Conservative party

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?

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.

Political realignments occur when large groups of voters desert one party for one or more other parties, shattering old coalitions and forming new ones. In America and northern Europe, working-class voters — mostly, but not exclusively, native and white — have been leaving established left-of-center parties. On their way out, they have met college-educated metropolitan professionals and managers migrating the other way. Center-left parties have exchanged the industrial workers who were once their core constituency for a new upscale clientele. The emerging center-left is supported by the college-credentialed middle classes, native minorities and immigrant diasporas.

On Monday evening, Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson, diagnosed 11 days’ earlier with COVID-19 and taken to hospital for ‘tests’ on Sunday afternoon after showing ‘persistent’ symptoms, was moved into an Intensive Care Unit at St Thomas’s Hospital in London. A brief statement from 10, Downing Street described Johnson’s ‘worsened’ condition and confirmed that Johnson, who had continued working in isolation throughout his illness, had asked foreign secretary Dominic Raab to ‘deputize for him where necessary’.Forty-six-year-old Raab is also the first secretary of state, the most senior member of Johnson’s cabinet.

The former British chancellor of the exchequer – or finance minister – Nigel Lawson once described the National Health Service (NHS) as the closest thing the British have to a religion. For some, however, is a worse than that – less mainstream religion than messianic cult. Yesterday, Donald Trump reassured British radio listeners that in seeking to do a trade deal with Britain it is not attempting to interfere in the NHS.  Not that it made any difference. Activists for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party, which will face Boris Johnson’s Conservatives in a general election on December 12, continued to make the accusation that there is some secret plot to break up the NHS and sell it off to US healthcare corporations.

Last night, during his entertaining slugfest with Jeremy Hunt, his rival for Number 10, Boris Johnson promised to take Britain off the 'hamster wheel of doom.' I thought it was the best line of the night. Judging from the applause, the audience did, too. I should acknowledge that Boris was somewhat parsimonious about exactly what mechanism he intended to employ to effect the announced emancipation. But about two of the evening’s chief issues — Brexit and Britain’s relations with the United States — Boris really didn’t need details. He needed, and demonstrated, determination. The Sir Humphreys of the world hate Boris, and they hate Brexit.