Today, Explained - Replacing Boris Johnson

Episode Date: July 26, 2022

Britain’s Conservative party is spending the summer choosing its next prime minister. The Atlantic’s Tom McTague introduces the candidates vying to replace him. This episode was produced by Miles Bryan with help from Victoria Dominguez, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Paul Mounsey, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained   Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Boris Johnson is out, kind of. He needs to be replaced. And now we know a bit more about our options. The two figures are Rishi Sunak, the man who helped bring down Boris Johnson by resigning as chancellor right in those sort of dying days. Did I disagree with him? Frequently.

Is he flawed? Yes. And so are the rest of us. And Liz Truss, Boris Johnson's foreign secretary, who didn't resign and who stayed, in her mind, loyal to the end. The Prime Minister has my 100% support. The next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, ahead on today's Play. Priced groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit Superstore.ca to get started. Today is gonna be explained to you. Every so often we hear at Today Explained reach out to Tom McTague from the Atlantic to ask about Boris Johnson.

Most recently, we reached out at the beginning of the year when no one quite knew if Boris Johnson would last another day or another week in office. Here's what Tom had to say then. So he goes from the guy who you quite liked breaking the rules because he was breaking the rules to socket to the Europeans, you know, and to stick up for the country. Suddenly he's breaking the rules that you're having to stick by. He's laughing at you now rather than at somebody else. And that's why I think it's suddenly flipped. That's the kind of the sort of tragic story of Boris Johnson's political demise. We reached back out to Tom to find out more about who might follow Boris Johnson, but also just to ask if that characterization you just heard was indeed what led to his recent and perhaps ultimate demise. Yes, absolutely. Boris Johnson is the man, the agent of chaos,

who whirled into British politics, chosen by the people to sweep away the kind of failures that had happened over the previous few years. But the same kind of agent of chaos just kept whirling in 10 Downing Street, causing scandal after scandal after scandal. And eventually it was just too much. And the Conservative members of Parliament decided to get rid of him. That's Boris Johnson in a nutshell, an agent of chaos that span out of control. Can we go through some of the scandals in order just to remind people what they were?

I mean, starting with Partygate, which feels almost quaint now that we're in this sort of do-it-yourself era of the pandemic. But this was about him breaking COVID restrictions, right? That's absolutely right. Will the Prime Minister tell the House whether there was a party in Downing Street on the 13th of November? No, but I'm sure that whatever happened, the guidance was followed and the rules were followed at all times. I said to my colleague Catherine West that there had been no such parties, and clearly he knew there had because he was there at one. The event lasted for a number of hours.

There was excessive alcohol consumption by some individuals. One individual was sick. There was a minor altercation between two other individuals. At the heart of it, that was something that nobody else was allowed to do. Sometimes when I explain the kind of the strength of the lockdown that Britain went through during the pandemic to Americans, it's always quite striking, you know, that we had some extraordinarily draconian rules that were introduced. You could only go out for an hour at a time at one point. And then you have the guy who's telling us we can't do all of this literally going around having drinks with his friends in number 10.

So that's the sort of the source of the fury. Firstly, I want to say sorry. And I'm sorry for the things we simply didn't get right. And also sorry for the way that this matter has been handled. Mr. Speaker, I get it and I will fix it. He manages to survive that scandal and then finds himself in another one over doing up his apartment. Is that right? He has an apartment in 10 Downing Street. All prime ministers get to use this apartment at the top of the building where they work. It's a little bit like, you know, the White House. They get a certain allowance to put their own tables and chairs in and change the wallpaper if they need to and all of that kind of thing just to keep it up to date. That's a reasonable system. But it wasn't enough

for Boris Johnson, even though Theresa May had only been Prime Minister for a little while and she'd put her own touch onto the apartment, decorating it in her own style. Boris Johnson comes along and he demands a complete remake of this. And he lavishes so much money on it that he can't pay it out of the official funds. You should know that I paid for Downing Street refurbishment personally, Mr. Speaker. This is Boris Johnson all over. It's not necessarily malicious, I don't think. He's just extraordinarily bad with money. Boris Johnson has earned lots of money in the past, but he's not a wealthy man. He's not a businessman. And really, he's had so many divorces and so many kids that he hasn't actually got that much money left. So when it turned out that he had to pay this extraordinary amount of money out of

