by Michael Brand
On Monday, June 6th, Britain’s Conservative Party held a no confidence vote to determine whether Boris Johnson should remain Prime Minister. If a majority of his party’s Members of Parliament voted that they had no confidence in the Prime Minister, he would have been forced to resign.
Johnson’s party has been broken apart by a number of scandals including the following: Partygate - which was when Johnson was fined for braking his own laws by hosting a large party during the pandemic, a member of parliament “who had breached lobbying rules,” and a different member of parliament who was “found guilty of sexually abusing a 15-year-old boy” (McGee). Ultimately, these scandals combined with high inflation rates and his party getting pummeled in local elections a month prior, caused 54 members of parliament to file no confidence letters, which is enough to trigger a no confidence vote.
When it came down to the ballots, Johnson won, but barely. His 211 to 148 victory was “a far bigger mutiny than many pundits had expected” (Smith). Although Johnson frames his victory as “a convincing result, a decisive result,” in reality it is just a result that is delaying the inevitable (Specia). When his predecessor, Theresa May, had her last no confidence vote, she had a larger margin of victory than Johnson did, but ended up resigning no more than six months after the vote.
Without anywhere near full confidence in the party, Johnson will have to face a number of challenges in the next month. On the political front, there are two key Member of Parliament elections on June 23rd, Conservative losses could put Johnson under a colossal amount of pressure from his party. On the popularity front, “energy bills are soaring, inflation is spiking and interest rates have risen just as Mr. Johnson is about to raise taxes” leaving citizens to pressure him to fix the worsening problems they face in their everyday lives (Castle). The combination of these problems will be too much for Johnson to handle, and like his predecessor, he will probably resign in a couple of months.
However, a Johnson resignation does not mean British politics will be saved because the “forces of nationalism pulling the country apart are not going away, a reality no party seems able to address in any serious fashion, while the endemic north-south divide that Johnson promised to resolve looks set only to get worse” (McTague). The problem Johnson faces is that he is a populist who is no longer popular. Disappearing does not make it any harder for Britain to elect a populist who is popular. When the country found itself in the Brexit crisis during 2019 it turned to Johnson, a populist. The country again faces a crisis in 2022, and it is likely they will again turn to a populist, just not Johnson.
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