After months of drama, accusations, and apologies in Parliament and at 10 Downing Street, word began to leak out over the weekend that Boris Johnson was finally going to face a vote of no confidence in the legislature, possibly ending his tenure as Prime Minister. This morning, Conservative Party leader Graham Brady announced that he had received a sufficient number of letters from members of his party to trigger the vote. Not wasting any time, the vote will be held this evening. This has nothing to do with Ukraine or the British economy, of course. It’s still all about Partygate and Bojo’s flouting of the COVID lockdown rules that he imposed on the rest of the country. But the tight-lipped leadership of the Tories isn’t giving much of an indication as to how the vote will go.
If Johnson loses the vote among the 359 Conservative lawmakers, the party will choose a new leader, who will also become prime minister. If he wins, he can’t face another challenge for a year under current party rules.
While Johnson has weathered many political storms, he has recently struggled to turn the page on months of ethics scandals, most notably over rule-breaking parties in government buildings during COVID-19 lockdowns.
Revelations that the prime minister and his staff repeatedly flouted restrictions they imposed on Britain in 2020 and 2021 have fueled outrage in the country at the scandal known as “partygate.”
Parliament operates quite differently than the United States Congress in most matters. In America, you rarely see a vote called by the Senate Majority Leader or the Speaker unless they know they have the votes to get their bill over the finish line. The exceptions to that practice generally only happen when they are trying to pin members of the other party to a vote they believe will be unpopular in the next election.
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The no-confidence vote in the Parliament doesn’t even involve the minority Labour Party. This vote will be conducted solely among the Conservative Party members. To trigger the vote, Graham Brady had to receive letters from 15% of the party’s group in the House of Commons, adding up to 54 members. All Brady has said publicly is that the 15% threshold had been met, but there is no definitive indication as to whether or not 180 votes exist to remove and replace Johnson as Prime Minister.
Some of the comments coming out in the press, however, suggest that many of the Tories are less upset about the actual Partygate affair than they are with BoJo’s failure to follow British traditions. When a Prime Minister is found to have violated the law in any way, they are expected to resign in disgrace without the need to be forced out. With the release of the recent report finding Johnson and his staff to have violated his own rules and the issuance of a small fine against him, many expected that he would simply grab his hat and head for the exits. Johnson has continued to refuse to do so.
Imagine for a moment if similar traditions were observed in the United States. The governor’s mansion and most of the state legislature in California would look like a ghost town. Gavin Newsom and more state legislators than you could count have regularly been photographed flouting the facemask mandates that he imposed on the rest of the state’s citizens. BoJo’s Partygate looks mild by comparison when you consider the Wine Bar debacle, as well as the NFL playoff games. In America, “do as I say, not as I do” is a practice so common that it often doesn’t even merit a mention in the news. In Great Britain, they would all have been sent home, hanging their heads in shame.
Normally, I would offer a prediction here as to how the vote in Parliament will go later today and whether or not Johnson will still be residing at 10 Downing Street tomorrow. But I honestly don’t have a sense as to how this will unfold. The Tories have obviously been irked by many of Johnson’s antics and he’s very unconventional in terms of traditional Britsh politics. But he’s also led his party to a lengthy run in the majority and a number of legislative successes. Without a clear successor waiting in the wings, the Conservative Party may decide to simply cluck their tongues at BoJo and condemn his scandals, but allow him to keep his job if he agrees to apologize yet again for the parties.
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