United kingdom

London, England When I checked the date that Boris Johnson resigned as prime minister, I thought it must have been wrong. July? The psychodrama that ensued felt as if it had been going on for years. If Boris’s tenure was the main show, Liz Truss’s stint as Britain's shortest-serving PM was the slapdash encore that no one asked for. You know, when the music restarts as you’re eyeing up a taxi home and secretly thinking the act needn’t have bothered. Boris’s downfall, the real one — not the multiple wobbles — began with Partygate. A steady drip of salacious stories for months, each one getting slightly more unforgivable, recounting incidences of Boris and members of his government breaching the strict lockdown rules he himself had set in place.

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.