The fall of a prime minister

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was forced to resign following a swath of protest resignations from his fellow government ministers. He was effectively removed from office under the guise of moral outrage, but there is far more to this picture than righteousness. Johnson resisted at first, refusing to step down, but at the last count, there were close to 60 resignations, which is clearly an untenable amount. Even he must admit his tenure was unsustainable.

Let’s not forget the primary reason Johnson assumed office after Theresa May and was voted in with a landslide majority in the general election: He was considered the man who could “get Brexit done.” If the Conservative and Unionist Party wanted moral leadership, it would have stuck with May. There are very few in politics with a stronger moral compass than the vicar’s daughter, whose most rebellious act as a youngster was to run through fields of wheat. Compared to Johnson and his time as a member of the Bullingdon Club—famous for burning wads of cash in front of homeless people—May was an outright angel. But she didn’t have the strength of leadership to get Brexit over the line, and that was the national issue that mattered most at the time.

Johnson, who was quite May’s opposite, is a complicated man. He has many strengths—a sense of morality is infamously not one of them. On his third marriage and following numerous affairs, until very recently he refused to go on record verifying how many children he had fathered. The last time I saw Johnson he was joking in his apartment above No. 10 Downing Street about not knowing how the Roman Catholic Church had even managed to marry him and his current wife, Carrie, in consideration of his previous two marriages.

There was never any pretense about his morality; we knew what we were getting. Some of his jokes were considered politically incorrect by his allies and outright racist by his detractors. It’s fair to say Johnson is an interesting character. The point being, all of this was known when the Conservative Party selected him as its leader and the British public elected him as prime minister. Johnson being morally ambiguous is not a revelation.

But sleaze and scandal have embroiled the Conservative Party of late. Johnson was amongst several politicians and civil servants fined for breaking his own COVID-19 regulations. Other controversies ensued: There was talk of changing the Ministerial Code—the rules governing ministers—to avoid breaking them. A member of Parliament was forced to resign after being caught watching pornography in the House of Commons chamber while another was caught pinching the backsides of his peers at a gentlemen’s club. The list goes on.

It seems Mr. Pincher (his actual name if one can believe it) getting handsy in the club was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Chris Pincher’s scandalous past was known when Johnson made him deputy chief whip, and his resignation was not sought immediately following the rear-end incident, allegedly because the prime minister needed his support. But the idea that members of Parliament were resigning because of the prime minister’s lack of moral fiber is frankly laughable. That judgment comes a bit late.

What’s interesting about Johnson’s downfall is the number of sustained attacks against him, the culmination of multiple fronts of attack. Journalists in the mainstream media have been piling on for months because his policies do not suit their metropolitan liberal elite agenda. The “remain” side of the Brexit divide has been looking for any excuse to attack him because he is the politician who managed to initiate the Brexit protocols where many others failed. And then there are the attacks by Her Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition: the Labour Party. After all, it is that party’s job to hold the government to account, but only if it attempts to do so based on politics or governmental policies rather than the prime minister’s personality and character.

As a matter of happenstance, the coordinated attacks against Johnson aligned enough to cause a domino effect. Politicians are like lemmings; they have a herd mentality. Once a couple of government ministers resigned, they all were at it.

Interestingly, the establishment in the United Kingdom managed to do what the establishment in the United States could only dream of: unseat a populist leader. There were many attempts to take down President Donald Trump, but he succeeded in completing his term, unlike Johnson.

Johnson formerly held dual citizenship in the U.K. and the United States. He renounced his U.S. citizenship in 2016 in a show of national loyalty, but he continues to be a strong American ally. It remains to be seen who will replace him as prime minister, but one can hope it’ll be someone who values the special relationship between our nations.