Since he was forced to resign, many members of the Conservative party have mourned his resignation and his supporters in the media have ignored the many tragedies of his premiership to hail him as a “great leader”. Here we recall (some of) the highlights of his time in Downing Street – and how an accumulation of mishaps and mistakes eventually led to his own party forcing him out.
August 2019: obstructing parliament
They say start as you want to go on. And in Johnson’s case, just a month after the ousted Theresa May took office, it meant plans to suspend parliament for five weeks were announced. Johnson said it was so he could introduce “a bold and ambitious domestic legislative agenda”. Labor called it “an utterly scandalous affront to our democracy” and a clear attempt to block parliamentary scrutiny of his then (still) ongoing Brexit deal negotiations. Ultimately, the high court ruled that the move was “illegal, void and of no effect” and the irregular service continued. Welcome to the Johnson prime ministership.
September 2019: Jennifer Arcuri
The prime minister was still technically married to his second wife when it emerged that an American businesswoman, Jennifer Arcuri, had received large sums of public money and attended business trips with Johnson while he was mayor of London. The prime minister, who denied any impropriety, was referred to the police watchdog, the IOPC, which ultimately declined to prosecute but said she should have declared their relationship. She later said they had been in a four-year relationship at the time and that he had offered to be “the push – the gas” in her career. Days after his divorce from Marina Wheeler was finalized, Johnson’s engagement to Carrie Simmonds and her first pregnancy were announced.
Early 2020 – ongoing: Covid
Where to begin retelling the story of Johnson’s handling of Covid? Perhaps with one of his advisers estimating that his initial delay in introducing the lockdown, while ignoring the pleas of public health experts, led to 20,000 extra deaths? Or with the government’s early stated goal of achieving “herd immunity”? Perhaps with the “protective ring” around nursing homes – which actually involved patients being discharged, unscreened, from the hospital, contributing to the devastating spread of the virus among the elderly residents? Then there was his opposition to an autumn “switch” and the Prime Minister’s reported comment: “Let the bodies pile up in their thousands.” And the delay in another lockdown in late 2020, which caused an additional 27,000 deaths, according to the Resolution Foundation. And vowed next year to “save Christmas” until Johnson made another dramatic last-minute U-turn just days before the festival. Boris Johnson with a face covering. Photo: WPA/Getty Images An attempt to tell the full story will begin at a public inquiry next year. Current total UK deaths attributable to Covid, meanwhile: 202,000.
Testing and detection and PPE
Johnson’s government has rightly won praise for successes in launching vaccines and developing treatments, with Britons among the first in the world to be vaccinated. However, the much-hyped “world beating” testing and detection system – not so much. Despite the staggering cost of £37bn – equivalent to around a fifth of NHS England’s total annual budget – MPs said in a scathing report that the program had made no measurable difference to the course of the pandemic. Enough to make you wonder if consultants are really worth £6,000 a day. Warnings of low PPE stocks before the pandemic had been ignored by the government, meanwhile, which meant critical shortages as the virus hit. In an attempt to catch up, the government created an (illegal) priority channel for companies with political connections. Contracts worth billions have been handed out to dozens of unlikely companies – including a takeaway box supplier run by ex-pub landlord Matt Hancock, who bagged the £40m contract after sending the ex-health secretary a WhatsApp message.
April 2020: intensive treatment
Britain’s lockdown was only four days old when it was announced that the Prime Minister, Health Secretary and Chief Medical Officer had tested positive for Covid. Johnson had only “mild symptoms,” aides said. Ten days later, he was suddenly admitted to St Thomas’ Hospital, and then to intensive care, where he spent three nights. Johnson would later say that the hospital staff saved his life. One of them, a nurse who looked after the Prime Minister in hospital, later resigned over the government’s “lack of respect” for NHS workers.
