Boris Johnson, prime minister since 2019 and promoter of the 2016 Brexit referendum, He has resigned. Several well-known cases had confirmed his excessive tendency to lie and dishonesty. He was even fined for having held lively parties in Downing Street itself in violation of his government’s harsh confinement rules.
Johnson has always been a combative demagogue. In 2008 he was elected mayor of London wearing the ultraliberalism. Instead, advocating for Brexit and in the 2019 elections, in which he had a great victory, he resorted to nationalist speech (bring power from Brussels back to London), against elites and even statists to capture the Labor vote alarmed by industrial job losses. Everything can be promised, even if it is impossible, to achieve power. He came to compare the European Union with Nazism and asked about the business opposition to Brexit, he replied: “Fuck it, the ‘business’ & rdquor ;.
Johnson, a populist like Trump, was different: educated, sensitive to climate change and, after a first moment, effective in vaccinating against the coronavirus. But he has been Victim of two big mistakes. One, with the advantage of 80 MPs, the great success of 2019 – against the Labor leader, Jeremy Corbin, the most sectarian and incompetent in many years – believed that everything could be allowed. Two, the great problem of England was not Europe but the deindustrialization. Once Brexit was achieved, it was left without a positive program and has not been able to assume the need for a coherent economic policy. He only sported the chronic conflict with Brussels and the firm defense of Ukraine against Putin. But above all, behavioral disorders and that of many of his collaborators.
The turning point was on Tuesday when Two relevant ministers (Economy and Health) left the Government asking for their resignation. And in 48 hours, three other Cabinet members and up to 50 junior ministers and senior officials have joined. In the end, Johnson has not been able to resist and has thrown in the towel, Although always combative, he will try to stay in office until the party elects a new leader. It’s hard for him to do it.
Deep down has fallen for her extreme personalism, which led him to compare himself with Winston Churchill (on which he wrote a biography), and because Brexit has been as profitable a populism as a futile government program.
On the other hand, his fall underscores a great virtue of British parliamentarism. The district deputy, personally elected in a constituency, is quite the owner of his actions. He is not almost a party bureaucrat like in Spain, where if the leadership removes you from the list you are dead. And in June many conservative deputies, when they believed that Johnson had lost the north, demanded that the parliamentary group vote on his continuity. He won, but almost half of the deputies (41%) voted against him. He was very touched.
Related news
And now another dishonest behavior – the straw that breaks the camel’s back – of one of his own (whom he protected) has liquidated his career. The autonomy of the British deputy in the face of the party machine has problems, but also advantages. Neither Aznar nor Zapatero ever thought that a free vote by their deputies could expel them from La Moncloa.
An English historian wrote that the conservative party was an iron dictatorship sweetened -yes- for the possibility of murder. Now, as happened with Thatcher, Major and Theresa May, has been rechecked.