JOHNSON. Boris Johnson will step down as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. A decision taken after many scandals. But who will succeed him?
The tremors caused by the various storms linked to the numerous scandals that have marred his mandate have therefore ended up causing him to capsize. Three years after being appointed Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson announced his resignation on Thursday July 7, 2022, during a speech outside his official residence as head of government, 10 Downing Street. “The Conservative Party wants a new party leader and a new Prime Minister, and I have agreed with the party’s staff,” said the one who was until then the boss of his political formation. “Sad to give up the best job in the world”, Boris Johnson did not leave the British Matignon immediately. The former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Theresa May remains in office until the appointment of her successor, a process which should take several weeks.
If Boris Johnson had to resolve to announce his future resignation, it was because the political situation had become untenable for the Prime Minister. The hours preceding his speech, the 58-year-old politician had faced a wave of resignations within his government. About fifty people (ministers, secretary of state, members of cabinets) had in fact announced that they no longer wanted to work alongside him after the revelation of a new lie linked to a case of sexual assault (read below).
From now on, a process to determine the new leader of the conservative party (the right, the equivalent of LR in France, editor’s note) who should be, de facto, the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, will be engaged. Until then, Boris Johnson will continue to handle day-to-day business.
The resignation of Boris Johnson just recorded, the race for his succession was immediately launched. And several suitors are vying to settle at 10 Downing Street. According to the British media, some personalities are eyeing the post of head of government:
- Ben Wallace: Secretary of Defense. He seems to be in the best position;
- Penny Mordaunt: Secretary of State for Foreign Trade;
- Liz Truss: Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs;
- Rishi Sunak: ex-Head of Treasury (Ministry of Finance);
- Nadhim Zahawi: current Head of Treasury;
- Tom Tugendhat: Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in Parliament;
- Suella Braverman: Attorney General.
In recent days, Boris Johnson has been in turmoil in the United Kingdom. Many ministers had announced their resignation, demanding the departure of their leader, mired in numerous scandals. About fifty people working in strategic positions of power who had left their functions to ask for the head of the boss of the Conservative Party. A major political crisis within the monarchy which led to the resignation of the 58-year-old politician, as he announced in a speech on Thursday at midday. “It is now clear that the Conservative Party wants a new leader and therefore a new prime minister,” he said.
This is the case that precipitated the fall of Boris Johnson. On Wednesday June 29, 2022, Christopher Pincher, a member of the British government, allegedly made advances and groped two men in a historic private club in London, the Carlton Club. Described as drunk at the time of the events, the Deputy Chief Whip for the Commons (the coordinator of the deputies of the presidential majority in the British National Assembly, editor’s note) was thus the subject of complaints to the Conservative party, of which he is member. He quickly resigned from his post.
But the 52-year-old MP is not his first such case. Several British media assure that the chosen one has made many advances to multiple people in the past with maneuvers that are at the very least insistent and tactile according to the stories. In 2017, he even allegedly made sexual advances to Tom Blenkinsop, MP and Olympic athlete, before being cleared.
So many accusations that did not prevent him from finding a position in the government of Boris Johnson, who had initially claimed not to be aware of the accusations which weighed on the shoulders of the fifty-year-old. Before backtracking and recognizing, on July 4, that he knew that Christopher Pincher had been the subject of a complaint. A new lie that did not pass through the government, leading to the wave of resignation of ministers.
Boris Johnson did meet a former KGB agent a few years ago when he was Foreign Secretary. After years of refuting such a claim, the British Prime Minister told MPs on Wednesday that he “certainly met” Alexander Lebedev in April 2018, when he was Foreign Secretary in Theresa May’s government. The meeting took place in Italy, “without officials”, said the head of government. An announcement that did not fail to react: in 1988, Alexander Lebedev had become a spy in London on behalf of Russia. Officially retired four years later, he had gone into business and politics. In December 2020, his son, Yevgueni Lebedev, was appointed for life to the House of Lords, the upper house of the British Parliament.
Boris Johnson’s mandate at 10 Downing Street was mainly shaken by a case of clandestine parties organized between May 2020 and April 2021, during the confinements then established in the United Kingdom in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic. Festive meetings during which the health precautionary measures were not respected, even though they were hammered at the time by the public authorities. The “Partygate” affair had particularly weakened the head of the British government, who had not, however, resigned.
Boris Johnson, nicknamed “BoJo”, is an atypical character. After receiving a prestigious education, he began a career as a journalist in 1987 by entering as an intern at the Timesbefore joining the Daily Telegraph. He approached the political world in the 1990s before being elected deputy with the Conservative Party in 2001. His future political career would be marked by controversial outings.
Boris Johnson is a controversial figure, accustomed to shocking statements, whether as a politician or in his career as a journalist. For example, he was fired from Times for coining a quote attributed to academic Colin Lucas. In its stands for the Daily Telegraphhe has also used expressions such as “niggers” or “watermelon smiles” to describe the inhabitants of Commonwealth countries, or attempted a comparison between women wearing the burqa and “mailboxes”, or won a contest of “satirical poems” about Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan using an unflattering joke about his goats.
Despite these eccentricities, Boris Johnson has had a rather successful career in politics, even before becoming Prime Minister of his country. After his election as MP for Henley, in central England, he sat for 7 years in the House of Commons. In 2008, he was elected for four years mayor of London, then re-elected in 2012. In 2015, he was re-elected Member of Parliament, this time in a constituency of “Greater London”.
During the Brexit referendum campaign in 2016, he was strongly committed to the exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union. Then mayor of London, he notably put forward a financial argument, plastered on his campaign buses: “We send 350 million pounds to the EU every week, rather finance our NHS (the British health system, editor’s note)” . An argument that would have played a big role in favor of Brexit, but which will quickly prove to have been false: the UK’s contribution to the EU budget averaged £135 million per week between 2010 and 2014.
In 2016, after the Brexit referendum, Boris Johnson joined the government of the new British Prime Minister Theresa May, responsible for enforcing the choice of the British. He was then Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and took care of certain files linked to the exit of the United Kingdom from the EU and its consequences. Very quickly, he opposed internally the “soft Brexit” of the head of government. After weeks of latent conflict, he finally resigned from this post in July 2018, in the midst of a crisis, the British Parliament refusing to validate the agreement reached by Theresa May with the Union. In May 2019, after the latter’s resignation, he announced that he was running for election as the new leader of the Conservative Party, and received the support of US President Donald Trump. He won the various rounds of the ballot organized within the “MPs”, the equivalent of British deputies, and won the election with the members against Jeremy Hunt, which earned him the appointment of Prime Minister. But after many scandals, he resigned on July 7, 2022.