From London
Boris Johnson continues, though no one knows for how long. A slim majority of Conservative MPs backed the prime minister in a vote of confidence in his leadership that kept Britain on edge. Of the 359 legislators that make up the caucus, 211 voted in favor of Johnson while 148 voted for his removal. With 40% of the conservative deputies once morest, the scale of the rebellion left the prime minister badly woundeda lame duck with more than two years in office ahead of him.
The conservatives postponed the moment of truth with the hesitant gesture of one who is regarding to stick the dagger and withdraws it at the last moment before the anticipated sight of the blood that is going to be spilled. The gale of uninterrupted six months of scandal by the Partygate, the booing on Friday at the Prime Minister’s arrival at Saint Paul’s Cathedral for the jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II were not enough for that decisive gesture demanded by Macbeth, Shakespeare’s most famous regicide: “if you are going to commit the act, do it fast”. If in February Johnson was saved by the war with Ukraine, now it was fear and conservative inertia in a parliamentary system.
The Endless Party Gate Scandal
On Sunday night it was learned that Graham Brady, head of the 1922 group (Conservative deputies without government positions), had received at least 54 letters from legislators stating that they wanted the prime minister to resign. In the internal regulations, when 15% of the bench takes that step, the future of the leader at the head of the party (and therefore, of the executive) is submitted to the vote of all the conservative deputies.
Brady’s announcement wasn’t an entirely unexpected surprise. Partygate, which began with journalistic revelations six months ago, had hit the Prime Minister and the Conservatives hard both in the polls and in the recent municipal elections.
The attempt to close the case last month with the Scotland Yard verdict on 15 of the parties investigated – at the journalistic level, more than 100 social events were reported during the different periods of confinement – it turned out a boomerang which left the government even more groggy and splashed the British police along the way.
The Metropolitan Police only fined Johnson £50. for one of the five meetings in which he had participated: a few days later a photo of the prime minister was published happily toasting another of the parties. Scotland Yard’s credibility plummeted, prompting a call for a parliamentary investigation into his conduct.
Despite this clear evidence that Johnson might drag his party and some famous British institutions into the abyss, the arithmetic of power played in his favor last night.
The rules of the game
The internal rules of the Party require that half plus one, in this case, 180 deputies vote once morest the prime minister so that he loses the leadership of the Conservatives and his position in the executive.
In the British parliamentary system, all the political functions of the government have to be occupied by parliamentarians, from the ministers to the undersecretaries of state: some 160 deputies form part of the government. A vote once morest is equivalent to a virtual resignation of their positions.
If to this wind in favor of the prime minister is added the Brexit factor; Fear and a meager handful of loyal votes explain why, like a cat of seven lives, Johnson has once once more saved his skin. But the scale of the rebellion will be its Achilles’ heel from now on.
The Titanic
One of the most shocking examples of Johnson’s lack of support across broad sections of the parliamentary party is criticism from one of his staunchest allies, former Treasury Secretary Jesse Norman.
The deputy condemned Johnson’s conduct at Partygate and added other “profoundly wrong” policies such as the one followed with the Northern Ireland protocol in relation to Brexit, the sending of refugees to Rwanda or the privatization of Channel 4. Norman stated that he would not be part of his government once more under any circumstances.
Another top MP, who is projected to succeed Johnson, former health minister Jeremy Hunt openly urged his colleagues to vote once morest it. “The Conservatives know in their hearts that they are not giving Britons the leadership they need and deserve. We are not offering the integrity, competence and vision that are needed to reboot the nation,” Hunt said before the vote.
Among those who voted once morest is the leader of the Conservatives in Scotland, Douglas Ross, who justified his position by saying that he had heard “very clearly” the voice of people fed up with the scandal and the behavior of the prime minister.
A last minute message
In the run-up to the vote that began at 6 p.m. local time, the prime minister addressed his deputies to convince them that he was still a winner as he had shown in both the 2019 London mayoral and national elections.
Johnson vindicated his support for Ukraine and promised an ambitious program of deregulation, tax reduction and social housing to combat the rising cost of living that has increased the number of households that depend on free food centers to meet their needs. “We cannot now launch into a fratricidal fight that is going to open the doors for Labor to come to power,” Johnson told his deputies.
The message may have garnered some votes, but it did not convince many. A former pro-Brexit minister, Steve Baker, said that although the prime minister had made a strong case and he reckoned he would win, he would vote once morest it.
A poll on the Conservative Party website, released shortly before the vote, suggested that 55% of party activists and members wanted MPs to vote once morest Johnson: only 41% were in favor of the prime minister.
How’s the movie going?
The result is the one that best suits the opposition because even surviving, Johnson has lost authority, he is rock-bottom in every poll, partisan or national, and cannot hold his own party together.
On June 23 there are two elections for the renewal of seats. In Tiverton and Honiton, a town that always votes Conservative, the Liberal Democrats have the upper hand. The vote in Wakefield, in the north of the country, has even more symbolic weight. In the 2019 national elections, Johnson managed to convince much of the Labor working class in the north of England that the Conservatives represented their interests. Today nobody gives a penny for the chances of the Tories to retain their seat in this emblematic constituency.
In the British parliamentary system, defeats of this type call into question the survival of the 359 deputies who have to fight for their re-election at the local level, in many cases with meager majorities, in the midst of a national mess. The party’s internal rules would seem to give Johnson a margin of maneuver because they establish that legislators must wait a year before subjecting the prime minister to a new vote of confidence. But this rule was called into question by Johnson’s predecessor in office, Theresa May.
In December 2018, May won the internal vote among her parliamentarians by a higher margin than Boris Johnson tonight: 200 votes to 117. Six months later she had to resign from office due to the threat of a new vote. “If the 1922 committee representing parliamentarians receives enough letters demanding a new vote, no matter how long it has been, there will be a new vote,” he noted in the Sunday paper. The Observer Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London in an article on Sunday.
