Earthquake at the heart of British politics. Boris Johnson, former prime minister and Tory leader triumphant of the elections at the end of 2019, fallen between scandals and internal revolts last summer, announced last night suddenly also his resignation with immediate effect as an MP: triggering a crisis that threatens to invest the very survival of the government of Rishi Sunak, his successor, former finance minister and now internal adversary.
The farewell to the seat in the House of Commons was motivated in a long and furious open letter made public in the evening by the main architect of Brexit; letter in which BoJo, controversial and divisive to the last, explicitly pointed the finger at the current executive and the political direction impressed on his party by Sunak, as well as on the Labour opposition and on the investigations opened in recent months against him for the so-called Partygate scandal of gatherings organized in Downing Street during his mandate in suspected violation of the anti-Covid restrictions then in force.
Johnson informed in the text that he had received in these hours the final report of the bipartisan parliamentary committee in charge of assessing whether he had lied to the House at the time, at the dawn of that scandal. A report of substantial condemnation, according to him the "shameful prejudice" with which the commission would have been conducted by its chair, Harriet Harman, a veteran Labour MP. "I did not lie, and I believe that in their hearts the committee knows perfectly well - wrote the former prime minister referring to the members of the commission - that when I spoke to the Commons I was saying what I sincerely believed was true". But they are still determined to try to "push me out of Parliament" in an "anti-democratic" way. Epilogue that Johnson - far from resigned to return to the shadows after the ups and downs of a political career passed through countless controversies and rebirths in the path from mayor of London to Prime Minister of Her Majesty - evidently does not intend to suffer. And who prefers to fall in the first person, slamming the door "at least for now", as he does not fail to emphasize. And leaving vacant that constituency of Uxbridge, at the gates of the capital, which at the moment, polls in hand, the Conservative Party of the 'traitor' Sunak risks losing.
The excerpts of the resignation letter are not only directed against the commission led by Harman (or against the senior official Sue Gray, who transferred weapons and luggage to perform functions as chief of staff of the number one of the Labour opposition Keir Starmer a few months after having in turn investigated from within Number 10 on Partygate). But also against the same Tories and the orientations of the prime minister who in recent months - after the ephemeral parenthesis of Liz Truss - has managed to replace him against the background of a ruthless internal feud. The majority "I won" three and a half years ago, he denounced, "the largest majority (Tory) in half a century, is now clearly at risk".
Blame in his words a new leadership that has given up on "cutting taxes", shelved "too easily" the negotiations for a post-Brexit free trade agreement with the US and would "urgently need to regain confidence in what this country can do". As well as "demonstrating how to get the best out of Brexit through a pro-growth and pro-investment agenda". A full-blown challenge, but also a nuclear attack on the authority of Rishi Sunak, brought a few hours after the incumbent premier had approved his honorary list of appointments and decorations of loyalists rewarded as outgoing head of government in a reduced form: and without the inclusion of praetorians such as the former Minister of Culture Nadine Dorries, She resigned as a Member of Parliament in protest. An attack whose shock wave will now have to be measured concretely in its effects on the government and legislature. But that could prove fatal.
While BoJo, cheered in recent months also by the international role played during the first phase of the Russian invasion of Ukraine - and by the all-round recognition he continues to receive from figures such as President Volodymyr Zelensky - shows, resignation aside, that he has no intention of retiring to private life. Much less to close oneself in silence.
