Tom already wrote about Boris Johnson’s resignation below, if you’re looking for the background. Apparently, it was just one too many scandals for the Tories. Imagine that. It’s tempting to see some hopeful parallels between Johnson and Trump in all this but they are misplaced. They live on the same side of the political compass but they are different animals. I liked this piece by JV Last on that subject:
I never fully bought the idea that Boris Johnson was the UK’s version of Trump. For one thing, he’s smart. For another thing, he was semi-competent at the the basics of governing.¹And for a third thing, Johnson never seemed like he was intent on blowing up NATO because he was a Russian cat’s paw.
Certainly, the similarities to Trump were too obvious to ignore. Both old men with extravagantly engineered hair. Both populist avengers who played to the working man while privately reviling the rubes. Both interested in using raw executive power in ways rarely contemplated. Both tabloid darlings. Both guys so corrupt that their scandals had scandals.
And another similarity was Johnson’s unwillingness to yield power even as his government collapsed around him.
Today Johnson will finally resign—or perhaps “resign,” since he seems to want to stay in power until his party has a replacement. For all I know he has a secret plan to stoke the pot, prevent a consensus replacement, let his own troubles die down, and then reconsider.
Saying “sure, I’ll quit . . . later” isn’t a binding contract.
But for all of their similarities, there are three very large differences between Boris and Donald that are worth talking about because they highlight how particularly dangerous Trump was/is to American democracy.
Despite his corruption and populism and intransigence . . .
(1) Boris Johnson did not summon an armed mob to Downing Street and then instruct them to march to Parliament and “fight” for their country in an attempt to change the minds of Conservative MPs.
(2) Johnson did not go around the country demanding that other British politicians commit crimes on his behalf, as Trump did when he requested that Georgia election officials “find” enough votes for him to win the state.
(3) However popular Johnson was with the Conservative party’s base, at the end of the day it was the Conservative party elites who deposed him.
This all seems significant. Especially #3.
I remember talking with a close friend about Donald Trump in late 2016. My friend told me that he couldn’t believe that he was going to vote for Trump, but that he had to, because Trump would arrive in Washington with thousands of Republicans and these people would constrain and change him.
I suggested that it seemed equally possible that the reverse would happen: That the good and noble Republicans would be transformed by Trump into something quite dangerous.
Seems fair to say that I was correct.
Yet however compromised the Conservative party was by Boris Johnson, at least members of his government were eventually able to resign en masse. At least there was a movement from within the party elites robust enough to push him out of power. At least the Conservative party retained enough independence from the man to finally act in defense of itself.
I don’t follow British politics that closely. Maybe there was a London staffer somewhere who told the Times on background, “By jove, what is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time, my good fellow!”
But whatever the rationalizations along the way, the Conservatives finally found a line they would not cross. Or, perhaps more accurately, a straw which broke the camel’s back.
In America the Republican party still has not found such a line even after Donald Trump attempted a coup to overthrow the presidential election.
Whatever you think of Britain’s Conservative party, at least they remain a more-or-less normal political institution. They are not so compromised that they represent an ongoing threat to democratic self-governance.
The same cannot be said for the Republican party in America.
I don’t think the Republican Party is even a party anymore. It’s more like a criminal gang that some people in the country are paying to protect them from what they think is a greater danger. The British Conservatives are … not. They decided they’d had enough and resigned en masse. Imagine if Trump’s cabinet and top GOP officials in his administration had done the same thing.