LONDON: British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was fighting to shore up his premiership on Wednesday amid a revolt by his own lawmakers who are angry over a series of lockdown parties in Downing Street.
Propelled into the top job to “get Brexit done”, Johnson in 2019 won his party’s biggest majority in more than 30 years but now faces calls to resign after a series of revelations about parties in the prime minister’s home and office during COVID lockdowns.
Johnson has repeatedly apologised for the parties and said that he was unaware of many of them. However, he attended what he said he thought was a work event on May 20, 2020. To trigger a leadership challenge, 54 of the 360 Conservative MPs in parliament must write letters of no confidence to the chairman of the party’s 1922 Committee.
As many as 20 Conservative lawmakers who won their seats at the last national election in 2019 plan to submit letters of no confidence in Johnson. A handful of others have already said they had written such letters. eading rivals within the Conservative Party include Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak and Foreign Secretary Liz Truss.
Toppling Johnson would leave the United Kingdom in limbo for months just as the West deals with the Ukraine crisis and the economy grapples with the inflationary wave triggered by the COVID pandemic, with UK inflation rising to the highest level in nearly 30 years. L
Johnson has denied accusations by his former adviser that he had lied to parliament about a lockdown party, saying nobody had warned him the gathering might contravene COVID-19 rules. He sidestepped questions about whether he would resign if proven he misled parliament, saying that he wanted to wait for the outcome of an internal inquiry.
Johnson will address parliament on Wednesday after his Cabinet is expected to approve plans to end the recent restrictions imposed to tackle the spread of COVID-19 in England. Opposition leaders have accused Johnson of being a serial liar and called on him to step down.
Downing Street lockdown parties – some held when ordinary people could not bid farewell in person to dying relatives – have undermined Johnson’s authority. His own former spokeswoman resigned after she was captured laughing and joking on camera about how to cast a party if asked about it by reporters.
Johnson has given a variety of explanations of the parties, ranging from denials that any rules were broken to expressing understanding for the public anger at apparent hypocrisy at the heart of the British state.
Opponents have called for Johnson to resign, casting him as a charlatan who demanded the British people follow some of the most onerous rules in peacetime history while his staff partied.
