Like his friend Donald Trump, Boris Johnson is a sleazy, corrupt, liar who only cares about his pwn interests. They are both assisted by enablers who help them until things get too hot at which point some of the enablers abandon ship to advance their own interests or to salvage their reputations. The number of people in the Trump administration who fit this description are too many to count.
Johnson’s government was rocked yesterday by the simultaneous resignations of two senior cabinet members who in their letters said that they no longer had confidence in Johnson’s leadership after a series of scandals
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was dealt a huge blow on Tuesday when two of his top ministers announced their resignations, saying they could no longer work for a government mired in scandal.
Chancellor Rishi Sunak and [health secretary] Sajid Javid both announced they were quitting in letters posted to Twitter within minutes of each other on Tuesday evening.
“The public rightly expect government to be conducted properly, competently and seriously,” Sunak said in his resignation letter. “I recognise this may be my last ministerial job, but I believe these standards are worth fighting for and that is why I am resigning.”
Javid and Sunak were not the only ones to go on Tuesday.
Shortly the two quit their jobs, Conservative party vice chair Bim Afolami announced live on television that he too was resigning.
…Afolami called for Johnson to step down and then said he would also give his own resignation. “I think you have to resign because I can’t serve under the Prime Minister.”
Several other junior-ranking government officials also announced resignations later on Tuesday.
It has been one long series of scandals through which Johnson has insisted he will stay on.
The most immediate controversy facing Johnson is Downing Street’s handling of last week’s resignation of deputy chief whip Chris Pincher, who stepped down from his post last Thursday amid allegations he had groped two guests at a private dinner the night before.
Downing Street has struggled to explain why Pincher was in government in the first place, amid a wave of revelations about his previous alleged conduct, denying Johnson knew anything specific about the allegations.
On Tuesday, it emerged that a complaint had been made against Pincher in the Foreign Office about three years ago and that Johnson was briefed on what happened.
…[W]hile he managed to win the confidence vote, he suffered a further blow late last month when his party lost two parliamentary by-elections in a single night, raising new questions about his leadership.
…UK opposition leader Keir Starmer said it was “clear” that the government was “collapsing.”
“Tory cabinet ministers have known all along who this Prime Minister is. They have been his cheerleaders throughout this sorry saga. Backing him when he broke the law. Backing him when he lied repeatedly. Backing him when he mocked the sacrifices of the British people,” the Labour Party leader said in a statement released after the two resignations.
These resignations seem to be a coordinated attempt to bring Johnson down.
Sunak’s statement that “I recognise this may be my last ministerial job” is a bit of disingenuous posturing. It is an open secret that he has long been eying Johnson’s job. In the backstabbing culture of British politics, it is believed that Johnson, seeking to undercut a rival, was the one who earlier leaked to the media damaging information about Sunak’s wife taking advantage of a tax provision that enabled her to avoid paying UK taxes on her huge Indian income, and also that Sunak was the holder of an American green card. While both those things were legal, it was hardly a resounding sign of the couple’s commitment to the country that they reside in and claim to want to serve. The timing of the resignations may be Sunak getting both revenge on Johnson and advancing his ambitions.
Will Johnson now act like Trump does when people turn on him and say that he hardly knew them or that they were terrible at their jobs, even though he was the one who hired them?
Lots more ministers (although none of the prominence of Sunak and Javid) have now resigned -- most recently, five at once in a joint resignation.
Correction -- another has just gone. It would hardly be surprising to see him literally dragged out of No.10 kicking and screaming!
15 ministers have now gone since last night. Far from obvious Johnson can find replacements -- there must come a point at which even the most selfish and stupid Tory MPs realise there’s no point in jumping aboard a sinking ship.
Just heard this on the news; “A sinking ship deserting a rat”.
Mano, I am shocked and dismayed at your terrible insult to peas!
While there are some surface-level similarities, I don’t think Johnson and Trump are really all that alike. In this particular case, no, I don’t think Johnson will turn on his former colleagues and launch a childish series of smears against them. This is because Trump was motivated by an incredibly fragile sense of self-worth, and does everything he does to project an image of success and superiority. For Trump it is all about ego and self-aggrandisement.
Johnson is a very different character. He isn’t controlled by a sucking vaccuum of self-worth at the core of his being. Quite the opposite in fact -- he is a product of a system that has instilled in him an absolute sense of self-worth and self-confidence. Where Trump will do just about anything to feel loved, adored and valued by others, Johnson couldn’t care less what other people think of him, because he is so utterly comfortable in his own sense of superiority anyway. Indeed, when it comes to his public image, Johnson thinks nothing of manipulating it to achieve his own ends. He plays the clown to distract from his intentions, and puts on the facade of the bumbling incompetent posh boy to blunt the sort of harsh criticism that his fellow oily old Etonian David Cameron got for being the nasty aristocratic posh boy. For Trump image is the goal, for Johnson it’s a means to an end.
cartomancer has Johnson’s number alright. Trump projects an image because deep down he lacks self-esteem -- he knows, in his heart of hearts, that he’s stupid. Johnson knows, absolutely knows for certain, that he’s not. Stupid people don’t win Kings scholarships to Eton, for starters. His self-esteem is the size of a planet.
