister became a “toxic” character. and the country prepares to await his resignation e call early elections.

But Boris has a personal, family and political survival story behind him. The Conservatives chose him as their candidate because he was Boris and now they try to kick him out for the same reasons.

“Boris is Boris and he only works for Boris,” says David Davis, his former Brexit secretary. That’s why we have to wait for the next few hours.

Paris, correspondent

ap