The prime minister has resigned. But why now?
 | By Tim Schneider Staff Editor, Opinion |
After months of speculation and scandal, Boris Johnson has resigned as leader of the Conservative Party. While he hopes to continue as prime minister until the autumn, the fact is inescapable: The Boris Johnson era is all but over. |
The news is at once shocking and predictable, a curious combination of high drama and everyday attrition. From the moment stories emerged of partying during lockdown at 10 Downing Street, the prime minister's official residence, Johnson's grasp on power started to slip. And yet despite everything — a police fine, electoral defeats, a bruising independent inquiry, just scraping through a no-confidence vote — he clung on. It started to seem as if Johnson's departure would be forever just over the horizon. |
But now, all of a sudden, it's here. One of the strange aspects of Johnson's downfall is that the scandal that precipitated it — the prime minister handed a lawmaker an important job despite knowing about allegations of sexual misconduct against him — is, while bad, hardly the worst of the bunch. Why did this scandal, now, bring about his end? |
Martha Gill, a British political journalist, has an answer. "It seems odd," she writes in a guest essay today, "but what may in fact have brought down Mr. Johnson was not a scandal but an apology." |
It was, Gill suggests, Johnson's decision to apologize for the latest scandal that finally emboldened many of his previously loyal colleagues to move against him. For a politician so committed to brazening it out, whose "bluster and bullishness seemed to transcend every rule of political practice," could the biggest miscalculation have been to say sorry? |
Facing the winter of his political life, Johnson will soon have plenty of time on his hands to reflect on the question. |
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