Boris Johnson dreamed of a Churchillian destiny, his hero, with dramas, sacrifices but also brilliant victories over adversity. The Prime Minister, 58, forced to resign on Thursday July 7, will go down in the history of British politics as a cynical and cynical leader, who spoiled in two and a half years, by his own fault, an unprecedented electoral victory for his Conservative Party, never seen since those of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.
This atypical politician, contemptuous of rules and conventions, and having long had a problematic relationship with the truth, leaves a Tory party in disarray, dented by scandals, and a country with a damaged international reputation, weakened by Brexit, in direct opposition to the European Union (EU) on Northern Ireland and without a plan to combat soaring energy prices.
Watching his chaotic and dignified fall in recent days, it was hard to remember the unquestionable authority Mr Johnson enjoyed in December 2019, after winning an outright majority in the House of Commons in the general election. . The eighty-seat lead he had over the opposition parties gave him free rein to apply a government program that broke with ten years of austerity.
On a simplistic slogan “Get Brexit Done” (“Let’s get Brexit done”), which worked wonders in a country exhausted by the endless debates on leaving the EU, this former promoter of the “Leave” campaign had also succeeded, with his unconventional style and his promises of an interventionist state, in pushing the famous “red wall”this labor bastion of the Midlands and the north of England, regions still marked by the deindustrialization of the 1980s.
Two and a half years later, Brexit is still not “realized”, London contesting a crucial part of the divorce treaty, the famous Northern Irish protocol, which the leader had nevertheless endorsed at the end of 2019. Mr. Johnson has even just propose a bill to unilaterally purge this protocol of the customs controls it establishes between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom, in defiance of London’s international commitments.
Undeniable successes
But Mr. Johnson also has undeniable successes to his credit. When the pandemic swept over the country, its government was ill-prepared, it underestimated the seriousness of the health crisis, belatedly decreed the first confinement and made the same mistakes as elsewhere in Europe: retirement homes were poorly protected, medical personnel lacked protection. The human toll, with well over 150,000 deaths attributed to Covid-19, is one of the heaviest in Europe.
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