ATBefore the drunken parties in Downing Street caught up with him, the British conservative Boris Johnson had come out of many bad times. Lies, reversals, betrayed speech, everything was forgiven him with, as a master key, his natural joviality, his sense of humor and this patter of great talker.
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom since 2019, he has long belonged to the political club of “Tefal” – this category of leaders on whom everything slips and nothing “attaches”, as it goes, says the advertisement, from the famous frying pan to fry. The contortion served as his conviction. But the “Tefal” period is coming to an end. This time, the Houdini of Whitehall seems to have exhausted the unfathomable amount of luck he had had since birth.
The reasons why he falls, and could be forced to resign, relate to the true nature of his political affiliation: not conservatism, but a mixture of populism and cynicism (the two diseases often go hand in hand). It is not his ideological plasticity that he is reproached for: he is today more “Keynesian” in economics, in favor of an interventionist government, than Thatcherian, advocate of a stunted state. Johnson stumbles upon something more serious.
Politically very damaging
The investigation report of a senior official, Sue Gray, responsible for clarifying the behavior of the Prime Minister during periods of pandemic confinement, stigmatizes an outlaw to the entourage focused on the bottle. On at least four occasions, in the gardens of the Prime Minister’s residence-office or, upstairs, in his apartments, the fiesta was in full swing, and too bad for the rules of social distancing and the ban on all gatherings .
For a Conservative, a party where respect for law, order and institutions is held high and proud, this is politically very damaging. But for Boris Johnson, the “javas” of 10 Downing Street contain the equivalent of a ton of TNT. They explode the image he has built for himself, that of a fighting patriot.
A talented pro-Brexit juggler during the 2016 campaign, “BoJo”, as the press calls him, willingly flirted with generous historical comparisons: leaving the European Union (EU) meant rediscovering the spirit of the Blitz, London under bombardment, and relive the soap opera Dad’s Army celebrating the country’s unity and glorious solitude in the face of Hitler.
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