Are The Cults of Johnson and Brexit Finally Imploding?

Is it curtains for one of the most colourful characters in British political history?

Boris Johnson via Wikimedia Commons

Brexit and Boris Johnson.

It’s practically impossible to separate one from the other.

Why I hear you ask?

Brexit was Boris Johnson’s project.

It was he who brought Brexit to life; even though the leave campaign during the 2016 referendum had Nigel Farage, Michael Gove, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Peter Boone and Bill Cash, it was Johnson’s galvanizing presence in the leave campaign which swung the vote in favour of those who wanted to exit the European Union.

And when David Cameron’s successor — Theresa May — was having great difficulty in making Brexit official, her party went into default mode by defenestrating her and bringing the one man they thought could walk on water.

The decision by the parliamentary Conservative party to go for Johnson in June 2019, will be seen by generations to come as the biggest single game changer in British politics.

Once ensconced in Downing street, our man set about purging the moderates from the Tory party and lying to the head of state in order to prorogue parliament, thus clearing the way for the hard right to fully take over the ruling party.

The cult of Boris Johnson over the British public was confirmed by the time the 2019 general elections took place which handed him an 80 seat majority.

This mandate gave him what his predecessors lacked: carte blanche to implement the sort of the Brexit he wanted.

And this was how hard Brexit came about.

Hard Brexit meant that we left the EU and the single market without any thought given to thousands of businesses whose survival was contingent on being in Europe.

And the consequences of hard Brexit are there for all to see: the slowest economic growth among the G7 nations; the talent exodus from the UK to France and not forgetting the huge divorce bill from our decision to leave the EU.

But what’s of note here is that Boris’s time as the nation’s premier was ended not by the fallout from Brexit but by his personal misdeeds.