Boris Johnson, to steal a phrase from his buddy Donald Trump, is a loser.
The newest Conservative Party prime minister wanted to come in barnstorming and ride a populist wave to victory, pushing through Brexit by sheer force of . . . something. Instead, he’s lost every vote in Parliament since attaining his new position and has had to resort to actually shutting the whole thing down (a procedure called “prorogation” that involves asking the Queen nicely to tell Parliament to take a break) in order to stop the constant humiliation. Even his own brother left Parliament rather than work with him.
Like much of the media, Johnson mistook the Brexit party’s success in this spring’s European elections as a sign that the hardest of hard Brexits was a thing for which there was significant popular demand. The problem with treating the European Union elections as a bellwether for broader U.K. politics is that only 37 percent of the population voted. That’s just a slight tick upward from the pre-Brexit total in 2014—suggesting that most of the U.K.’s population responded to those elections with a collective shrug, not a frothing desire for crashing out of the Union on October 31 come hell or high water.
It’s Johnson’s opponents who have regularly taken to the streets since his ascension to office and particularly since prorogation was announced; Johnson’s base, meanwhile, was most recently represented in public by a handful of white nationalists bent on violence.
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Of course, polls of the Tory base consistently do show support for Johnson and his relentless Brexitmongering; one poll that made the rounds this summer showed that Conservative members would cheerily see their own party destroyed, Scotland and Northern Ireland leave the U.K., and significant damage to the U.K. economy if they could only get Brexit. (The only thing they wouldn’t countenance is allowing Jeremy Corbyn to become prime minister.)
But as far as proroguing is concerned, it wasn’t just the MPs—one of whom tried to physically block the Speaker of the House to prevent shutdown—who disapprove of Johnson’s moves. Even a decent percentage of Leave voters don’t think they’re so great. And Johnson’s attempts at rallying the base with blustering speeches have fallen rather flat.
So what does all this mean?
Johnson’s attempts to call a general election, presumably to get a mandate for his Brexit plans, have failed—twice. The opposition parties, who aren’t united on much, stood firm, along with twenty-one rebel Tories now purged from the party, on the you-break-it-you-buy-it principle that Johnson is going to have to go ask for an extension of the Brexit deadline if he can’t get a deal. Johnson insists that he won’t do it even though he’s now legally bound to, and Parliament won’t meet again until mid-October.
It’s always tempting to compare the U.S. and the U.K., and indeed there’s plenty of parallels between Johnson and Trump. Certainly Johnson, considered a relative moderate when he was the money-wasting mayor of London, has taken a page from Trump’s governing style. But the parallel stops at Brexit.
The issue is not straightforwardly partisan, but cuts across both the major parties. Labour voters lean more Remain and Tory voters more Leave, but there are significant factions in each party who go the other way, and this divide exposes significant contradictions in the coalition each party needs in order to win power. Johnson is doubling down on Brexit as the new equivalent of his garden bridge: something he can wave around to demonstrate that he, unlike David Cameron or Theresa May, is a success and therefore deserves to go down in history like his hero Winston Churchill.
A divided Parliament has still, almost because Brexit cuts across parties, been able to stand up to a prime minister more interested in his own power than democratic process.
Labour is hoping that by election time it will be able to change the subject from Brexit, which it correctly notes isn’t going to do anything to improve the lives of the British, to its proposals to remake the U.K. economy in favor of the working class.
The Liberal Democrats might have just given Labour an opening on this front by choosing Revoke Article 50 (the part of the Lisbon treaty that allows a member state to leave the European Union) as the hill they’d like to die on. Having refashioned a party identity around being the Remain party, being the manager that the Remainers want to speak to and pulling Remain votes from both Conservative and Labour, the Lib Dems are hoping everyone will forget about all that austerity they enabled in coalition with David Cameron just as Labour hopes to run a campaign against it.
Nevertheless, for now Parliament has been relatively united against Johnson. The U.S. Congress, in contrast, has been unwilling to take any significant stand against Trump—not only the supposed moderates in Trump’s own party but plenty of Democrats too have muttered and hand-waved away demands that they do something.
A divided Parliament—the Conservative majority Theresa May called an election to shore up, instead disappeared under a Labour wave in 2017, and a by-election, a resignation, and now a purge have taken Johnson’s majority into negative numbers—has still, almost because Brexit cuts across parties, been able to stand up to a prime minister more interested in his own power than democratic process.
So now that Parliament is prorogued, Johnson has to try to get a deal from an E.U. leadership that has shown little willingness to change, or else humiliate himself further by asking for an extension he’s said he’d rather be dead in a ditch than ask for. (He could also, potentially, break the law.) The other parties will be preparing for an election that they have taken the power to call out of Johnson’s hands, and the informal campaigning will be going hard.
Labour will talk about austerity, about public ownership, about a bankers’ Brexit. The Lib Dems will promise that they will wave a wand and make Brexit go away. The Greens will Green. And Tories will do . . . something. (Their best attempt this week was delivering chicken to Parliament in an attempt to shame Corbyn into, I suppose, voting for an election). Everyone will wonder what Nigel Farage will do—will he hold his fire and cut a deal with his buddy Boris or will he, too, smell blood in the water and challenge Tory Leave seats with Brexit party-wrecker candidates?
There are limits to the lessons Americans can take from the U.K. in this moment; we cannot magically create a parliamentary system (or an opposition party with a spine), not to mention a ticking time bomb of a deadline that scares everyone into action. We can, though, consider what it would take to stop letting Trump dictate the terms of the debate.