An angry and aggrieved ex-leader attacks the institutions he once led for accusing him of breaking the rules and lying to them. His allies are whipping supporters against what they call a witch hunt. A country watches nervously, worried that this flamboyant, rule-breaking figure could cause lasting damage.
There are obvious parallels in the political storms convulsing Britain and the United States, but also stark differences: Former President Donald J. Trump faces federal criminal charges while Boris Johnson was tried as a deceiver for attend parties And yet the British Conservative Party has regularly clashed with Mr. Johnson, while the Republican Party is still largely in thrall to Mr. trump
Conservative UK lawmakers form the majority on a committee that found Mr. Johnson, a former prime minister, had deliberately misled Parliament about the gridlock-breaking parties in Downing Street during the coronavirus pandemic. According to them, the conduct of Mr. Johnson would have warranted a 90-day suspension from the House of Commons had he not pre-emptively resigned his seat in protest last week.
On Monday, the House of Commons will vote on whether to accept or reject the committee’s findings. The government said it would not pressure Tory lawmakers to vote one way or the other. This creates a possible repudiation of Mr. Johnson by his party that could go far beyond the token number of Republican lawmakers in the House of Representatives who voted to impeach Trump in 2019 and 2021.
Even before Monday’s vote, Mr. Johnson by his conservative colleagues on the privileges committee was surprising. Not only was it a stinging rebuke of a popular, albeit questionable, politician, but it was also a clarion call for the restoration of truth as a fundamental principle in a democracy.
“The outcome is much worse than expected,” said Kim Darroch, a former British ambassador to Washington, who noted that the committee was expected to recommend a 30-day suspension at most. “Its seriousness suggests that the committee had a wider purpose in its decision: to reaffirm the fundamental importance of truth in British politics.”
“There is a read through situation in the US,” said Mr. Darroch, observing the fierce debates about truth in American political discourse.
While a few Republicans, such as former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey and Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, have called Trump out on his misstatements, many more have remained silent, implicitly or explicitly accepting his false claim that he won the 2020. presidential election, for example.
So far, the multiple accusations of Mr. Trump still hasn’t shaken most Republicans from their support for him. His arraignment this week on charges of mishandling classified documents and obstruction of justice prompted fresh cries from Republican leaders like House Speaker Kevin McCarthy that President Biden was “weaponizing” the Justice Department to go after his enemies politicians
Mr. Johnson has leveled similar charges against the committee. In a vitriolic statement after his report was made public, he said: “This decision means that no MP is free from revenge or expulsion on false charges by a small minority who want to see him out of the Commons.”
The language was vintage Trump, if dressed in an English accent. The committee’s report, stated Mr. Johnson, it was “rubbish”, “mess” and a “full load of guts”.
He accused a senior Conservative backbencher, Bernard Jenkin, of breaking lockdown rules by attending a meeting to celebrate. a birthday And he veered off into obscure personal taunts, describing one of the report’s claims as “an argument so well-worn it belongs in one of Bernard Jenkin’s nudist camps”.
“This is all straight out of the Trump playbook,” said Frank Luntz, an American political strategist, who noted that Mr. Trump had influenced the language of other world leaders. “He is condemning the messenger, like Trump in the US, Netanyahu in Israel and Bolsonaro in Brazil.”
Mr. Luntz, who met Mr. Johnson when they were students at Oxford University, said he was surprised that Mr. Johnson had resorted to this language. Mr. Luntz has long resisted comparisons of Mr. Johnson and Mr. Trump, saying that “Boris has written more books than Trump has read.”
But after spending two days this week in Parliament, Mr. Luntz said his overriding sense was that Mr. Johnson had little support and most conservatives simply wanted to put the drama behind them.
Very few conservatives have taken up Mr. Johnson of a political revenge. Many pointed out that not a single lawmaker tried to block his referral to the privileges committee in April 2022, when questions about the veracity of his statements in Parliament about parties had reached a crescendo.
The committee reflects the party balance in the House, with four members from the Conservatives, two from the opposition Labor Party and one from the Scottish National Party. By tradition, it is chaired by a member of parliament from the main opposition party, in this case Harriet Harman, to whom Mr. Johnson charged that he had “the sole political aim of pleading guilty and expelling me from Parliament”.
Unlike Mr. Trump, whose personal attacks often go unanswered, the committee attacked Mr. Johnson. It accused him of “challenging the commission and therefore undermining the democratic process of the House” and “being complicit in the campaign of abuse and attempted intimidation of the commission.” Plan a special report on the behavior of Mr. Johnson during the investigation.
Although Mr. Johnson delivered a landslide majority for the Conservatives less than four years ago, and remains popular in some conservative quarters, he has never had the kind of iron grip on the party that Mr. trump
In September 2019, conservative rebels staged an uprising, blocking his plan to withdraw from the European Union without a deal with Brussels. Last summer, Mr. Johnson was forced to resign as prime minister after the full resignation of members of his government, amid allegations of Downing Street parties and sex offenses by a senior Tory official.
But not until this week Mr. Johnson has faced a reckoning for what his critics say is a career, first as a journalist and later as a politician, built on bending the facts and gleefully ignoring the rules. For those who know Mr. Johnson for a long time, the sense of satisfaction was palpable.
“It’s the first time it’s finally been discovered,” said Sonia Purnell, who worked with Mr. Johnson in the Brussels office of the Daily Telegraph in the 1990s and wrote a critical biography of him. “Had he not been caught today, this would have been almost a death blow to British democracy.”