his own pocket to try and fund his own refurbishment of his apartment that his wife wanted. He started looking around for people to fund it, and that's when it became a bit dodgy. Bills for tens of thousands of pounds are paid for by government department, then paid off by the Conservative Party, and they were then paid off by Tory donor Lord Brownlow. When ethics people got involved in this and said, hang on, this smells really bad, you know, why is somebody giving you all this money to do up your apartment? What are they getting in return?

All of these completely reasonable questions. Then the scandal started to build. Only when others get to hear about the secret payments does Boris Johnson get out his own chequebook to hear about the secret payments does Boris Johnson get out his own checkbook to settle up the redecoration bill. It was a kind of completely ludicrous scandal again for Boris Johnson, completely self-made, didn't get him anywhere and cost him a fortune personally. And then you come to scandal three after that, which was the straw that broke the camel's back. This is a story about a guy named Pinscher who may have been a groper, if I got it correctly?

Yes, that's very well put. Chris Pinscher, Deputy Chief Whip, the man in charge of welfare for Tory MPs, resigned from government last night in disgrace. On Wednesday night, he had been here, the Carlton Club, where he allegedly groped two men. And the problem was, there have been previous allegations against this member of parliament. When people then went to Boris Johnson and said, why did you promote this man who had had previous allegations against him of impropriety? Johnson said he didn't know about any of these previous allegations. Then a senior official in one of the government departments that Johnson used to run released a letter. Within the last

few minutes we've just been handed a letter which the former top civil servant at the Foreign Office has sent by email to the Standards Commissioner and it relates to Chris Pincher. It proved that he'd warned Boris Johnson about these previous allegations and Johnson had ignored them. Johnson then comes around and says, oh, I forgot that I knew about these allegations. It was something that was only raised with me very cursorily,

but I wish that we had, I in particular, had acted on it. That was it, really. That's the final thing where members of parliament just felt, we're just being told lies by this guy. You know, we've gone through all of these previous scandals, we've gone onto the TV and onto the radio defending him, being told one thing, repeating that thing, and then finding out, you know, weeks or even hours later that it's not true. And they just got sick of it. So he just about survived Partygate. And then over this, again, a pathetic, stupid lie, he gets caught and that's the end of him. And they just moved then en masse, Conservative MPs to declare that they didn't have confidence in him and just became too much. The tide swept him out of number 10.

It was rather dramatic. I mean, all of his ministers were resigning in this sort of waterfall. Two unexpected high-profile cabinet resignations, first from the Health Secretary, Sajid Javid, and then from the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, the man who lives next door. Both of them attacked Boris Johnson's leadership as they quit. All day, it felt at times like every ten minutes or so, Conservative MPs were sending letters saying the Prime Minister should go. Is it all over, Prime Minister? Going, going, surely nearly gone. That's the beauty of the British system in that it's this

unwritten constitution. So it's not like the American constitution where things are set and you can get rid of a president in this way and his replacement will be this person and that person. And it's all kind of ordered and neat. In Britain, it's very messy, but it can be brutally efficient. So a prime minister is only prime minister if they can command a majority in the House of Commons. If they can't command a majority in the House of Commons, they're done. They're not the prime minister anymore. I think if our discussions about this man have taught us anything, Tom, it's that he's got nine, maybe ten lives.

Do you think this is the last we've seen of Boris Johnson in British politics? I really am not sure because his famous last words now to the House of Commons as Prime Minister were, Hasta la vista, baby! which is obviously this nod to, I'll be back, essentially. I'll see you around. I'll see you another time. So he's saying that. He is clearly setting himself up. He is defending his position in his resignation speech, he sets out that, you know, my job was half done. I did what I said I was going to do. I had a mandate from the people.

