A Boris Johnson in crisis takes refuge in the ‘great successes’ of Brexit to try to stop its attrition

The 2019 UK elections focused almost exclusively on Brexit. And Boris Johnson won a historic outright majority – the largest of his party in 30 years – with a clear promise: to make Brexit a reality now, whatever the cost, and to end the endless months of parliamentary battles and counter-battles. Johnson kept his promise last Christmas Eve, and the polls rewarded him with a huge boost in popular support. But nine months later, the magic of those days has ended up buried under empty supermarket shelves and closed gas stations. The latest, a serious corruption scandal that has forced the resignation of a ‘Tory’ deputy. And the prime minister does not seem to be very clear on what to do, except relive the Brexit crisis to try to revive his government.

The threat of breaking the agreement has been on the table again for weeks. Johnson agreed to keep Northern Ireland within the European common market to avoid Ireland’s veto of the deal, as the country was unwilling to resurrect the bloody border between the two Ireland after more than 20 years of peace in the province. But the British premier now says he has regretted what he signed in the face of the crisis of Northern Irish unionism, and wants a new battle with the EU: either their conditions improve, or he will ignore the treaty and stop complying with customs inspections imposed by Brussels. And both Ireland and the European Commission have already conveyed to London that, if they dare, they too will break the rest of the agreement and launch a full-fledged trade war against Britain.

Why would Johnson play with the match of an economic crisis even greater than that caused by the global supply crisis caused by COVID, and greater than that caused by the hard Brexit that he himself chose? The answer must be sought on the national level: without Brexit, the British government has lost its way, and is beginning to show harsh signs of wear and tear. The polls are clear: the rush caused by the Brexit deal and the initial good management of vaccination has faded as quickly as it came.

The reasons for this drop have become very clear in recent weeks. First, Finance Minister Rishi Sunak presented budgets that broke several key promises: an increase in the tax burden to 70-year highs, an increase in social security contributions and a cut in the promised rise in pensions. Three movements that directly violated three promises of his last electoral program.

Then, last week, Johnson got himself into a massive image crisis. It all started when one of his deputies, Owen Patterson, was sentenced by Parliament’s Standards Committee to a 30-day suspension for having received 100,000 pounds from private companies to ‘lobby’ the Government, which would trigger a by-election for his voters decide whether to keep him or elect a new deputy. But after dinner with a close friend of both, Johnson ordered his caucus to vote to repeal the Committee and exonerate Patterson.

The vote resulted in dozens of ‘Tory’ MPs abstaining and a wave of newspaper front pages – even from conservative media – accusing them of going back to the years of “Tory corruption” that sank John Major’s government in 1997 and turned them into “the unpleasant party”, in the words of Theresa May. The Major himself came out this weekend to attack Johnson for his attitude. In the end, Johnson backtracked in a matter of hours: on Friday morning he ordered his spokesman to withdraw the previous day’s vote and dropped Patterson, who learned from the press that his political career was over while I did the grocery shopping.

And the fire seems to last several weeks: this Monday an extraordinary session of Parliament was held to debate the matter, in which multiple ‘Tory’ deputies have asked their leader, who was absent from the plenary session, to apologize publicly to the House and to the British public. In addition, the opposition demands to investigate who paid the vacations in Marbella that Johnson hit while the gas stations in half the country were empty. To this is added another list of scandals that had gone somewhat unnoticed until now, but are suddenly resurrecting. For example, the fact that 16 former Conservative Party treasuries, with donations of more than £ 3 million to the party, have ended up receiving a seat in the House of Lords from Johnson and his predecessors.

End of invulnerability

In recent years, the opposition has suffered to hurt Johnson, as it was engrossed in its internal battles and deeply divided: there are three parties to its left, and the British electoral system brutally penalizes the division. But if the others don’t rise, Johnson is starting to slide: the first poll in nearly a year was released Monday that puts Labor ahead, alongside strong growth in the Greens. And the possibility of an electoral coalition between Labor, Greens and Liberals that minimizes the effects of the division has begun to sound strongly.

Johnson, for his part, is discovering a harsh reality. During 2019 and 2020, citizens forgave him almost everything before promising to end the torture of Brexit as soon as possible. It did not matter if he attacked Justice, that Parliament closed, that his Chief of Staff broke the strict confinement to go to 300 km from London, the bad management of the virus or that he failed to keep promises left and right: his voters were grateful only with to put an end to the Brexit soap opera. With Brexit over, Johnson now has nowhere to hide. The only solution it seems to have found is to resurrect the crisis of the Brexit negotiations with the EU to resolve them again. The polls, for now, do not seem to show much enthusiasm to hear a repetition of the “great successes” of his government. Now the question remains as to whether he has any new songs up his sleeve.