It's not hard to see why British Prime Minister Boris Johnson had to go, Thomas Coughlan writes. Photo / AP
OPINION:
NZ Herald senior political reporter Thomas Coughlan reports from London this week, where he has watched on as British PM Boris Johnson fell on his sword just six days after meeting with Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.
"Are you drowning in sleaze prime minister?" cried a member of the British press pack as Prime Minister Boris Johnson escorted Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern into 10 Downing Street last week.
Johnson very much was.
Throughout the week, the floodwaters rose higher and higher until, on late Thursday, Johnson's unkempt foppish mop disappeared below the tide - and he resigned.
It's not hard to see why he had to go; every corner of Downing Street, a warren of offices and accommodation done up with plush red carpets and brass fixtures like a chintzy 1980s hotel, drips with scandal: A lockdown party here, a lockdown karaoke there.
Johnson was finally toppled after his deputy chief whip Chris Pincher resigned following allegations he had drunkenly groped two men. That fact alone wasn't enough to get rid of Johnson.
Ministers were summoned to defend his handling of the incident in TV and radio interviews, but those ministers later discovered they'd been misleading in their defence of Johnson, and the information they'd been given about Johnson's handling of the incident was false.
It emerged that Johnson was personally aware of previous allegations against Pincher, and had appointed him to a prior post regardless. Johnson had possibly even used the joke that was apparently well known in Westminster: "Pincher by name, Pincher by nature".
Sleaze in a government is one thing, knowingly appointing sleaze is something else, and getting ministers to defend something you know to be false is an extreme test of loyalty - a test that proved to be too much for most of Johnson's ministry, who began resigning on Tuesday night.
First, it was senior ministers such as Chancellor of the Exchequer (the equivalent to our finance minister) Rishi Sunak and Health Secretary Sajid Javid. For two days they peeled away, most of them tweeting their resignation letters allowing the whole world to participate in their defenestration of the party leader. The letters came for days: First a trickle, then a torrent, until more than 50 members of his government resigned, some individually, others in groups of as many as five.
Even the trade envoy to New Zealand, sadly a very junior post, walked.
A day into the scandal, people Johnson had appointed to replace ministers who had resigned were themselves pressuring him to go. Suddenly the whole executive was gripped with a cyclical inertia as resignation replacements became resignees. Michelle Donelan, who Johnson had appointed to replace a resigning minister herself resigned less than 48 hours after she was appointed (long enough to claim a healthy severance).
Much like in New Zealand, the whiff of instability in the party leadership gave MPs the cover they needed to begin a furious briefing war against Johnson in the papers.
Quotes attributed to anonymous MPs and splashed across tabloid papers questioned whether Johnson, the "greased piglet", could wriggle out of this scandal, another noted he was "drowning", another, from a Cabinet minister, said ministers were "handing out cyanide pills".
All came to pass. Ministers took their metaphorical cyanide pills, and Johnson, the greased piglet, drowned in sleaze - to borrow the metaphors so visceral they demand to be mixed. Labouring the point, local TV host Piers Morgan opened his TV programme holding a live piglet, asking if anyone would "save [Johnson's] bacon?"
By Wednesday afternoon, discarded sheets from morning and evening papers were blowing around London papering the city in an inky defenestration of the prime minister. It was inescapable.
Disloyalty appears to have maddened Johnson, who won a thumping majority in the 2019 election, and some media have reported he was threatening to go to the polls and test his mandate with the people, rather than just his party.
But Johnson is as unpopular in the country as he is in his party. All countries are divided, and Brexit-riven Britain is divided more than most, but Johnson's conduct has meant that even Brexit-leaning parts of the country have abandoned him.
All of which makes an election threat doubly suicidal: Johnson would have lost his job, of course, but an election could see everyone else lose their jobs too - Labour is currently ahead in the polls.
The reddish area of South London where I was watching proceedings never liked Johnson to begin with, and took particular glee in his downfall.
Commuters streaming the feed from 10 Downing Street while waiting for their train hurled expletives at their phones as ministers scurried in and out of the famous black door.
"Look at him weaselling himself away, the w**ker," said one,
"What a t**t," said another, gleefully chugging his morning coffee.
It's been like this for days here.
At a West End show on Wednesday night, hands were enthusiastically thrust into pockets and handbags the second the lights went up, so eager were theatregoers to discover whether any fresh ministers had fallen on their swords.