May 2020: Cummings goes to Barnard Castle
As Johnson’s chief adviser, Cummings was one of the main architects of the government’s Covid restrictions. Awkward, then, when the Guardian and Mirror dramatically revealed he had driven with his family to a family second home in Durham while symptomatic for Covid. Refusing to resign or apologise, Johnson said he had acted “responsibly, lawfully and with integrity” and the government’s power to impose Covid restrictions was never reinstated. Dominic Cummings speaks at a press conference in the Rose Garden at 10 Downing Street after his trip to Durham. Photo: Jonathan Brady/AFP/Getty Images Barnard Castle, which Cummings said he had driven to one day to test his eyesight, resulted in a tourist spike, however.
Summer 2020: educational farce
Johnson’s pick for education secretary, fireplace salesman-turned-sacked ex-minister Gavin Williamson, has had a full summer season of breaches in 2020, with first confusion and turmoil over school reopening dates and then an embarrassing reversal of the free food stamps for the most needy children, shamed by the footballer Marcus Rashford. Williamson’s ultimate fiasco, however, came when he established an algorithm to allocate students’ grades in canceled A-levels, insisted there would be no turnaround when the system’s flaws became apparent, and then abruptly scrapped it after universities had already their offers. Labor called him “the most ignorant, clueless and incompetent education secretary in UK history”. And yet somehow Johnson’s key ally, who had run the prime minister’s campaign for party leader, kept his job for another year and then won a knighthood.
December 2020: EU trade deal
Just as Santa’s children never knew what they wanted, Johnson’s gift to Britain on Christmas Eve 2020 was a commercial deal without teeth. “This deal is fantastic news,” said a Downing Street spokesman, and in the sense that it avoided a “no deal” that the Office for Budget Responsibility said would cost £40 billion and 300,000 jobs in 2021 alone, he was undoubtedly right. . . Since then, Johnson has repeatedly praised himself for “getting Brexit done”. Two years on, the OBR believes Brexit will be responsible for £100 billion a year in lost economic output for the UK and the country will have the lowest growth in the G20 apart from sanctioned Russia. The EU is planning legal action against the UK government over its plans to scrap parts of the deal with Northern Ireland after Brexit. Photo: Andy Rain/EPA The separate trade arrangements Johnson negotiated for Northern Ireland were so “fantastical” – his words – that his government has spent several years trying to circumvent them, as well as international law. Johnson recently admitted he had agreed to the trade terms hoping the EU would not implement them. As one journalist put it: “Prime Minister – you must be furious with whoever signed such a bad deal.”
April 2021: Wallpapergate
Incoming prime ministers are given £30,000, or about what the average person earns in a year, to renovate their Downing Street flat when they move in – an allowance that feels particularly generous when you’re the fourth PM in six years. However, that sum was not enough for the Johnsons when they began the reshuffle in April 2020. It was Cummings – who had left after a reported turf war with Carrie Johnson – who first revealed the Prime Minister’s plan to pay ‘undercover’ Tory donors for a truly stunning makeover, later valued at more than £200,000, by designer Lulu Smyth. The Electoral Commission launched an investigation and subsequently fined the Conservative party for improperly declaring donations. Johnson insisted that he had (eventually) paid for the renovation himself.
August 2021: Collapse of Afghanistan
As the US and British military exit from Afghanistan hastened Kabul’s imminent fall to the Taliban, Johnson was savaged by his own MPs for “the UK’s biggest humiliation since Suez”. After the evacuation ended, it emerged that tens of thousands of desperate Afghans had been “left to die at the hands of the Taliban”, unable to access British aid thanks to catastrophic failures by the Foreign Office. But has the prime minister urged officials to prioritize evacuating an animal charity from the city, including its cats and dogs? “Absolute nonsense,” said Johnson. Two leaked emails suggested otherwise. A Foreign Office whistleblower later said it was “wide knowledge” that the prime minister had asked for the charity to be prioritized.
September 2021: panic fuel buying
Brexit, as a triumph, was not behind the late summer 2021 supply chain crisis, ministers said, which was caused by Britain’s recovery from Covid rather than the 1.3 million foreign workers who had left the UK since the start of the pandemic. Strange that the huge queues outside petrol stations somehow only affected the UK and not other European countries. No, Brexit was “actually part of the solution”, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said, although in…
