Boris Johnson

Boris Johnson (born June 19, 1964, New York City, New York, U.S.) American-born British journalist and Conservative Party politician who became prime minister of the United Kingdom in July 2019. He left office in September 2022 after being forced by scandal to resign. Earlier he served as the second elected mayor of London (2008–16) and as secretary of state for foreign affairs (2016–18) under Prime Minister Theresa May.

Early life and career as a journalist

As a child, Johnson lived in New York City, London, and Brussels before attending boarding school in England. He won a scholarship to Eton College and later studied classics at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was president of the Oxford Union. After briefly working as a management consultant, Johnson embarked on a career in journalism. He started as a reporter for The Times in 1987 but was fired for fabricating a quotation. He then began working for The Daily Telegraph, where he served as a correspondent covering the European Community (1989–94) and later as an assistant editor (1994–99). In 1994 Johnson became a political columnist for The Spectator, and in 1999 he was named the magazine’s editor, continuing in that role until 2005.

Election to Parliament

In 1997 Johnson was selected as the Conservative candidate for Clwyd South in the House of Commons, but he lost decisively to the Labour Party incumbent Martyn Jones. Soon after, Johnson began appearing on a variety of television shows, beginning in 1998 with the BBC talk program Have I Got News for You. His bumbling demeanour and occasionally irreverent remarks made him a perennial favourite on British talk shows. Johnson again stood for Parliament in 2001, this time winning the contest in the Henley-on-Thames constituency. Though he continued to appear frequently on British television programs and became one of the country’s most-recognized politicians, Johnson’s political rise was threatened on a number of occasions. He was forced to apologize to the city of Liverpool after the publication of an insensitive editorial in The Spectator, and in 2004 he was dismissed from his position as shadow arts minister after rumours surfaced of an affair between Johnson and a journalist. Despite such public rebukes, Johnson was reelected to his parliamentary seat in 2005.

Mayor of London

Johnson entered into the London mayoral election in July 2007, challenging Labour incumbent Ken Livingstone. During the tightly contested election, he overcame perceptions that he was a gaffe-prone and insubstantial politician by focusing on issues of crime and transportation. On May 1, 2008, Johnson won a narrow victory, seen by many as a repudiation of the national Labour government led by Gordon Brown. Early the following month, Johnson fulfilled a campaign promise by stepping down as MP. In 2012 Johnson was reelected mayor, besting Livingstone again. His win was one of the few bright spots for the Conservative Party in the midterm local elections in which it lost more than 800 seats in England, Scotland, and Wales.

While pursuing his political career, Johnson continued to write. His output as an author included Lend Me Your Ears (2003), a collection of essays; Seventy-two Virgins (2004), a novel; and The Dream of Rome (2006), a historical survey of the Roman Empire. In 2014 he added The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History, which was described by one reviewer as a “breathless romp through the life and times” of Winston Churchill.

Return to Parliament, the Brexit referendum, and failed pursuit of the Conservative leadership

Johnson returned to Parliament in 2015, winning the west London seat of Uxbridge and South Ruislip, in an election that saw the Conservative Party capture its first clear majority since the 1990s. He retained his post as mayor of London, and the victory fueled speculation that he would eventually challenge Prime Minister David Cameron for leadership of the Conservative Party.

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Some critics, however, charged that Johnson’s personal political ambitions led him to be less interested and less involved in his job as mayor than he was in self-promotion. Even before leaving the office of mayor—having chosen not to run for reelection in 2016—Johnson became the leading spokesman for the “Leave” campaign in the run-up to the June 23, 2016, national referendum on whether the United Kingdom should remain a member of the European Union. In that capacity, he faced off with Cameron, who was the country’s most prominent proponent of Britain remaining in the EU, and came under criticism for equating the EU’s efforts to unify Europe with those undertaken by Napoleon I and Adolf Hitler.

When all of the votes were counted in the referendum, some 52 percent of those who went to the polls had opted for Britain to leave the EU, prompting Cameron to announce his imminent resignation as prime minister. He said that his successor should oversee the negotiations with the EU over Britain’s withdrawal and that he would step down before the Conservative Party conference in October 2016. Many observers believed that the path now had been laid for Johnson’s ascent to the party leadership and the premiership.

