The challenge now for Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party, U.K. politics, and weary members of the British public is to understand who—and what—may come next.
on red, embossed Treasury notepaper that he had simply taken the job out of loyalty to the country, to ensure his department could “continue to function through a national crisis,” but Brits needed a government that “acts with integrity.
” Johnson, he admonished, should “go now.” Zahawi is, dear reader, yet considered one of the front-runners to succeed Johnson as prime minister. Some of the others are also Johnson loyalists—or at least they were before the political winds changed enough for them to trash him publicly. Some are self-styled “Brexit Spartans,” who never once saw fit to vote for the kind of agreement with the European Union that would prevent the country’s economy falling off a cliff. One ambitious pretender to the throne, a lawyer calledeven went on national television Wednesday night as the country's sitting attorney general to discuss Johnson’s future. Sheshe was “proud of what he’s achieved,” but that Johnson’s “time has come.” Then with a patently affected ponderousness, she answered a question about her own willingness to compete for Britain's premiership. “I’ll be straight with you, Robert. Yes. I will,” she told the interviewer,to “put my name into the ring,” apparently unaware that this particular metaphor typically involves hats. During the last Conservative leadership contest, from which Johnson emerged as victor, Brexit was by far the most contentious area of policy dispute. Today, Britain faces other no-less-complex crises, including sky-high energy prices and rampant inflation. As former cabinet minister and longtime Johnson criticin an email, “We desperately need someone who is not just about campaigning but who can govern well—who shows humility and critical thinking and above all honesty.” This would seem to require a seriousness of purpose and focus that have eluded Johnson in recent days, and his reputational implosion may well affect all those would-be candidates that have remained so long in his orbit—particularly the cabinet members that still sat close around him in Parliament as recently as Wednesday. Any new British leader will also doubtless seek to continue supplying military and financial support to war-torn Ukraine, as it fights to retake Russian-occupied territory, including the Crimean peninsula. It was there that a previous calamity involving Russia befell Britain, during a now infamously disastrous 19th-century military action by a cavalry regiment, called the Charge of the Light Brigade. Yesterday in Parliament, Johnson’s chief political opponent, Labour party leaderat the “Z-list of nodding dogs” that surrounded Johnson, despite his eminently imminent downfall, and cheerfully denigrated their inexperience as they scowled back at him. This group represented, he said to laughter across the House of Commons, “the charge of the lightweight brigade.”
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