Former UK Prime Minister and professional circus clown Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson (Cons.—Uxbridge and South Ruislip) resigned his seat in Parliament this week ahead of a damning all-parties report recommending he be suspended for 90 days:
The death certificate for Boris Johnson’s career in politics read June 12th. A government statement appeared that evening appointing Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson as “Steward and Bailiff of the Three Hundreds of Chiltern”, the title MPs accept, according to Britain’s absurd constitution, in order to resign. He went because an inquiry into whether Mr Johnson deliberately misled Parliament found that he had. Not only that, he’d also impugned the investigating committee and joined a campaign of abuse and intimidation against it. Mr Johnson faced suspension as an MP for a remarkable 90 days. Given forewarning of the report, the former prime minister quit.
Conservatives are losing everywhere. But support is falling fastest in the northern constituencies the party was so proud of winning. Across the country Labour enjoys a 14-point poll lead. In “Red Wall” constituencies, this rises to 23 points, according to one pollster.
Andrew Sullivan, who attended Oxford with Johnson, wishes the US Republican Party would treat their former leader the same way:
And now we have Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. This past week saw two official reports into the abuse of their respective offices, and their lavish lying about it. The Smith indictment alleges that Trump knew full well that the documents he took from the White House and stored haphazardly at Mar-a-Lago and Bedminster were highly classified and not his own. But rather than hand everything back, Trump ignored the best legal advice, lied to his own lawyers, ordered an underling to move boxes to conceal them from the FBI, and threw out his usual barrage of excuses, distractions and falsehoods.
In an eerily similar fashion, the British parliamentary committee set up to investigate whether Boris Johnson lied to the House of Commons about his breaking of social distancing rules during Covid, published its final report this week. It’s as authoritative as the Trump indictment — first-hand witnesses, photos, sworn testimony, due process. And it too focuses on a very basic fact: just as Trump knew he was not authorized to keep top secret documents, so Johnson knew that crowded office-parties were quite clearly banned across the UK. But this awareness of the rules did not stop either man from flagrantly breaking them — and then complaining of a “witch-hunt” when called to account.
And it would be “utterly incredible” — unless you had a pulse and two ears at the time, because the ban on workplace parties was incandescently clear to the entire country. When the Queen had to sit alone at the funeral of her husband, it was obviously not ok for the prime minister to have “bring your own booze” parties at Number 10.
And as with Trump and his bizarre behavior with “his boxes,” it’s very hard to see some profound, malign motive here in pursuit of something important. It’s just mindless egotism, married with an infinite capacity for deceit.
[T]here is almost nothing in the narrative of these men’s late careers that isn’t exactly replicated in every previous episode of their lives. A mature democracy will throw up these characters every now and again, and use them. But a healthy one will also test them, and cast them out if they threaten the integrity of the system as a whole. The Brits and Tories have done that, in the end, with Boris — and it speaks well of the remaining integrity of their democracy.
The GOP needs to do the same with Trump. And soon.
Oh, completely unrelated, of course: today is the 165th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's address to the Illinois Republican Convention in Springfield, Ill., also known as the "house divided" speech. It's worth a re-read.