Fortune Mag - Doris article27 May 2022 22:37
A rather sad read
https://fortune.com/2022/05/27/boris-johnson-survived-partygate-uk-politics-leadership-international-northern-ireland-international-marina-purkiss/
For centuries, Great Britain’s body politic has been held together by what historian, Peter Hennessy calls “the good chaps” theory of government.
The U.K. has long prided itself on the absence of a written constitution. Instead, we bumbled along in quintessentially British fashion with our unwritten code of convention–one that relies on the decency, morality, and self-restraint of those within its jurisdiction to keep political propriety in check.
And until now, it had more or less worked.
Enter Boris Johnson. A man who, in under two and a half years, has taken a sledgehammer to so much, slashing the value of what it means to be British. A man who signs international treaties with his fingers crossed behind his back with no regard for the consequences.
One such treaty is the U.K.’s Withdrawal Agreement from the EU, which included the delicate details of the Northern Ireland Protocol. The protocol was designed to protect the Good Friday Agreement by avoiding a land border on the island of Ireland. But it now transpires that Johnson deliberately overlooked the details in his quest to offer up the “oven-ready deal” that saw him win a landslide election in 2019.
In 2018, then-prime minister Theresa May said, “No U.K. PM could agree to the Brexit withdrawal text on Northern Ireland.” But Johnson is unlike any other PM.
With every week comes a new scandal. In April, we saw our prime minister fined for his COVID law-breaking, cementing his place in the hall of fame as the first-ever British PM to have officially broken the law.
Fast-forward to this week, and the British public has been confronted with newly released pictures of Johnson raising a toast at a No.10 party during the height of our second lockdown in November 2020. The law at the time forbade the mixing of more than two people indoors.
People died alone, funerals went ahead unattended, and elderly loved ones were abandoned–all in the name of following the lockdown laws that were announced by Johnson. Yet here he was, enjoying a “right royal knees up” at one of many lockdown parties that forced the investigation of the Metropolitan Police and subsequently led to No.10 being the most fined building in the entire country when it came to breaking COVID lockdown laws.
Back when good chaps were in charge, it would never have got this far.
Decency would have driven a leader to bow out after the very first COVID fine, so would lying to the Queen to prorogue parliament, or accepting Tory donor cash to refurbish his No.10 apartment.
Morality would have seen him step down after his absence of leadership landed our country, a small island, with one of the worst COVID death tolls in the world.
Self-restraint would have seen him concede that Brexit has been an unmitigated disaster: It slashed four per
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