After being given advance sight of the Parliamentary Privileges Committee’s investigation into him over Partygate, disgraced ex-Prime Minister Johnson has stepped down as the MP for Uxbridge and South Ruislip.
Whilst the majority of Brits will of course be jubilant at this news, the man still casts a long, oozing shadow over British politics. We should be under no illusions that as dead as his Parliamentary career might be, his influence over the more right-wing elements of the Conservative Party, and over those poor fools in the electorate who are still falling for his bullshit, is still very strong. He remains a dangerous beast, and should always be treated as such.
That being said, this is certainly a good day for the UK and its democracy. The immeasurable and uncountable damage that this one man has done to one of the greatest and oldest democracies in history still completely boggles the mind, and this resignation is surely five or six years too late, but at least it has finally happened. He’s gone now.
Johnson published a long, ranting, worryingly Trumpian resignation speech shortly after stepping down. In it, he languishes in self-pity, blaming everyone and everything except himself, and not providing any evidence to back up the claims he makes.
He attacks the Privileges Committee who investigated him, calling them a “kangaroo court” and the investigation a “witch hunt”. The Trump comparisons are sickeningly valid here. He said they had “still not produced a shred of evidence” against him, which is easy to say before anyone else has seen the evidence except him.
“Their purpose from the beginning has been to find me guilty, regardless of the facts”, Johnson continues, still obviously intent on throwing as much doubt on the Committee as possible so that his rabid devotees can spiral into conspiracy and keep his dim flame flickering.
Johnson had plenty of ways to contest the findings of the Committee and fight to keep his seat; he did it for Priti Patel when she was found guilty of bullying. But he has chosen the coward’s way out. Not confident in his victory at any stage of appeal, he resigned, foregoing any democratic process and robbing his constituents of their voice.
He noted that some of the Committee members had “expressed deeply prejudicial remarks about my guilt” before he appeared before them. He has previously expressed gladness that Chris Bryant MP, who had indeed expressed prescient views about Johnson’s honesty and innocence before the investigation started, recused himself from the investigation. Bryant was one of Johnson’s loudest and most prominent critics in Parliament, so it was right that he recused himself (even though everything he said about the man is correct).
Some others on the Committee had indeed expressed a negative view about Johnson, as is their right (and as had most of the country at this point) before the investigation got underway. But others on the Committee (the majority of which was Conservative) had previously expressed support for the ex-PM, including the arch-Brexiteer and former Johnson loyalist Bernard Jenkin. They still found him guilty.
Also, the Select Committee is not capable of “driving him out of Parliament”. Only Parliament itself can vote to put an MP up for re-election, the Committee just advises them when they find someone guilty, which clearly they have in Johnson’s case. Parliament is also majority Tory.
And even then, only his constituents can “drive him out” by voting him out in a by-election, which Parliament only has the power to call. Uxbridge and South Ruislip is, currently at least, majority Tory.
He has stepped down as an MP because he knows he has been found guilty by a Tory majority Committee (including Brexiteers), that he will lose the vote in the Tory majority House, and he will lose his Tory majority seat.
He is simply scared of losing what little face he has left, of being repudiated not just in the history of the country, but the Conservative Party as well.
Johnson was already making headlines this week after the publication of his resignation honours list, a characteristically sleazy and oily affair. Among the forty-five recipients are Priti Patel, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Simon Clarke, Michael Fabricant, Conor Burns. All Tory MPs, all listed for Knighthood. I cannot imagine the listless Rees-Mogg kneeling before the King to be made a knight, and just saying the words ‘Sir Michael Fabricant’ brought a bit of bile up in the back of my throat.
Johnson has raised seven of his allies into the House of Lords, including former Downing Street chief of staff Dan Rosenfield who oversaw part of the Partygate saga and had attended some of the parties. Johnson’s former principle private secretary Martin Reynolds, who famously invited Downing Street staff to a BYOB garden party during lockdown, was given the Order of the Bath.
Also being made a Peer is Johnson’s 30-year old ex-adviser Charlotte Owens, now the youngest Peer in British history. Why Johnson decided to elevate a relative political newcomer to a lifelong law-making position after just five short years working in politics is beyond most political commentators. However, if one looks at a picture of Ms Owens and Mr Johnson side-by-side, that answer suddenly becomes very, very clear. Nepotism, base and loathsome.
The list is long and most of the individuals listed are neck-deep in Johnson-related sleaze. It’s just another action by Johnson that brings such disgrace to our institutions that should make you furious, but at this point, I’m numb to it. I just want him gone.
Conspicuously absent from Johnson’s list of lustre was Nadine Dorries, his former Culture Secretary (despite not having any culture herself) and one of his staunchest and most outspoken loyalists.
Regrettably for our political soap opera, Johnson did not spurn Dorries, but she was instead struck from the list by the House of Lords Appointment Committee.
Rishi Sunak said in an interview today that Johnson asked him to overrule the Committee, but Sunak refused because he “didn’t think it was right” in a rare moment of honesty that will surely anger his predecessor-but-one.
