Bye bye Boris?

If one reads the liberal press, as of course I do, one could be forgiven for believing that the departure of Boris Johnson from the office of Prime Minister is both inevitable and imminent. He has, the argument goes, so flagrantly disregarded parliamentary conventions that he is honour bound to resign, and if for some reason he fails to see this, then his party will surely move against him, to maintain the integrity of our political system.

Perhaps that is what will happen, but I can’t help thinking that this position rests on the belief that Johnson, and the Conservative Party that put him into power, are still playing the game by the old rules, an assumption that is not entirely backed up by recent experience. As we have seen over the last four years in the US, where liberal expectations that the Republicans world eventually recoil from the excesses of Trumpism have been repeatedly disappointed, in today’s world the right is much more interested in hanging on to power than in observing the niceties of bourgeois democracy.

So I think Boris might yet brazen it out, in the short term at least, and if his MPs do topple him in the coming days it may have more to do with cold political calculation than any sense of decency. It seems unlikely that any moves will be made before the Gray report is published later this week, so we look set for a few more days of uncertainty before the situation even starts to move towards resolution.

Then perhaps we can start worrying about the really important things…