In the morning at the end of June when he was set to officially announce his candidacy, however, Johnson was deserted by his key ally and prospective campaign chairman, Michael Gove, the justice secretary. Gove, who had worked alongside Johnson on the “Leave” campaign, concluded that Johnson could not “provide the leadership or build the team for the task ahead” and, instead of backing Johnson’s candidacy, announced his own. The British media were quick to see betrayals of Shakespearean proportions in the political drama involving Cameron, Johnson, and Gove, whose families had been close and who had moved up the ranks of the Conservative Party together. When he left, Gove took several of Johnson’s key lieutenants with him, and Johnson, seemingly concluding that he no longer had enough support in the party to win its leadership, quickly withdrew his candidacy.

Tenure as foreign secretary

When Theresa May became Conservative Party leader and prime minister, she named Johnson her foreign secretary. Johnson maintained his seat in the House of Commons in the snap election called by May for June 2017, and he remained foreign secretary when May reshuffled her cabinet after the Conservatives lost their legislative majority in that election and formed a minority government. In April 2018 Johnson defended May’s decision to join the United States and France in the strategic air strikes that were undertaken against the regime of Syrian Pres. Bashar al-Assad in response to evidence that it had again used chemical weapons on its own people. Opposition parties were critical of the May government’s use of force without having first sought approval from Parliament.

Johnson himself was taken to task in some quarters for statements he had made regarding an incident in March 2018 in which a former Russian intelligence officer who had acted as a double agent for Britain was found unconscious with his daughter in Salisbury, England. Investigators believed that the pair had been exposed to a “novichok,” a complex nerve agent that had been developed by the Soviets, but Johnson was accused of misleading the public by saying that Britain’s top military laboratory had determined with certainty that the novichok used in the attack had come from Russia; the Defense Science and Technology Laboratory actually had only identified the substance as a novichok. Nonetheless, the British government was confident enough of the likelihood of Russian complicity in the attack that it expelled nearly two dozen Russian intelligence operatives who had been working in Britain under diplomatic cover. In May 2018 Johnson was the target of a prank—also thought to have been perpetrated by Russia—when a recording was made of a telephone conversation between him and a pair of individuals, one of whom fooled Johnson by pretending to be the new prime minister of Armenia.

While all these events unfolded, Johnson remained a persistent advocate of “hard” Brexit as May’s government struggled to formulate the details of its exit strategy for its negotiations with the EU. Johnson publicly (and not always tactfully) cautioned May to not relinquish British autonomy in pursuit of maintaining close economic involvement in the common market. When May summoned her cabinet to Chequers, the prime minister’s country retreat, on July 6, 2018, to try to reach a nuts-and-bolts consensus on its Brexit plan, Johnson reportedly was crudely obstinate. Nonetheless, by the gathering’s end, he seemed to have joined the other cabinet members in support of May’s softer approach to Brexit. However, after Brexit secretary David Davis resigned on July 8, saying that he could not continue as Britain’s chief negotiator with the EU because May was “giving too much away, too easily,” Johnson followed suit the next day, tendering his resignation as foreign secretary. In his letter of resignation, Johnson wrote in part:

It is more than two years since the British people voted to leave the European Union on an unambiguous and categorical promise that if they did so they would be taking back control of their democracy.

They were told that they would be able to manage their own immigration policy, repatriate the sums of UK cash currently spent by the EU, and, above all, that they would be able to pass laws independently and in the interests of the people of this country.…

That dream is dying, suffocated by needless self-doubt.

May named Jeremy Hunt, the long-serving health secretary, as Johnson’s replacement.

Ascent to prime minister

Meanwhile, Johnson remained a persistent critic of May’s attempts to push her version of Brexit through Parliament. After failing twice to win support for her plan in votes in the House of Commons, May, in a closed-door meeting with rank-and-file members of the Conservative Party on March 27, 2019, pledged to step down as prime minister if Parliament approved her plan. This time around, the promise of May’s imminent departure won Johnson’s support for her plan; however, once again it went down to defeat. Having failed to win sufficient support for her plan from Conservatives, unable to negotiate a compromise with the opposition, and assailed by ever more members of her own party, May announced that she would resign as party leader on June 7 but remain as caretaker prime minister until her party had chosen her successor.

