Johnson has been left with little choice but to step down after several high-profile members of his cabinet resigned in protest this weekover his handling of misconduct allegations related to government officials. Dozens more members of his government have also quit.
Johnson was ultimately undone by his response to fallout from the resignation last Thursday of deputy chief whip Chris Pincher, amid allegations Pincher had groped two guests at a private dinner the night before. While he did not admit the allegations directly, Pincher said in a letter to Johnson last week that “last night I drank far too much” and “embarrassed myself and other people.” Other historical allegations of misconduct by Pincher emerged in the ensuing days.
Johnson initially denied being aware of some of those allegations, but ultimately the Prime Minister was forced to admit he had been briefed years before and apologize for his decision-making.
It was the final straw for many political allies who had supported Johnson through crisis after crisis over the years. In recent months the Prime Minister had been facing a barrage of criticism from all sides over his conduct and that of his government, including illegal, lockdown-breaking parties thrown in his Downing Street offices, for which he and others were fined.
Johnson faced numerous other scandals that hit his standing in the polls – despite his 80-seat landslide general election victory just two and a half years ago. These include accusations of using donor money inappropriately to pay for a refurbishment of his Downing Street home and whipping lawmakers to protect a colleague who had breached lobbying rules.
Two weeks ago, the Conservatives lost two key by-elections – results that were blamed on Johnson personally.
In early June, he survived a confidence vote, but the final count of his lawmakers who rebelled against him was higher than his supporters expected: 41% of his own parliamentary party refused to back him.
That vote was triggered after months of speculation over Johnson’s future. The so-called “Partygate” scandal, which saw Johnson found guilty of breaking his own Covid-19 laws by attending a gathering to celebrate his birthday at a time when such events were banned, has dogged Johnson since the news broke late last year.
With the possible exception of his hero, Winston Churchill, Johnson was perhaps the most famous politician to enter Downing Street as Prime Minister, having forged a successful career as a journalist, novelist, TV personality and London mayor in the preceding decades.
He was a populist before populists really existed. His controversial comments – comparing Muslim women who wear face coverings to letterboxes, or calling gay men “bum boys” to name but two – appalled many. But he got away with his Lothario image, the public seemingly happy to accept his alleged affairs and love child. It seemed that Johnson could essentially laugh his way through any problem.
Yet, for all his ambition and charisma, the job of Prime Minister seemed out of reach for most of his adult life. Those who know Johnson personally say that he loathed the fact that many in the British Conservative elite saw him as a useful campaigning tool but more of a comedian cheerleader than a serious statesman.
Photos: British Prime Minister Boris Johnson
Frank Augstein/AP
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson waves from the steps of No. 10 Downing Street after giving a statement in London in July 2019. He had just become prime minister.
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Brian Smith/Reuters
A 21-year-old Johnson speaks with Greek Minister for Culture Melina Mercouri in June 1986. Johnson at the time was president of the Oxford Union, a prestigious student society.
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Johnson started his career as a journalist. He was fired from an early job at The Times for fabricating a quote. He later became a Brussels correspondent and then an assistant editor for The Daily Telegraph. From 1994 to 2005, he was editor of the weekly magazine The Spectator.
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In 2001, Johnson was elected as a member of Parliament. He won the seat in Henley for the Conservative Party.
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Johnson looks apologetic after fouling Germany’s Maurizio Gaudino during a charity soccer match in Reading, England, in May 2006.
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Johnson is congratulated by Conservative Party leader David Cameron, right, after being elected mayor of London in May 2008. Cameron later became prime minister.
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Johnson, left, poses with a wax figure of himself at Madame Tussauds in London in May 2009.
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Johnson poses for a photo in London in April 2011. He was re-elected as the city’s mayor in 2012.
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Johnson and his wife, Marina, enjoy the atmosphere in London ahead of the Olympic opening ceremony in July 2012. The couple separated in 2018 after 25 years of marriage.
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Johnson gets stuck on a zip line during an event in London’s Victoria Park in August 2012.
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Johnson poses with his father, Stanley, and his siblings, Rachel and Jo, at the launch of his new book in October 2014. Stanley Johnson was once a member of the European Parliament.
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Jonathan Brady/AP
Johnson takes part in a charity tug-of-war with British military personnel in October 2015.
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Johnson kisses a wild salmon while visiting a fish market in London in June 2016. A month earlier, he stepped down as mayor but remained a member of Parliament for Uxbridge and South Ruislip.
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Johnson arrives at a news conference in London in June 2016. During the Brexit referendum that year, he was under immense pressure from Prime Minister Cameron to back the Remain campaign. But he broke ranks and backed Brexit at the last minute.
