Boris johnnson

The most surprising part about Boris Johnson's honors list, which allows him to approve lifetime peerages and other awards for his allies, is that he has included his hairdresser. That's right, the famous blonde mop isn’t just something that he wakes up with, but rather an intentional look crafted by House of Commons hairdresser Kelly Jo Dodge, who is set to get a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) from the former UK prime minister. Johnson is standing down as a Member of Parliament after receiving a report into "Partygate" scandal. The honors announcement, needless to say, has turned heads. It was approved by British prime minister Rishi Sunak on Friday, along with almost forty honors and seven peerages.

President Joe Biden’s administration has announced that he will be crossing the pond to Poland on February 20 through 22, just days before the one-year anniversary of Russia’s Ukraine invasion. Cockburn finds the dates curious — and wonders if the president will make a surprise visit to the epicenter of the conflict on the anniversary itself. The scheduled trip looks like it will already be a busy one, meeting with American allies in the region and reasserting Washington’s “unwavering support for the security of the Alliance.” The real kicker will be if Biden makes his way to Kyiv and meets Zelensky, ending the unfortunate distinction of him being one of the few Western leaders yet to travel to Ukraine.

Kharkiv, Ukraine Wednesday, the morning after Russia sent six long-range missiles into the center of Ukraine’s second city, I went for a run in snow-covered Gorky Park listening to the music of the German band Scorpions: “Down to Gorky Park, listening to the wind of change.” Scorpions were singing about a park of the same name in Moscow but I wanted to hear that song here in Kharkiv. When that song was released in 1990, the Soviet Union was breaking up. There was so much hope. Ukraine and other nations that had lived under the Iron Curtain began the process of finding freedom, happiness, possibility. But Russia? Ah, I thought as I ran past the fresh crater of a Russian missile in Kharkiv’s Gorky Park, what happened to Russia? What happened to that “wind of change"?

The Spectator’s Ben Domenech and Kara Kennedy sat down on the Ben Domenech Podcast on Thursday to discuss UK prime minister Liz Truss's resignation and where British politics goes from here.

Boris Johnson’s departure has left a vacancy at the top of British politics. For so long, he seemed to be the "teflon Tory" who could get away with anything; now a raft of scandals have brought him back down to earth. His resignation earlier this month triggered a leadership election among his Conservative party colleagues in the House of Commons. After a week of ballots, just two now remain: Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss. That pair of names will go to the party’s 160,000 members in constituencies across the country to decide which one will be Britain’s next prime minister. The former would be Britain’s first Asian premier; the latter its third female one.

I think that Thomas Babington Macaulay had the last word about Boris Johnson’s forced resignation as prime minister of the UK: “We know no spectacle so ridiculous,” Macaulay wrote, “as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.” Macaulay’s line needs to be slightly adjusted, it is true, because, ridiculous though public displays of puritanical moralism are, in this case it was mostly Boris’s colleagues in Parliament, not the public at large, that suffered that unbecoming fit of morality. Indeed, throughout it all, Boris — a politician with more élan than any prime minister since Margaret Thatcher — remained popular with the public. He was especially popular, I think, with the American public. And why not?

You might be wondering why Britain's government has rolled from crisis to crisis since the pandemic began, culminating today in the resignations of two leading ministers, and with the threat of more hanging overhead. Some would blame the character of 2020 and the pestilential years since; others the nature of Boris Johnson, the prime minister: his "colorful" personal life (a hard-working euphemism); his lack of focus; his indifference to the truth. I would look a little broader. Britain's political life is the product of the people who fill its parliament. And very many of them are deeply substandard people. The straw that apparently broke the camel's back this week was the government's former deputy chief whip, a man called Chris Pincher.

Cockburn woke up this morning to a good laugh over his coffee when he saw that British prime minister Boris Johnson had attributed Putin’s invasion of Ukraine to “toxic masculinity.” Johnson, the Conservative PM of the UK, told German broadcaster ZDF, “If Putin was a woman, which he obviously isn't, but if he were, I really don't think he would've embarked on a crazy, macho war of invasion and violence in the way that he has." He proceeded to say that the war is a “perfect example of toxic masculinity,” urging more countries to have “more women in positions of power.” While Putin’s bare chest on horseback may be the source of endless memes, Cockburn believes Johnson is focusing on the wrong things here.

Boris Johnson has survived the attempt by some in Britain's Conservative party to remove him as prime minister. The margin not quite close. But by being so publicly called into question, both the prime minister and his party have been weakened. Dogged by real and performative public disapproval, Johnson will have difficulty remaining in power for the rest of the parliamentary term, and more performing to do in the next election to remain in office after it. In the fabled axioms of British politics, two things are meant to be clear. One is that the Conservative party is the natural party of government. The country is slightly right-of-center, the logic goes, and it is a rare Labour challenge which can defeat this innate advantage.