Gossip over just who would next fall on their sword drowned out the usual post-theatre din of seat backs clapping back to attention, and tipsy punters loudly scraping melted Malteasers off their trousers.
"Is he gone?'
"Not yet"
"God, more resignations - how many now?"
… so the snatches conversation went.
The peculiarities of Tory party politics mean Johnson has been on some form of borrowed time for weeks since narrowly surviving a no-confidence vote almost exactly a month ago.
In the Tory party, a no-confidence vote can be triggered if 15 per cent of MPs write to the chairman of the backbench committee saying they have lost confidence in the leader. This is destabilising, because it's quite easy to get a narrative going about letters being sent to the committee, but it also means confidence votes are almost always taken too early to succeed. Getting 15 per cent of MPs to trigger a vote is very different from getting 50 per cent of MPs (+1) needed to win one.
Former Prime Minister Theresa May won her confidence vote, before Johnson toppled her anyway, and Johnson won his too, but not by enough to avoid being dispatched just weeks later.
In New Zealand, by contrast, MPs keen on rolling a National or Labour leader would tend to wait until they were confident of success. This makes the lead-up to a spill quieter and longer, and it makes the time MPs spend openly trying to destroy a leader far shorter.
One of the episode's unlikely victims is National Party leader Christopher Luxon, who is in London on his European tour. On taking the job in December, Luxon promised "no more House of Cards" politics in the National Party, Unfortunately for him, he appears to have found himself in the midst of something of a re-enactment of House of Cards in London: a nightmare from the whip's office, leading to the toppling of the prime minister.
Luxon was meant to meet one of Johnson's closest ministers, Michael Gove in London, but Gove yesterday urged Boris to step aside and was sacked in response. Luxon was able to meet May, the woman Boris effectively rolled. In photos released by Luxon's office, a usually dour May, with the BBC on in the background, appears elated, but one gets the impression it has little to do with meeting Luxon.
The Conservative Party has been in a state of uncertainty for weeks, knowing Johnson could not last long, fearful that he'd cling to power regardless, and uncertain over who would replace him.
Two of those scenarios have now played out (Johnson very clearly did not want to go, and in his resignation speech essentially called his critics out for being wrong for rolling him).
The question of who will replace Johnson is now beginning to be answered. A slew of names is in the mix.
One of the subtle fears is that a replacement might reopen the contentious Brexit dispute. Former Tory MP Michael Hesseltine, who played a part in toppling Margaret Thatcher (and who Johnson, weirdly and inexplicably part-models himself on - "a Brexity Hezza" is how Johnson once described his politics) said that when Johnson is gone, Brexit would go with him.
But it's not clear that's true. Of all the Tory hopefuls, even those who voted remain have pledged their support for Brexit. Labour leader Sir Kier Starmer this week gave a Brexit speech outlining Labour's plan to do Brexit better than Johnson, but the speech was very clear that Labour wouldn't be changing its position not to tear up Brexit by wearing Johnson's "hard" Brexit settlement and would not lead the UK back into the EU.
In the way Thatcher once said centrist Tony Blair was her greatest success, Johnson could equally claim the fact that every credible candidate for leader or prime minister is wedded to his Brexit policy is his great political legacy.
This scandal will rumble on for days and possibly weeks, if Johnson sees out a transition period like he wants to. Despite Johnson's resignation on Thursday, still more letters arrived, This time not from a minister, but from former Prime Minister Sir John Major, saying Johnson should not stay on as caretaker and urged him to leave as soon as he could to ensure a smooth transition.
One report has it that one reason Johnson is keen to stay on longer is that he and his wife Carrie have a massive wedding bash planned at Chequers, the prime minister's country house - one last, symbolic party to end a leadership defined by them.
It's an ignominious end to a prime minister who so nakedly styled himself after Winston Churchill (to the point Johnson even published a saccharine popular biography of Churchill that attempted to almost algorithmically distil Churchill's successes into the deployment of something Johnson called "the Churchill factor").
Instead, pundits were quick to note Johnson's premiership will only just surpass that of Churchill's great rival Neville Chamberlain, who lasted 1077 days.
Johnson cut a denialist Chamberlain-ish tone outside Downing Street yesterday, saying he would have been able to come from behind and win the election, that he had a mandate to continue, that he had reset relations with Europe.
It was all very "peace in our time".
The steely peel ringing out over Whitehall of Johnson's rivals sharpening their knives for the forthcoming leadership contest suggests any prospect of peace in the Tory party is no more likely now than European peace in Chamberlain's time.
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