This opened up a campaign to replace her that found Johnson among 10 candidates who were put to the parliamentary party in a series of Ivotes that eventually winnowed the field to four contenders: Boris Johnson, Jeremy Hunt, Michael Gove, and Sajid Javid, the home secretary. After Gove and Javid fell by the wayside in subsequent votes, Johnson and Hunt stood as the final candidates in an election in which all of the party’s nearly 160,000 members were eligible to vote. Some 87 percent of those eligible voters participated and elevated Johnson to the leadership when the results were announced on July 23. In winning 92,153 votes, Johnson captured some 66 percent of the vote, compared with about 34 percent for Hunt, who garnered 46,656 votes.

Johnson had campaigned on a promise to leave the EU without a deal (“no-deal Brexit”) if the exit agreement with the EU was not altered to his satisfaction by October 31, 2019, the revised departure deadline that had been negotiated by May. In his victory speech, he pledged to “deliver Brexit, unite the country, and defeat Jeremy Corbyn” and then rounded out the dud acronym for his pledge to dude by promising to “energize the country.” On July 24 Johnson officially became prime minister.

Faced with a threat by Corbyn to hold a vote of confidence and then confronted by a broader effort by opponents of a no-deal Brexit to move toward legislation that would prevent that option for leaving the EU, Johnson boldly announced on August 28 that he had requested the queen to prorogue Parliament, delaying its resumption from its scheduled suspension for the yearly political party conferences. The schedule called for Parliament to convene during the first two weeks of September and then to take a break until October 9. Johnson reset the return date for October 14, just over two weeks before the Brexit deadline. The queen’s approval of the request, a formality, was granted shortly after it was submitted by Johnson. Outraged critics of Johnson’s initiative argued that he was seeking to limit debate and narrow the window of opportunity for taking legislative action on an alternative to a no-deal departure. Johnson denied that this was his intention and emphasized his desire to move forward on Britain’s domestic agenda.

Opponents of a no-deal Brexit took the offensive on September 3, as members of the opposition and 21 rebellious Conservative MPs came together on a vote that allowed the House of Commons to temporarily usurp the government’s control of the legislative body’s agenda (as it had earlier done during May’s tenure as prime minister). The 328–301 vote was a humiliating defeat for Johnson, who responded vindictively by effectively expelling the 21 dissident MPs from the Conservative Party. Taking control of the agenda of the House of Commons allowed those opposed to a no-deal Brexit to set the stage for a vote on a bill that would mandate Johnson to request a delay for Brexit. Johnson sought to regain control of the narrative by announcing that he would call for a snap election. Under the Fixed Terms of Parliament Act, however, a prime minister must win the support of at least two-thirds of the House of Commons to hold such an election when it falls outside of the body’s fixed five-year terms, meaning that Johnson would have to win opposition support for that vote. The political drama heightened on September 4, as the House of Commons voted 327–299 to force Johnson to request a delay of the British withdrawal from the EU until January 31, 2020, if by October 19, 2019, he had not either submitted an agreement on Brexit for Parliament’s approval or gotten the House of Commons to approve a no-deal Brexit.

By October Johnson was able to find common ground with the EU on a renegotiated agreement that greatly resembled May’s proposal but replaced the backstop with a plan to keep Northern Ireland aligned with the EU for at least four years from the end of the transition period. On October 22 the House of Commons approved Johnson’s revised plan in principle but then quickly stymied his effort to push the agreement through to formal Parliamentary acceptance before the October 31 deadline. Thus, Johnson was compelled to ask the EU for an extension of the deadline, which was granted, and the deadline was reset for January 31, 2020. With no-deal Brexit off the table, Corbyn indicated that he would now support an early election, which was scheduled for December 12. After three failed attempts to hold a snap election, Johnson was finally able to take his case to the people, and during the campaign he promised to deliver Brexit by the new deadline. Although Johnson’s solution to the backstop pitfall looked certain to lose him the support of the Democratic Unionist Party, opinion polling prior to the election showed the Conservatives to be the likely winners and poised to gain seats. When the votes were counted, the projected Conservative victory proved to be wildly more decisive than anyone had expected. In winning 365 seats, the party increased its presence in the House of Commons by 47 seats and recorded its most commanding win in a parliamentary election since 1987. With a solid majority in place, Johnson stood poised to guide his preferred version of Brexit across the finish line.