I had a mandate from the Conservative Party members. And I've been removed because of, in his words, the herd mentality of members of Parliament who just kind of moved like sheep at one moment and took him out. But as we've seen at Westminster, the herd instinct is powerful. When the herd moves, it moves. So clearly he's setting himself up for, you know, at least keeping that option open in case the Conservative Party loses the next election under the new leader. And you can see it, right? You can see it right now.

The Conservative Party loses and he stands there and says, you would not have lost if you'd have kept me. You lost the faith. That was your mistake. We all look to the US and what's happening in the US. Donald Trump lost, but he still looks like he's got a very good chance of coming back. Boris Johnson hasn't even lost. So maybe that's going to happen. What, or rather who, comes next? Ahead on Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained.

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to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Today, today explain. Okay, Tom, for all those who are ignorant of how British politics works, what comes next? It does seem that Boris Johnson will, in fact, leave number 10 in the coming months? That's right. So Boris Johnson has resigned as the leader of the Conservative Party, and he stays on as prime minister until the Conservative Party elects a new leader. Once it elects a new leader, that person is in control of Conservative members

of Parliament and therefore is in control of a majority of members of Parliament. And therefore he or she becomes Prime Minister. They will go to the Queen, the Queen will ask them to form a government and that is what they'll do and Boris Johnson will disappear. That will happen early in September when the winner of the Conservative Party leadership contest is announced. And we recently found out who the two contenders are. The two figures are Rishi Sunak, the man who helped bring down Boris Johnson by resigning as Chancellor right in those sort of dying days. Did I disagree with him? Frequently. Is he flawed? Yes. And so are the rest of us. And Liz Truss, Boris Johnson's foreign secretary, who didn't resign and who stayed, in her mind, loyal to the end. The prime minister has my 100% support.

So you've got already a clear divide there between those who thought Boris Johnson wasn't fit for the job and Liz Truss who did. And what you're getting is essentially a split between the left and the right of the party. Now, it's quite ironic this, but Rishi Sunak has now become the kind of standard bearer of the moderate and left of the party, the centrist candidate. The most pressing economic priority for the new prime minister and the new government is to grip inflation. So I don't think the responsible thing to do right now is launch into some unfunded spree of borrowing and more debt. Even though he is a Thatcherite right winger in the traditional mold, who was a conservative when he was about 16, writing letters about how devastated he was that Tony Blair had won election and he voted to leave

the European Union. Despite all that, he now represents the kind of centrist candidate. And Liz Truss, who used to be a liberal, who once supported a motion to abolish the monarchy, who voted to remain in the European Union, is now the standard bearer of the right of the party. She is the tax-cutting, Reaganite, Thatcherite, pro-Brexit, sort of freedom-loving Brexiteer on the right. We have to recognise that we are in one of the worst global crises for a generation, the Covid crisis. And now is the time to think about how we do things differently. That's why I'm advocating tax cuts. So that is essentially the split. And that is going to be the argument now between the two of

them, alongside Rishi Sunak, who is saying, we must control inflation first and then move to tax cuts versus Liz Truss, who says, no, no, no, we need to cut tax now because people are struggling and we need to get growth going. And that is the argument that is now taking place. And the winner will take over the Conservative Party in September and become prime minister. So it sounds like either way, you do have something of a continuation of Boris Johnson's politics, if not a more professional political version of it? I think that's quite nicely put, because a lot of their fundamentals will not really change. You know, all the candidates support Brexit, even if they didn't

support it at the time. Even the Labour Party, the opposition party, is saying that it won't touch Brexit. Brexit has happened. Britain is not going back into the European Union. We're not going back into Europe's single market and its customs union and all of that infrastructure of the European Union that Britain left. None of that is happening. So within the Conservative Party, the consensus is in a way even deeper than that. Britain's place in the world, its support for Ukraine, its support for Brexit, its support for tax cutting measures, its support for this concept called levelling up, which is essentially to bring the north of England, that kind of industrial Rust Belt, if you like, up to the kind of same level of wealth as London and its surrounds. All of that is essentially the policies that all candidates will support.