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Johnson sits next to Prime Minister Theresa May during a Cabinet meeting in November 2016. Johnson was May’s foreign secretary for two years before resigning over her handling of Brexit.
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As foreign secretary. Johnson meets with US House Speaker Paul Ryan in April 2017. Johnson was born in New York City to British parents and once held dual citizenship. But he renounced his US citizenship in 2016.
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Johnson launches his Conservative Party leadership campaign in June 2019.
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Johnson and Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt take part in the Conservative Leadership debate in June 2019.
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Johnson speaks in July 2019 after he won the party leadership vote to become Britain’s next prime minister.
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Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II welcomes Johnson at Buckingham Palace, where she invited him to become Prime Minister and form a new government.
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Johnson poses with his dog Dilyn as he leaves a polling station in London in December 2019.
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Johnson appears on stage alongside Bobby Smith during the count declaration in London in December 2019. Johnson’s Conservative Party won a majority in the UK’s general election, securing his position as Prime Minister.
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Johnson and his partner, Carrie Symonds, react to election results from his study at No. 10 Downing Street.
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Johnson speaks on the phone with Queen Elizabeth II in March 2020.
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From Twitter
In March 2020, Johnson announced in a video posted to Twitter that he tested positive for the novel coronavirus. “Over the last 24 hours, I have developed mild symptoms and tested positive for coronavirus. I am now self-isolating, but I will continue to lead the government’s response via video conference as we fight this virus. Together we will beat this,” Johnson said. He was later hospitalized after his symptoms had “worsened,” according to his office.
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After recovering from the coronavirus, Johnson returned to work in late April 2020.
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Johnson and staff members are pictured together with wine at a Downing Street garden in May 2020. In January 2022, Johnson apologized for attending the event, which took place when Britons were prohibited from gathering due to strict coronavirus restrictions.
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Johnson wears a face mask as he visits the headquarters of the London Ambulance Service NHS Trust in July 2020.
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US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo sits across from Johnson in the garden of No. 10 Downing Street in July 2020.
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Johnson holds a crab in Stromness Harbour during a visit to Scotland in July 2020.
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Johnson is seen with his wife, Carrie, after their wedding at London’s Westminster Cathedral in May 2021. The ceremony, described by PA Media as a “secret wedding,” was reportedly held in front of close friends and family, according to several British newspaper accounts.
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Johnson and US President Joe Biden speak at Carbis Bay in Cornwall, England, after their bilateral meeting in June 2021. Biden and Johnson were participating in the G7 summit that weekend.
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Queen Elizabeth II greets Johnson at Buckingham Palace in June 2021. It was the Queen’s first in-person weekly audience with the Prime Minister since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
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Johnson delivers his keynote speech on the final day of the annual Conservative Party Conference in October 2021.
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UK Parliament/Jessica Taylor via AP
Johnson speaks in the House of Commons in January 2022. He apologized for attending a May 2020 garden party that took place while the UK was in a hard lockdown to combat the spread of Covid-19. Johnson told lawmakers he believed the gathering to be a work event but that, with hindsight, he should have sent attendees back inside.
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Victoria Jones/AP
Johnson attends the National Service of Thanksgiving at St Paul’s Cathedral in London in June 2022. It was part of Platinum Jubilee celebrations for Queen Elizabeth II.
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PA/AP
“I think it’s an extremely good, positive, conclusive, decisive result which enables us to move on to unite,” Johnson said in an interview shortly after surviving a confidence vote in June 2022.
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Johnson leaves No. 10 Downing Street on July 6, a day after two senior Cabinet ministers quit over Downing Street’s handling of the resignation of deputy chief whip Chris Pincher.
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Jessica Taylor/UK Parliament/Reuters
At Prime Minister’s Questions on July 6, Johnson said “the job of a Prime Minister in difficult circumstances when he has been handed a colossal mandate is to keep going, and that’s what I’m going to do.”
Even during his time as Mayor of London, winning two terms in a city that traditionally doesn’t vote Conservative, the most memorable moments of his time in office are images such as him inelegantly dangling from a zip wire or forcefully rugby tackling a 10-year-old child while on a trade visit to Tokyo. He just wasn’t considered serious enough for the top job.
Then Brexit happened. Johnson led the successful campaign that defied the odds and saw the UK vote by a narrow majority to leave the European Union in 2016.
Overnight, he went from being a man who seemed to have made a fatal political error by backing the wrong horse in the referendum, to the figurehead of a mass rebellion that had just overrun the entire British establishment.