In his address to the British people late on January 31, 2020, as the U.K. formally withdrew from the EU, Johnson said:

This is the moment when the dawn breaks and the curtain goes up on a new act in our great national drama.

Battling the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 pandemic

Although the formal withdrawal had taken place, final details relating to a new trade deal between the U.K. and the EU remained to be hammered out, and the deadline for agreement on this was set for December 31, 2020. Perhaps not surprisingly, those negotiations also proved to be protracted and often bitter; however, Johnson was able to announce that an accord had been reached on December 24. The 2,000-page agreement specified that there would be no limits or taxes on goods traded between U.K. and EU parties but there would now be a regimen of extensive paperwork for such transactions and for the transport of goods. Moreover, the freedom to live, work, and study in one another’s countries that U.K. nationals and EU citizens had enjoyed would be eliminated for many. Fishing rights, which had proved to be a particular sticking point in the negotiations, were agreed upon for a five-year period only.

As important as these negotiations were, they took a back seat to the catastrophic public health crisis that came to dominate events not only in the U.K. and the EU but also in the world as a whole—the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 global pandemic, which likely originated in China, where the first cases were reported in December 2019. Heeding the controversial guidance of its key scientific advisers that the best way to limit the long-term effects of the pandemic would be to allow the virus to spread naturally and thus generate “herd immunity,” the Johnson government initially took a low-key approach to combating the pandemic, which was at odds with the aggressive measures taken in much of the rest of the world. By mid-March 2020, as COVID-19, the potentially deadly disease caused by the virus, began spreading rapidly in Britain, the fallacy of this approach had become clear, and the government imposed social-distancing and mask-wearing requirements, along with a lockdown that included the closing of schools, pubs, restaurants, and other businesses.

The severity of the crisis became very personal for Johnson when he contracted the virus at the end of March, became so ill that he had to be hospitalized, and, with his life in danger, spent three nights in an intensive-care unit. While he was incapacitated, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab steered the government. After Johnson returned to his post, the grateful prime minister in his Easter message to the country on April 12 thanked the health care workers who had saved his life, called on Britons to adhere to social-distancing measures, and lavished praise on the National Health Service (NHS) for its response to the crisis:

We will win because our NHS is the beating heart of this country. It is the best of this country. It is unconquerable. It is powered by love.

Over the coming year, Johnson initiated and rescinded a series of stay-at-home orders (which varied by region) as the spread of the disease waxed and waned in Britain. Although many observers were critical of Johnson’s slow, unsteady response to the crisis, British scientists, aided by government funding, made historically rapid advances on the vaccine front. Notably, the University of Oxford and the Anglo-Swedish pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca developed and successfully tested one of the first effective vaccines. Moreover, in December 2020 the U.K. became the first country to approve and deploy the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, with which it quickly began a national immunization program. Nonetheless, by March 2021 the U.K. had suffered more COVID-19-related deaths (about 126,000) than all but four other countries (the United States, Brazil, Mexico, and India)—a situation that had been made worse in September 2020 by the emergence in Britain of a new, more easily transmissible variant of the disease (B.1.1.7).

“Partygate”

The Johnson government’s response to the pandemic would make headlines for very different reasons beginning in late November 2021, when reports began surfacing that members of the prime minister’s cabinet and staff, as well as Johnson himself, had attended parties earlier in the pandemic that violated prohibitions on social gatherings set forth by the government. Dubbed “Partygate,” the resulting scandal hinged not only on the nature of the alleged violations but also on Johnson’s initial insistence that the government-issued guidelines had been “followed at all times.” As reports came to light of an increasing number of illegal social gatherings at Downing Street, during lockdowns imposed because of the public health crisis in 2020 and 2021, Johnson apologized for having attended one such party at which drinks were served but which he said he had thought was going to be a work event. A picture began to emerge of a culture of excessive workplace drinking in Johnson’s orbit and of a prime minister who had misled Parliament with his claim that no pandemic-related rules had been broken—the last being an offense that historically had called for resignation.

