“They broke the law and are in disgrace. Whatever they do now, shame will cling to Johnson and Sunak”. With those words, Polly Toynbee, a Labor columnist for the British daily “Guardian”, described on Tuesday the 12th in an opinion article the crisis that the British Prime Minister is going through, Boris Johnson, and the head of the Treasury, Rishi Sunak. Both politicians are under extreme pressure again this week over police fines for violating lockdown rules imposed by their own government during the pandemic.
The scandal of the ‘partygate‘ has struck a deep chord in the United Kingdom. The outrage revolves around the attendance of public officials at illegal parties in Downing Street during the quarantine, at a time when cases of COVID-19 they were far from being controlled and when millions of citizens were prohibited from meeting with their loved ones and even attending the funerals of their deceased.
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Own Johnson attended a June 19, 2020 Cabinet Office party for his 56th birthday, allegedly hosted by his wife Carrie, who was also fined.
In addition to the rejection of his actions, the revelation of the fines applied to Johnson and his entourage put the prime minister in check once again as they made the conservative leader the first active head of government in the United Kingdom to be punished for breaking the law.
The fines revived a latent crisis for the government, and the opposition reacted by calling for Johnson’s immediate resignation. However, the conservative leader refuses to leave office.
“Obviously, this weakens him quite a bit, plus he was already being questioned enough within his own party. Of course there are people from the Conservative Party who want to knock him down and also from the opposition. However, they still don’t have enough strength to do it and he doesn’t want to give up.”, international analyst Francisco Belaúnde tells El Comercio.
According to British media, the fines that the prime minister and his wife have already paid amount to 50 pounds each (60 euros).
Leave office?
For Enrique Banús, director of the Institute of European Studies at the University of Piura, being fined represents an important loss of prestige for Johnson. However, he points out that the facts for which he was sanctioned were already known, and what he unexpectedly added to the case is the sanction. The big question is what will happen now with the immediate future of the prime minister.
“Any other character in any other country, for much less, should have already resigned, but the case of Boris Johnson is very particular. The other minister who has also been sanctioned and who is also a man of confidence for Johnson has not even resigned”, he tells this newspaper.
The expert believes that Johnson is allowed much more than any other politician because he has a reputation for being eccentric and special. “With that, he got votes. That’s a very British phenomenon, that eccentricity sells”, adds Banus.
The fine was the result of months of police investigation into parties violating lockdowns at government offices, something Johnson initially denied, saying there were no parties and that he believed rules were not flouted.
Although the political opposition as a whole has called for the resignation of Johnson and Sunak, the conservative leader is in a relatively safe position since he has the support of his deputies -whose vote is key to achieving his exit or permanence-, who defend that he it is time to change leadership, at a time when the war is being waged in Ukraine.
“Morally, the behavior was already punishable and has already been punished. I don’t know if now the indignation is going to rise so high as to force Johnson’s party to force him to resign, because if someone is going to force him, it will be his party, not the opposition”, says Banus.
He adds that the opposition has to try to make this work in their favor. “But it seems that it is not enough, the only issue would be if your party decides that it is unacceptable and it seems that it is not, at least for now”.
The war factor
Unlike when the scandal broke out, at the end of 2021, Johnson is hardly questioned by conservative parliamentarians today, mainly due to the international situation.
The leader of the “Tories” in Scotland, Douglas Ross, who in the past has been one of the prime minister’s biggest critics, declared that “it would not be correct” to dismiss the chief executive in the midst of the war in Ukraine.
“My position remains that the fact that the Prime Minister misled the House of Commons is very serious, but we are in the midst of an international crisis and I am not about to give Russian President Vladimir Putin the consolation of thinking that we are going to kick out the prime minister of the uk”, said, for his part, the deputy Roger Gale.
Francisco Belaúnde considers that it is evident that the war in Ukraine is helping Boris Johnson to stay in power.
“The United Kingdom is a very important country in supporting Ukraine, it is a country that is giving it intelligence, anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles, now even missiles that would allow it to attack ships. The Ukraine thing has served Johnson and perhaps even saved him, because without the war in Ukraine he probably would have fallen”, says the expert.
It also highlights that the issue of Ukraine has helped many rulers to win elections, as has happened in Hungary and Serbia, with the re-election of Viktor Orbán and Aleksandar Vucic, respectively.
Banús is pronounced along the same lines. For the professor, the war in Ukraine works in Johnson’s favor because any change in government creates a time of instability until everything is reconfigured again, which creates an undesirable scenario in times of conflict.
“There is a general perception that in times of crisis it is better not to make many changes or to put in a new team that probably will not have all the capacity to react. That certainly plays in favor of Boris Johnson and protects him.”, he adds.
Source: Elcomercio