On paper, Johnson was an unlikely candidate to become the voice of those who felt themselves to be voiceless. Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson was born in New York City in 1964 to an internationalist family. As a boy, Johnson would tell friends and relatives that he wanted to be “world king” when fully grown, his sister wrote in a family biography.
He was educated at Eton College, the most exclusive private school in the UK, alma mater of 20 Prime Ministers, followed by the University of Oxford. While at Oxford, he was a member of the notorious Bullingdon Club: An elite all-male group for wealthy students, famed for ostentatious (and sometimes rowdy) displays of wealth such as vandalizing restaurants, then paying for the damage on the spot in cash. Johnson was never proven to have been personally involved in any such activity.
Johnson worked as a journalist for establishment newspapers, most notably The Daily Telegraph, which made him its Brussels correspondent in 1989. It was here in Belgium that Johnson began writing what would become the most important chapter of his life story: Brexit.
Although the Telegraph was firmly Euroskeptic, the UK’s exit from the EU was not really on the cards at the time, and even English Conservatives seemed to accept this. However, they lapped up Johnson’s guerrilla journalism, which often stretched the truth of what was actually happening in Brussels.
The most famous example of this was a story by Johnson that claimed the EU was planning to ban the sale of bendy bananas. The EU repeatedly debunked that and many of the stories that Johnson published.
In 1999, Johnson was offered the editorship of The Spectator, a weekly magazine often jokingly called the “Conservative bible.” He accepted, agreeing with the owner that he would drop his by now well-known political ambitions, according to a biography by the political journalist Andrew Gimson. He kept his word for all of two years and stood to become a member of parliament in 2001.
In the years that followed, Johnson was swallowed by the conservative establishment. He carried on writing the conservative script as a journalist and building a base of loyalists both inside and outside of politics.
As Johnson’s confidence grew, he was determined to show the Conservative Party that his appeal went beyond the British right. In 2008, he was elected the Mayor of London – a liberal, cosmopolitan city that did not traditionally vote Conservative. Johnson believed that he was showing his party that he had the chops to drag them into the 21st century. The problem for Johnson was that they already had a new, young leader – his old schoolfriend and future Prime Minister, David Cameron.
It was Cameron who ultimately made Brexit possible. After winning his second general election as Conservative leader in 2015, he decided to hold the EU referendum on the understanding that Johnson would fall in line and be an asset for the “remain” campaign.
Instead, in February 2016, Johnson shocked the nation by announcing on the front page of his old paper, the Telegraph, that he would defy Cameron and lead the Brexit campaign.
The rest is history. Johnson turned the establishment on its head and became the most influential politician in the UK. While he didn’t become Prime Minister immediately, he continued to build his power base, undermining then-incumbent Theresa May as she struggled with Brexit for three years.
As foreign secretary under May, he was blamed for worsening the predicament of the jailed British-Iranian mother Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe after wrongly saying in 2017 that she was in Iran teaching journalists, rather than on holiday, at the time she was detained. But his patchy record in the role did not appear to cost him much support within his party.
Johnson’s time finally came in July 2019 when he became leader of the Conservative Party, claiming around two-thirds of the membership vote. His brash style was vindicated later that year, when he silenced all of his opponents in a landslide election victory that would finally allow him to, as his own slogan boasted, “Get Brexit Done.”
It truly seemed that the stars had finally aligned for Johnson, who desperately wanted to be taken seriously. He made Brexit popular and personally dragged it across the line. He had completed his transition to the role of statesman. He had proved everyone wrong.
Yet, as the clock ticked down on so-called Brexit Day, January 31, 2020, a deadly virus was already causing alarm in Asia. It would soon start spreading across Europe and kick off the crisis that would remove him from office.
Johnson had a mixed pandemic. He was lauded by the public for the amount of state spending unleashed to mitigate its impacts on those whose jobs and livelihoods were threatened, but panned by the more conservative elements of his party. He was accused of responding too slowly, but also for making lockdown rules so complicated even he and his team in Downing Street couldn’t follow them.
The breaking of these rules by Johnson and members of his team, the economic fallout of the pandemic leading in part to a cost-of-living crisis, his handling of the Pincher scandal and a general sense of the shine wearing off the Brexit golden boy were ultimately too much for his party. It seems its members couldn’t stand the thought of Johnson staying on and dragging the party into its grave.
His political career is a story of near-misses, sex scandals, celebrity, controversy and revolution that ended in personal tragedy. The man who only ever wanted to be taken seriously ended up, ultimately, as the joker once again.
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