It has been reported that Johnson promised Sunak that he would campaign for him at the next general election, no doubt hoping to fuel his own triumphant return off the back of his work, if Sunak approved his peerages. Sunak’s moral code is a little tighter than Johnson’s, it seems.
Dorries, seemingly distraught for not being granted a peerage for having the brownest nose in England, resigned from Parliament just before Johnson. Perhaps he made her aware of the findings of the Committee investigation, and Dorries just couldn’t imagine a future in politics with no Boris and no peerage.
Of course, Johnson and Dorries resignations trigger by-elections in both of their constituencies. Another Johnson loyalist refused a peerage is his longtime ally Nigel Adams, who has also resigned, overcome with emotion, triggering a third by-election in his seat of Selby and Ainsty.
Three by-elections and three less hard-right Tories in the Commons. It’s like Christmas.
Johnson’s seat of Uxbridge and South Ruislip is held by a majority of just over seven thousand votes, and has always been held by a Tory. Labour are, however, expected to win comfortably; they have always come second in Uxbridge, and they will not be facing Johnson either, only bettering their odds.
Dorries’s seat of Mid Bedfordshire is Conservative heartland. She holds a sizeable margin of twenty-four thousand, staying comfortably ahead of Labour and even further ahead of the Lib Dems. However, it is the Lib Dems who are expected to be the Tories’ biggest rivals here. They would have to pull off a swing as impressive as North Shropshire or Tiverton and Honiton, but they have a better chance than Labour. Tory loyalists like those in Mid Beds are more likely to choose the Lib Dems than Labour; that’s how they won in North Shropshire 2021 and Tiverton and Honiton in 2022. Wise tactical voters will be voting Lib Dem in this seat.
Selby and Ainsty seems less clear-cut; Adams enjoyed a majority of twenty thousand in the North Yorkshire seat, and 60% of the vote share. Labour took 25% and the Lib Dems 9%. The constituency was only made in 2010 and the Tories have always held it, and the seats that pre-date it have also mostly been Conservative. If Labour were to win here, it would show a real change in the wind.
Only one outcome of these by-elections can be certain, however; the Conservatives are toast. They will certainly lose at least one of these seats, which is never a good look a year before a general election.
But more than than, if they weren’t tearing themselves to shreds before these resignations, they surely are now. The Johnson loyalists, the remnants of the ERG and those of their mindset, the Tufton Street crowd. They will be at the Government’s throat for the remainder of this Parliament, and from the stronger language used by Sunak in his interview today, it doesn’t look like he’ll be taking it lying down.
This resignation is a major spite move from a seething Johnson, trying to cause the most damage to what he sees as the cabal traitorous of Tories who pushed him out of No. 10, especially the man he holds most accountable for his downfall, Sunak.
He cares not one jot for the most electorally successful party in the history of politics that raised him from disgraced newspaper editor to Prime Minister, and would happily see the Conservative Party burn to ash and bone if it meant he could get one over on the remoaners, the anti-growth tofu-eating whatevers in his own party that hounded him from Downing Street.
He is nothing but spite and jealously and greed, and I’m glad that the relatively sensible ones in his party have seen it, and the ones who can’t are leaving. I hope losing the general election will be a character-building experience for them and they can re-form into a sensible, thoughtful centre-right opposition, as I believe the country needs.
Labour on the other hand are looking the most united in years. There are still elements within the membership that will never forgive Keir Starmer for his treatment of Jeremy Corbyn and his purge of the hard left, but they are relatively quiet and certainly aren’t involved in developing policy. Recent local elections indicate that the public are on board, as does recent polling; Labour have recently increased their poll lead to seventeen points nationally and, crucially, by twenty-two points in the Red Wall. These are not the heights Labour enjoyed at the peak of Liz Truss’s shenanigans with the economy, but it is still very significant to have sustained a double digit lead for almost a year, and a lead outright for almost two.
The UK is well on the way to recovery after its nasty case of right-wing populism. Across the Atlantic, the United States are also seeing off their particular strain, it seems, as former President Donald Trump has been indicted on thirty-seven counts relating to his removal of classified documents from the White House.
The documents in question were found during an FBI raid on Trump’s south Florida Mar a Lago estate. When a President loses office, they are required to hand over all classified documents in their possession to the National Archives. But Trump, inside his own little world, didn’t lose the election and was still President when he left the White House.
When the National Archives asked for the documents back, Trump gave some, but not all of the documents. The FBI found 25 Top Secret, 92 Secret, and 67 Confidential classified documents in Mara a Lago’s storeroom, theatre, and bathroom, among other places. Trump had a safe in an office he locked with a padlock he called his “45 Office”, which the FBI broke into. and they found… “nothing of consequence”, according to the FBI.
Trump had Top Secret documents scattered around his house like an easter egg hunt, but he didn’t put any of them in his safe. That, if everything else about Trump hadn’t shown he was unfit to be President, is the starkest example.
