LONDON — Less than three weeks after announcing his resignation, and with rumored to be planning a comeback, scandal-stricken British Prime Minister Boris Johnson received the kind of self-care advice best given by a relative.
“If you ask me,” Rachel Johnson, the Prime Minister’s sister, recently said on LBC Radio:where she hosts a talk show, “I’d love to see my brother rest and write and paint and just regroup and just, you know, see what happens.”
Little chance of that.
Mr Johnson, who still serves as interim prime minister, has barely retreated into the background. He recently posed in a fighter jetthan on a military base where he threw a hand grenade, used a machine gun and held a rocket launcher during an exercise with Ukrainian troops.
And on his last appearance in Parliament as Prime Minister, Mr Johnson’s verdict of his three tumultuous years in Downing Street was “mostly his mission accomplished for now,” before signing off with words from a “Terminator” movie: “Hasta la vista , baby.”
But as a lover of the Terminator franchise, Mr. Johnson from sue.
“He’s not the kind of person to give up and go away to live a quiet life in a nice house in the country and do a good job for the local church,” said Andrew Gimson, who will soon be publishing a second volume of his biography. . from Mr Johnson.
“You don’t really get to the top unless you’re already pretty unnaturally competitive, so it would be really amazing if he just disappeared into private life.”
The fall of Boris Johnson, explained
Unrest in Downing Street. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he would resign less than three years after a landslide election victory, following a string of scandals that have ensnared his government. This is what led to this:
While a return to Downing Street may be unlikely, Mr Johnson, with his outsized political profile, knows how to keep his name in the headlines. That may not be good news for his successor.
Writing in The Times of London, William Hague warned of the potential for Mr Johnson to “articulate a bundle of resentment, denial, attention-seeking and attempted justification that will be a permanent nightmare for the new Prime Minister. ”
Downing Street has said nothing publicly about Johnson’s future, although his allies reject Hague’s comments. They expect Mr Johnson to remain in parliament and speak out on any dilution of his strong commitment to Ukraine, any significant shift on Brexit or a reversal of his still murky plan to ‘increase’ the prosperity of neglected regions .
Despite the scandals that led to his resignation, he retains a strong clique of supporters in the right-wing media and among his party members who will elect the new leader. Mrs. Truss’ backers have tried to exploit this loyalty, accusing Mr. Sunak – whose resignation marked the start of the unraveling of Mr. Johnson’s job security – of betraying the prime minister. A minister, Nadine Dorries, recently retweeted an image of Mr Sunak in the pose of Brutus about to stab Julius Caesar in the back.
And a seemingly doomed campaign to keep Mr Johnson in Downing Street via a petition signed by thousands of Conservative Party members is helping to validate his theory – put forth when he announced his resignation – that his lawmakers acted irrationally by the man. who had brought them out to force victory 2019.
“As we have seen in Westminster, the herd instinct is powerful and when the herd moves, it moves,” Mr Johnson said in his resignation speech, suggesting that his Conservative colleagues in Parliament were simply succumbing to the political survival instinct of the following the crowd.
Mr Johnson showed little remorse or self-reflection about the mostly self-inflicted wounds that led to his downfall.
Robert Ford, a professor of political science at the University of Manchester, said the prime minister believes in his heart that it is possible for him to return to Downing Street one day because he has defied all odds before.
“He has believed throughout his political life that he is someone special, that he can achieve things that others cannot and that he is someone for whom the normal rules do not apply,” he said, pointing to the numerous comebacks of the Mr Johnson of past misfortunes.
Professor Ford said comparisons to former President Donald J. Trump are inaccurate because Mr Johnson ultimately accepted the process that led to him being impeached.
“But where the Trump analogy applies is: first, in Boris Johnson rejecting the idea that everything that happened this year is his fault; and second, in his very intense desire to put him back in the spotlight,” said Professor Ford.
Aside from any remaining political ambitions, Mr. Johnson is not short of options to make a living. He must complete a biography of William Shakespeare, the prospect of lucrative appearances on the international lecture circuit and possibly even the lure of journalism. (He is a former columnist for The Daily Telegraph).
If he is to remain a force in politics, Mr Johnson’s first task will be to retain his seat in Parliament.
The political situation in Great Britain
After being mired in several scandals, Boris Johnson said he would resign as Britain’s prime minister, paving the way for a new leadership race within the Conservative Party.
A committee is investigating whether he misled lawmakers about party-breaking in Downing Street and, if things go badly for Mr Johnson, he may have to fight an election to keep his seat later this year.
Nor is it certain that he would keep his seat in the next general election unless the lot of his conservatives improves, so there is speculation that he may be looking for a safer district.
As for a possible return to Downing Street, Mr. Gimson that Mr. Johnson’s “the greatest chance of coming back is when the nation is in a desperate predicament and he is considered the only figure big enough and bold enough to handle it.”
Some previous prime ministers have made a comeback, including Winston Churchill, Johnson’s political hero.
But Mr Johnson’s job would be more difficult because – unlike Churchill – he has lost leadership of the Conservative Party and would have to regain it for a second attempt at Downing Street. Conservative lawmakers seem unlikely to risk a repeat of his chaotic administration.
Either way, said Professor Ford, with a ready platform in the right-wing media, Mr Johnson will enjoy trouble rather than play the supportive elder statesman.
“He takes no personal responsibility for his impeachment, and he doesn’t think he should have gone,” said Professor Ford. “He does think he has a people’s mandate and a special electoral appeal that his colleagues can’t match.”
And the question remains: does Mr Johnson – who has a long history of depreciating his doubters – acknowledge deep down that it really is all over this time?
‘I doubt it,’ said Mr Gimson, his biographer, ‘I think he has accepted that he will be out in the short term. But that’s short term and he’s an optimist by nature.”