Edit to add an interesting article about who might replace him: https://www.axios.com/2022/07/06/uk-prime-minister-johnson-r...
It's a petty enough reason for him...
i love this kind of subtly absurd humour. good work.
The "never back down or admit defeat" seems mostly to apply to bureaucrats and public health officials. Conservative MPs are famous for resigning when they think honorable norms have been violated (as they see it), and getting rid of leaders once they become an electoral liability.
Knifing ineffective leaders, yes - that is a reputation they still have. But I wouldn't see any of the recent resignations as anything other than opportunistic: they knew perfectly well that Johnson was an untrustworthy scoundrel well before they joined his government.
There is no one event that triggered this. The resignation letters don't mention any specific event. Rather, it was a constant flow of scandals and poor decisions that caused his party to lose confidence in him, starting primarily with "partygate" in which it was revealed that senior members of the Government and No 10 were repeatedly ignoring their own COVID regulations often for trivial reasons like holding parties, at a time when theoretically people weren't allowed out of their own homes. He apologized but the damage done was extraordinary. Then the Tories lost safe seats in by-elections due to tactical voting, there were some other scandals of the type that are common in politics, and it all added up to too much. Johnson is no longer seen as a vote winner but rather a vote loser. Since partygate it was all downhill for him, especially as he kept sending his cabinet ministers to defend him on news programmes, often with them discovering they were repeating lies he'd told them, sometimes whilst literally live on TV.
In resigning, or rather being forced to resign, British politics and the Conservative party is at least showing that these sorts of acts ultimately do have consequences in the UK, even for someone who goes kicking and screaming like Boris. In this, the country is doing better than most places. Leaders telling people about the importance of lockdowns whilst simultaneously flouting the rules became an epidemic all by itself in the past few years. The same thing has happened in many parts of the world, and probably many more where they didn't get caught. Even Prof Neil Ferguson - the architect of lockdowns - was immediately caught ignoring the rules in order to visit his married lover.
It says a lot about the quality of leadership and 'expertise' our society is afflicted with, that nobody stopped to think about how effectively fanatical and unreasonable rules could actually be enforced on the people creating them, and what would happen when that failed. Johnson's fall is the perhaps inevitable consequence of what started in March 2020.
In the meantime, he keeps control of the Parliamentary agenda, control of nuclear weapons, his salary etc.
Though it would be quite a wild, and probably unprecedented, way of staying in office. Because it undermines the cohesion and legitimacy of the Conservative party itself.
I doubt Brits will have a better leader though. Michael Gove is a far worse candidate than BoJo. Or Sajid or Rishi even I would argue. It’s probably once of the latter twos. And their labor party is just as bad with messaging. There is an epidemic of leadership crisis facing Europe (or the whole Western Hemisphere) and this is all in the face of the growing threat of WWIII. Not good.
Yes, vacinnation went very well. But the dithering on lock-downs, constant u-turns on any decision of note, and populism over science led to the death of literally thousands.
If you doubt we could have a better leader than someone repeatedly sacked throughout their carreer for lying, and then being ousted for breaking the law, lying to the Queen, lying in parliament, and getting his ministers to lie on his behalf, then lying again, then we're in even deeper shit than I thought.
What do you mean precisely because of Boris? There were referendums and UK voted to leave. It wasn’t upto him to decide, although he had led campaigns for it. But ultimately it’s the majority of the Brits that wanted out. He got the dwindling state of uncertainty and got it over with. It may not have been a good deal but it’s over and thank goodness for that. Because otherwise it would undermine trust in referendum and voters choices. And you could argue any deal would have been just as bad.
> populism over science
I am not sure what you mean by that. He mostly followed the recommendations from the health department (not for himself of course which is why he got in trouble in public eyes, but for the general public I mean), I never saw him questioning the health departments to the extent like they had over here in US.
> lying
oh come on! You forgot Tony Blair clearly. Just a recent example.
Ultimately it’s a win for parliamentary democracy. In presidential system we have, he would be still the president. There is still faith in democracy.