The documents are reported to pertain to, among other things, the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, the US military, and he US’s and other nation’s nuclear weapons capabilities, the US’s and other nation’s nuclear weapons capabilities, and information relating to foreign leaders and .foreign interests, and daily White House intelligence briefings.
The charges against Trump include thirty-one violations of the Espionage Act 1917, conspiracy to obstruct justice, corruption, concealing and withholding documents during a Federal investigation, and making false statements, among others. All together, the charges carry a maximum sentence of around forty years, but the likelihood of the book being thrown at Trump for this case are still quite low.
That being said, there is now a not-insignificant chance that a former President of the United States will face jail time when his time in court is up. Yes, his deranged conspiracy theorist base will invent some cockamamy second opinion for the right-wing media to plaster over their airwaves if he is sent to prison, but he will be in prison, where he belongs, and not in the White House.
It still remains an optimistic thought, but perhaps the era of right-wing populism is finally drawing to a close in the West. This unsightly period of the past ten to fifteen years that started with backlash against a refugee crisis after the Arab Spring leading to Brexit, picked up speed with Trump, and became consolidated when Johnson took office. It feels like the type of politics that upheld their reasoning is becoming less opaque as the true extent of their deceptions start to unravel.
As stated earlier, there will always be those in the Trump and Johnson camps that will never see the light, that will never stop believing in what they stand for, which the rest of us know is precisely nothing but themselves. Thankfully, many of those who were duped by these conmen have more faith in the institutions of their nations than in one man, whether it is Parliament in Johnson’s case, or the American legal system with Trump.
Biden, for his flaws, has stuck a bold chord in the policies he has introduced, most notably the Inflation Reduction Act. Despite the economic challenges the Act presents to Europe, it is precisely the type of ecological legislation we need to see from all leading Governments. Biden’s theoretical second term will build upon the foundations he laid in his first.
However, a second Trump term is not a distant prospect. Trump still leads polls for Republican nominations, and still commands a great deal of loyalty in that shell of a party. The 2024 election will be very bit as vile, volatile, and vitriolic as 2016 or 2020, with the same, or perhaps even greater threat to American democracy.
Besides the damage it would do to democracy, a second Trump administration would spell doom for America’s standing in the world. So much hegemony and soft power was lost in the first four years, dragging America firmly out of its clear lead over China into a relegation zone. Trump 2024 would mean China’s dominance becomes inevitable.
Also, Ukraine’s fortunes in its war against Russia would sour greatly. US military support would effectively dry up under Trump, having a devastating effect on Ukraine’s ability to wage war. International enthusiasm for the Ukrainian cause would grow colder, perhaps cease altogether from some of the US’s more obsequious allies (such as a still Tory-run UK), maybe even leading to victory for Russia.
Whilst less prevalent in frontline politics than it was some years ago, right-wing populism still remains a threat. Although two of its main instigators are facing career-ending problems, other nations are slipping further towards this damaging standpoint.
Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party and President Andrzej Duda are one such example, who’s policy and conduct in office has been described as “authoritarian” and “illiberal” by Polish and international political scientists. Another is Italian PM Giorgia Meloni and her post-fascist Brothers of Italy party who have made headlines recently for turning hundreds of refugees away from Italian shores, and has called for borders to be shut completely to refugees.
France still faces threats posed by Marine le Pen and her Front National party, who still remain Macron’s biggest electoral threat. Also Victor Orban in Hungary, the SVP in Switzerland, to name a few.
And that’s just inside Europe! Outside our small continent the rest of the world faces the same comforting threat of right-wing nationalism. India has been ruled by Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalists for years, stoking tensions between Hindus ad Muslims. Israel has recently elected its most right-wing government in history, ramping up settler sentiment and causing surges in violence, and, most pressingly, Vladimir Putin in Russia.
Putin is of course the most dangerous, but also most successful right-wing populist in Europe. He has kept Russian society ruthlessly oppressed; institutional racism and homophobia, human rights violations including torture, rampant corruption, the whole shebang, but maintained high popularity regardless. He has repeatedly rigged elections and murdered opponents to stay in power, robbing the Russian people of their voice, but they still love him. He tells state media what to say and has locked up every other independent journalist in the country, and the people lap it up every time. He is a master of his craft; the best since Stalin.
However, as Western backing of Ukraine continues to grow stronger and stronger, Putin’s regime, from the outside at least, is looking weaker every day. The man himself looks like a husk, and his list of allies no longer exceeds a page of A4. His rule will not survive this war, I predict. Whether he is ousted by his oligarchs, dies of whatever horrible disease is coursing through him, or just disappears one day, he won’t see Russia claim victory as President.
As social, economical, and environmental policy around the world but particularly in the west has become more liberal and progressive, backlash from those opposed to change and progression is expected. Whether we are over the worst of this opposition remains to be seen, but we can take some comfort that two of the loudest voices in the “post-truth” era are well on the way to being silenced.
stay safe
/e