In late January 2022 an investigation into the affair by senior civil servant Sue Gray was reported to Parliament, though in a truncated and redacted form so as not to compromise the investigation into a number of gatherings that had been subsequently undertaken by the London Metropolitan Police. Gray indicated that “there were failures of leadership and judgment by different parts of No. 10 and the Cabinet Office at different times” and that “some of the events should not have been allowed to take place” whereas “other events should not have been allowed to develop as they did.” Johnson apologized again to Parliament and was roundly castigated, even by Conservatives, some of whom joined members of the opposition in calling on the prime minister to step down. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, which united most of the West in support of Ukraine, seemed to forestall the threat to Johnson’s staying in office, as many Britons appeared to feel that the moment of existential crisis for Europe brought on by Russia’s aggression was not the time for a change of leadership. Nevertheless, Johnson’s grip on power remained precarious, especially after the police investigation led to Johnson’s being served a “fixed penalty notice” in April and being fined for his transgressions of pandemic-related rules, making him the first incumbent British prime minister in living memory found to have broken the law.

By the first week of June, fallout from the release of the full report by Gray (in May) and growing discontent with the prime minister’s role in the Partygate scandal had led no fewer than 54 Conservative members of Parliament to send letters to the party’s 1922 Committee requesting Johnson’s resignation. Many of them were concerned that Johnson’s damaged brand would prove to be a liability in the next scheduled parliamentary elections, some two years in the offing. With the number of written requests required to force a vote on leadership of the party having been met, 359 Conservative members of Parliament on the evening of June 6 participated in a secret ballot vote of confidence in Johnson. To survive as leader, Johnson needed to get 180 affirmative votes. He got 211, but the 148 MPs who voted against him constituted roughly 40 percent of the party’s representation in the House of Commons and exceeded in number the 133 MPs who had voted against Theresa May in the 2018 vote of confidence in her leadership that preceded her resignation by some six months. Under party rules, a subsequent vote on Johnson’s leadership could not be held for another year, but, as Britain struggled with inflated prices of fuel and groceries, public approval of the Labour Party was growing in preference polling that did not bode well for Johnson. Moreover, he had very publicly lost the support of prominent Tories such Jeremy Hunt and William Hague.

Resignation in disgrace

Only weeks after he survived the confidence vote, Johnson’s standing as party leader was further shaken by the loss of two Conservative seats in by-elections on June 24, 2022, in Tiverton and Honiton and in Wakefield. Sexual scandals had forced the resignation of the Conservative MPs holding those seats, and in early July Johnson’s handling of another sexual scandal, involving Conservative Deputy Chief Whip Chris Pincher, would finally force the resignation of the embattled prime minister whose grip on power had for so long seemed impervious to scandal. This time Johnson and his spokespeople repeatedly changed their story regarding Johnson’s awareness of allegations of sexual misconduct that had been brought against Pincher both in the run-up to his appointment as deputy chief whip and in 2019 during his tenure in the Foreign Office. When Johnson ultimately claimed that he simply had forgotten being briefed about Pincher’s 2019 indiscretion, it proved to be the last straw for two key ministers, Health Secretary Sajid Javid and Treasury chief Rishi Sunak, who resigned their cabinet posts on July 5. Despite the short-term statutory protection against another vote of confidence in Johnson’s party leadership, his support within the parliamentary Conservative Party continued to crumble, and senior party members threatened to change the party rules to allow for another confidence vote if Johnson did not resign. Despite the multitude of defections, Johnson initially dug in his heels. Indeed, he fired his erstwhile ally Michael Gove from his position as levelling up secretary after Gove joined in pressuring Johnson to resign. Finally, on July 7 Johnson announced his immediate resignation as party leader but said that he would remain as prime minister until the Conservatives had chosen a new leader.

On September 6, Liz Truss, Johnson’s foreign secretary, replaced him as prime minister, though her tenure in office would prove to be the shortest in British history. Still immensely popular with the party’s base, Johnson was under consideration as Truss’s replacement despite his fall from grace. During the scramble to choose a new Conservative leader in October, Johnson made a hurried return to Britain from a vacation in the Dominican Republic, but he chose rather quickly to stand aside in deference to Sunak. On June 9, 2023, Johnson received the final report of the Privileges Committee, a cross-party investigatory body that had been tasked with determining whether or not he had willingly misled Parliament during the Partygate scandal. He announced his resignation as MP that day, decrying the committee as a “kangaroo court” that had been determined to “drive me out of Parliament.”