What you are having, I think, fundamentally, is tension within the Conservative Party between the 2019 Boris Johnson election victory, where he won in areas of the country that are traditionally Labour strongholds. Now, that is the sort of contradiction at the heart of this Conservative Party leadership election. How do you maintain Boris Johnson's coalition of voters while doing something to win over these hardcore Tory members who want something quite different?

Is there a favourite in the race? Yes, right now Liz Truss is actually the favourite over Rishi Sunak and that is really because she has adopted this more hardline, conservative, sort of Thatcherite position. What we have to look at is the cost of illegal immigration, the cost to the United Kingdom, the cost to the individuals and their families who are suffering from the actions of these people traffickers. That's the issue that we are seeking to deal with. Whereas Rishi Sunak is having to own all of the measures

that he has taken since the pandemic to try and restore the public finances to some sanity. By 2024, the OBR currently expect inflation to be back under control, debt falling sustainably and the economy growing. You know, and you look back and Britain, just like the US, spent an extraordinary amount of money propping up the economy when it shut it down during the pandemic. You know, it essentially bailed out all the businesses. It put workers on what's called, you know, furlough here where businesses could keep the workers employed on 80 percent of the salary. And all of that would be paid for by the state. So for a long time, the state was paying most of the country to not work. And it is now trying to find a way to balance the books.

And Rishi Sunak was the man who had to do that. Now, anybody who puts taxes up is essentially unpopular, right? That is the sort of a golden rule of politics. Nobody wants to be the person putting up taxes. Read my lips. No new taxes. So you've got all of these pressures on the Conservative Party to balance the books, to pay people more. And really, they just something has to give give and Rishi Sunak is the one that's getting hit with this so he's got a bit of an uphill struggle to claw that back and win back support of the Conservative Party members but don't write him off because he's a very slick professional smart

operator who does also have a message which is if you unleash tax cuts too early, you will only stoke inflation. And once inflation starts to build, interest rates will go up and they will hit homeowners. And who are the fundamental Tory base in Britain? It's homeowners, middle class, middle aged homeowners who do not want to see their interest rates on their mortgage go up. So that is an interesting challenge between the two. But right now, trust is the favorite. And either way, it's a continuation, essentially, of Boris Johnson's administration. What does Boris Johnson end up in the history of UK politics? A success or a failure? It sounds like there's no way anyone's taking back Brexit. And

at the end of the day, he did pull that off, right? Yes, this is the challenge of trying to weigh up Boris Johnson. He, in some ways, leaves a legacy that is more consequential on British politics than almost any previous prime minister, even Thatcher included, because you can always cut taxes or raise taxes once the previous guys have been in, right? That's how it works. You know, if Thatcher manages to shrink the size of the state, Tony Blair can come along and grow the size of the state. And so that's something that is a problem for all prime ministers when they come to, when you come to weigh up their legacy. For Boris Johnson, it's quite simple. He took Britain out of the European Union. And it's very, very difficult to go back. And if Britain never goes back in, it's going back

in on completely different terms to what it had before. It'll have to renegotiate everything. And that is a stark, lasting legacy. For his supporters supporters it's obviously a great thing for his opponents it makes him the worst prime minister that we've had you know since the war um so that is the constant challenge but what i think both sides will agree on to some extent is that however however consequential he is, he threw it away for such absurd reasons. So pathetic were the scandals. So of his own fault, nothing about policy, nothing about anything major, you know, he was lauded for his support of Ukraine. He came through the pandemic having nearly died himself in the pandemic with his popularity high because Britain had a good vaccine rollout that he got some credit for. He had all of these things and he threw it away for party gate, for, you know, wallpaper gate, for all of these

absurd things that just revealed a kind of lazy character at the center of it. So you have to weigh up both of these things. And that's why he's such a confusing figure to try and cover. He's unlike all of the other prime Atlantic, based in London, England. Our episode today was produced by Today Explains' own Philadelphia bureau chief, Miles Bryan. He had help from Tori Dominguez and even more help from Matthew Collette, Laura Bullard and Paul Mounsey. I'm Sean Ramos from You Can Find Today Explained on Twitter at today underscore explained if you so choose. We're also available via email today explained at Vox dot com. Thank you.