I don’t think so. What they are is an elaborate game of chicken, played exclusively by the Conservative party (manoeuvering does happen in Labour, the Lib Dems and others, but it takes different forms). Some of the rules are:
1. don’t be standing next to the leader when they are brought down, so make sure you’ve resigned before that happens, because the people associated closely with the leader will be non-grata once they’re gone.
2. BUT make sure you don’t resign too soon, because if you do that you won’t be at the front of the queue when the leadership election happens
3. BUT don’t resign too late, either, because there’s a risk you’ll be identified as THE ONE who brought down the leader, and there’s one thing the hypocritical twunts in the Tory party hate more than their newly ex-leader, it’s the backstabbing bastard who brought them down. See Michael Heseltine.
4. Ideally, you need to be professing loyalty right up until the moment you must, with regret, throw your hat into the ring now that the leader’s position has become untenable and they simply have to go. See John Major.
Of course, all the above are based on things operating by the normal rules, which is to say in an environment where the leader is a person with at least a trace of integrity, or at the very least, shame. Alexander Johnson could probably tell you the correct Latin AND Greek words for “integrity” and “shame”, but both concepts seem entirely alien to his character.
I’ predicted earlier today they’d take him out of No. 10 in a box, but that was back when the number of resignations today was two, not 17. So I’m predicting nothing -- beyond Johnson doing whatever he thinks is best for Johnson, and fuck the country, fuck the economy, fuck business, fuck the people, and especially and more than anyone else, fuck every single other Tory MP in particular.
Actually, I take it back: I shall make a prediction.
The Tories better be very, very careful, because while Johnson in No. 10 is a disaster, Johnson OUT of No.10, with nothing left to lose and (unlike Trump) absolutely no conceivable route back to power, could be the end of the party. There are a LOT of people out there who didn’t vote Tory, they voted Johnson -- they voted for the knockabout comedian they’d seen on the telly hosting Have I Got News For You and hanging off that zipwire over the Thames or something. When he goes, their votes go with him.
Also, here’s what ex-Tory PMs do, traditionally: they take a seat on the backbenches, quietly. They’re elevated to the House of Lords. They make occasional, judicious, considered, sensible suggestions to the press, usually only slightly critical of the current leadership. Overall, they’re sensible. Nobody who has ever seen Alexander Johnson do ANYTHING can possibly pretend that they can imagine him doing this. Ex-prime minister Johnson will be an absolute nightmare for anyone who follows him, quite possibly until the day he dies -- I’d go so far as to say even possibly after that. I’m sure he’d find a way to fuck up the people he doesn’t like from beyond the grave. He is, after all, as Comedy Genius Eddie Mair once called him to his face, on television “a nasty piece of work”.
It’s going to get a lot, lot worse for the Tories before it gets better, and simply stopping Johnson from being PM will not stop Johnson from being Johnson. In that he does have something in common with Trump -- losing could make his effect on the party even worse.
I do hope so.
Then again, I don’t trust the fucking thick as pigshit British electorate not to vote the Tories in again if they do get rid of him.
Two spelling errors in your Subject line. Should be “Two pees in a pot.”
Johnson sacks Gove and calls him a snake.
I think another difference is that the people who resigned in Trumps time went quietly and waited till Trump was out of office (for the most part) before any mild critique whereas atleast the evil Tories still seem to have some semblance of a spine (Can you imagine a third of Republicans saying they have no confidence in trump)-
On the other hand no Republican could hope to become the next president while Trump was around whereas some Tories seem to harbor those hopes.
Johnson is worse then Trump, because Trump is a result and consequence of deliberate policies and degradation of U.S politics over decades by Republican agency; he is a symptom, not a cause.
Johnson is a cause of corruption in the U.K -- which has always been corrupt, but at least within limits that Johnson has cast aside.
With so many running away from him, his time is up. The only question of import now seems to be; will, or won’t he, call for an election? It would be an effort to enlist popular support now the poltical elites and once allies have abandoned him.
He would campaign on being the champion of Brexit hoping to squeeze the last of popular support for that in his interests. But given he has over-seen the failure of deiivering benefits from Brexit that would be follyI think.
Perhaps England would have a better government if it formed one without any of those grubby Anglo-Saxon types in it…
Well, Johnson is to resign as party leader, today apparently, but will stay on as PM until the Autumn.
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/uk-politics-62072419
Can Modi and Bolsonaro be next, please?
@me, 6:
And now, Rishi Sunak.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/jul/09/rishi-sunak-tory-leadership-race-boris-johnson
“One senior No 10 official was quoted in the Financial Times as calling Sunak “a treacherous bastard””.
Bear in mind that less than one week ago this man was Chancellor of the Exchequer in Alexander Johnson’s government.
Further to point 3 in post#6,
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/sep/02/curse-of-heseltine-how-the-wheels-came-off-rishi-sunaks-no-10-campaign