BOris Johnson is about to leave 10 Downing Street, pushed out by the cascading resignations of her ministers, just weeks after – narrowly – surviving a vote of no confidence from Conservative MPs in the House of Commons. He does it with a bad grace and a form of denial of his faults, like three years in power where he lied and violated countless constitutional conventions.
Ministers in his government, and the Conservative Party as a whole, tolerated his antics and populist overtones until polls and two by-election losses in June showed he was no longer an asset, but on the contrary, it put them at serious risk of defeat in the next elections. They don’t grow out of this sequence either.
Very poor economic situation
The British Prime Minister leaves, despite the success of the vaccination campaign in the United Kingdom and his action in Ukraine, a country facing a very degraded economic situation. Inflation, at 9%, is the highest in the G7, growth has almost stopped (+0.2% in the first quarter), and a crisis is coming for the poorest Britons, faced with a vertiginous rise in energy prices, with no aid mechanism for the time being. We can add to this a health system at the end of its tether, an unresolved Brexit, with the crisis around the protocol on Northern Ireland, signed, then called into question by Boris Johnson, and the threat hanging over the future. of the kingdom in Scotland, where the nationalist government wants to hold a second referendum on independence in 2023.
Boris Johnson’s merit, in the eyes of his admirers, was to have won several elections (London mayor’s office, Brexit referendum, then legislative elections in December 2019) thanks to his charisma and hollow slogans like “Take-back control” (“Let’s take back control”) or “Get Brexit Done” (“Let’s get Brexit done”). He had succeeded in bringing together, around vague formulas, traditional conservative voters, faithful to the Thatcherite vision of a minimally interventionist state and free trade, and others, socially conservative but favorable to public spending to rebalance development. between the north and the south of England, in particular the deputies elected in 2019 in the former Labor strongholds of the “red wall”.
But for several months, neoliberal conservatives had been worried about public spending induced by the health crisis and the tax hikes introduced by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak. Johnson’s fall can also be explained by this internal opposition, determined to reduce taxes to revive the economic machine.
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