On Thursday last week, Boris Johnson returned home from the NATO summit in Madrid after spending several days in the company of world leaders. At the previous G7 in Bavaria, speaking loudly enough for the camera to catch him, he joked: “Can we take off our clothes?” in purported response to an old shot of Vladimir Putin naked to the waist.
At NATO, he had at least tried to think long term, making a public pledge to raise defense spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2030. Yet his premiership ended a week later – until then the only military comment he would make did, was a private compared to a Japanese soldier who refused to surrender 29 years after World War II. The joke was extremely apt.
The remarkable disintegration of his premiership began the moment he left the NATO photocalls behind him. Chris Pincher resigned as deputy chief whip on the evening Johnson returned, following allegations that Pincher groped two men at the Carlton Club in Westminster. The story was bad enough, but what followed was a disastrous series of cover-ups, half-truths – and even the sense that Johnson thought the whole thing was a joke.
On Friday last week, Downing Street said first that the prime minister was not aware of any allegations against Pincher when he promoted him in February, then hours later that he was not aware of any “specific” allegations.
Yet even that proved inaccurate as more complaints against Pincher surfaced. Johnson’s former adviser Dominic Cummings, long waiting for the opportunity to deliver the final blow, suggested that Johnson had known all along and called his colleague “Pincher by name, pincher by nature”.
More incriminating evidence was forthcoming. On Tuesday morning, former senior Foreign Office civil servant Simon MacDonald said there had been a similar previous incident involving Pincher when he was a junior Foreign Office minister in 2019, and that Johnson had been “informed personally of the onset and the result of the investigation”.
Jason Groves, the political editor of the proto-Daily Mail, began today’s briefing for lobby journalists by asking the Prime Minister’s spokesman: “Are you going to tell the truth?” – prompting a somewhat embarrassed civil servant to reply that they had provided “the information I have on time of each meeting’.
Johnson toured the teahouses to try and salvage the situation. But as Conservative MP Gary Sambrook revealed at Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday, Johnson tried to blame everyone but the perpetrator.
According to Sambrook, Johnson said: “There were seven MPs at the Carlton Club last week and one of them had to try and intervene to stop Chris drinking so much.”
Sambrook was applauded when he called for him to resign, but by then it was clear that Johnson’s premiership was at an end – even if Johnson was the last to see it.
The night before, Sajid Javid and then Rishi Sunak resigned, releasing similar statements nine minutes apart that focused squarely on the issue of Johnson’s character.
“The British people rightly expect integrity from their government,” Javid wrote in a statement released at 6:02 p.m.
Sunak wrote: “The public expects the government to be run properly, competently and seriously.” The statements appeared to be coordinated, although both camps denied it.
The resignations of mostly junior ministers continued at breakneck speed on Wednesday, with the first coming as new chancellor Nadhim Zahawi was on a media tour in the morning and followed by Welsh secretary Simon Hart at 10.33pm. By midnight the final number of departures was more than 40.
It was an easy day for Keir Starmer. At Prime Minister’s Questions, the Labor leader read out a victim narrative of Pincher – “he slowly moved his hand down in front of my groin” – in the deliberate style of a prosecutor. Johnson then pressed why the former whip had been promoted in the first place.
From tea time officials began to gather in Downing Street, mostly to demand Johnson’s head and a handful to encourage him to stay. The Prime Minister saw them separately. Even Priti Patel, the usually loyal home minister, said she thought he could not continue.
It was expected that Johnson, after taking the temperature of his most senior colleagues, would conclude that it was game over, as Margaret Thatcher did a generation before. There was even an arranged telephone conversation with the Queen in the early evening. But, remarkably, Johnson concluded for a moment that he could keep fighting.
In a final show of frustration and a flexing of his waning power, he sacked Michael Gove from the Cabinet while Gove’s children and his ex-wife Sarah Vine watched Love Island. According to Vine, a columnist for the Daily Mail, Gove told her: “The Prime Minister rang me a few minutes ago and said it was time to step down. I respectfully said, “Prime Minister, if anyone should step down, it’s you.”
Downing Street said Gove had to go because “you can’t have a snake that’s not with you in any of the big arguments”. The Sun was told tonight that Tory rebels will have to “soak their hands in blood” if they want to oust a Prime Minister who won an election in December 2019.
A night’s sleep and the fight was over, although some were impatient. Michelle Donnellan resigned as education minister just before 9am on Thursday, after about 36 hours in the job. She told Johnson it was the only way to “force your hand.” If she had waited the whole math lesson, maybe she would have changed her mind.
With more and more resignation letters landing on the Downing Street doormat, officials stopped taking calls from journalists on Thursday morning, prompting the immediate suspicion that it was finally over.
Johnson apparently got up at 6 a.m. to write a resignation speech in which he would blame his departure on “herd instinct” rather than any particular misjudgment — about Pincher, or parties, or propriety.
The BBC’s new political editor, Chris Mason, was to tell the nation by calling from Downing Street live on Radio 4 just after 9am.
On his return to the microphone, with a guest slightly pushed aside, a cool Freemason said simply: “The Prime Minister has agreed to stand down.”
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