UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson survives Conservative Party vote of no confidence

Published on: 06/06/2022 – 22:06 Despite the anger that rumbles after months of scandal, the British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, obtained, on Monday, the confidence of his majority in Parliament during a vote of the deputies conservatives. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson saved his post on Monday, June 6, by winning a vote of no confidence from his majority, from which he nevertheless risks emerging even further weakened.Two and a half years after his triumphant victory at the ballot box, the 57-year-old leader, increasingly challenged, has once again demonstrated his ability to get out of the most perilous situations. But he remains bogged down in the Partygate affair, the very drunken parties organized in Downing Street during the confinements, and Monday’s vote showed the deep divisions within the Conservative Party. It should leave traces. Of the 359 Conservative MPs who voted, 211 voted in favor of the former mayor of London, against 148 who wanted to oust him, a considerable group of rebels likely to paralyze government action. At the end of 2018, Theresa May had survived a motion of no confidence by a wider margin than her successor, before resigning a few months later, too fragile to lead. Boris Johnson has so far completely refused to resign. After weeks of speculation, events rushed on Monday morning, barely closed the festive parenthesis of the celebrations of the 70 years of reign of Elizabeth II. Conservative Party 1922 Committee Chairman Graham Brady announced that the fateful threshold of 54 letters from MPs, or 15% of the parliamentary group, calling for Mr Johnson to leave, had been reached, triggering the vote. defeat, an internal election would have been called to appoint a new leader of the party, who would have become head of government, in a delicate context of war in Ukraine and inflation at its highest for 40 years. Victorious, he cannot be targeted by another motion of no confidence for a year, under current rules. “The government can not do everything” Pleading his case to his troops before the vote, Boris Johnson had urged them to end a saga not interesting, according to him , that the media to “speak exclusively about what we are doing for the people of this country”, according to a Conservative Party official. Addressing their Thatcherite streak, he had dangled tax cuts and administrative cuts , cut nt with the massive public interventions of recent years in favor of the pandemic, or more recently of the crisis of the cost of living. “The time has come to recognize that sometimes the government cannot do everything”, he said. he hammered. These explanations, and the efforts made all day by his most loyal ministers on television, are far from having convinced everyone. After former minister Jeremy Hunt, considered a possible successor, the leader of the Conservatives in Scotland, Douglas Ross, had announced he would vote against Boris Johnson, citing public ‘anger’ over breaches of Covid rules. A majority of Britons want him gone despite mounting scandals and public anger and his majority, Boris Johnson has maintained himself in recent months by highlighting in particular his leading role in the Western response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He has also been favored by the absence of an obvious successor in the ranks of the Conservatives, who have been in power for 12 years in the UK, especially since Finance Minister Rishi Sunak’s star, long a darling of the party, abruptly tarnished due to his wealth and his tax arrangements woman, at a time of rising costs of living. Boris Johnson’s collapse in popularity has already dealt the Tories heavy setbacks in a local election in early May. The majority increasingly doubt the ability of “BoJo”, booed by the crowd during the Queen’s Jubilee celebrations, to win the 2024 legislative elections. Britons. According to a poll published by YouGov on Monday, 60% of Britons wanted the Tories to oust their leader – but only 32% of majority voters. The repercussions of Partygate are not over either. After the police and senior civil servant Sue Gray, another investigation is planned, this one parliamentary. If the latter concludes, a priori in the fall, that Boris Johnson misled the House of Commons by claiming not to have broken the rules, he is supposed to resign. With AFP