Boris Johnson

Britain's leader Boris Johnson has been forced by his own team to resign as head of his Conservative Party, but he will remain prime minister until a ...

The longer Johnson had stayed in office, the greater the damage to the party’s electoral prospects. In time, politics will return to discussions about policy, and the Conservatives will ensure they are part of that conversation.” However, some names are featuring more prominently in the Westminster bubble than others. “The Conservative Party is currently in chaos. This kind of vote is largely irrelevant in the present circumstances,” Allen noted. They are already starting to distance themselves from Johnson and will continue to do so. “However, Labour has not done enough to convince many voters that they should be in government. “Johnson survived one in June, and the Conservative Party’s rules currently prohibit a second vote within 12 months. “There isn’t a clear and obvious replacement for Johnson, which makes removing him a big step into the unknown. But families bereaved during the pandemic will struggle to see his tenure as a success overall,” she said. The most recent crisis that merits some comparison was Thatcher in 1990. “Johnson’s time in office is ending as it started, with chaos and breaking conventions.

Covid was rife in Westminster at the time of the first lockdown. On 27 March 2020, the prime minister and Matt Hancock, then health secretary, both tested ...

Their failure to act quickly in the autumn and winter of 2020 is the most glaring example of that not being the case. He was forced to apologise to the Queen after lockdown parties were thrown on the eve of Prince Philip’s funeral. But if Covid appeared to be under control, the illusion was swiftly shattered when scientists in South Africa spotted another new variant, ushering in the era of Omicron. The UK was one of the first countries to develop a Covid test, but daily infections topped 2,000 before test and trace was operational. Johnson can, and does, point to some major successes in the crisis. From the first days of the pandemic, Johnson and his ministers routinely claimed they were following, or being guided by, the science. On 21 September, Sage warned that without urgent action the country faced an epidemic with “catastrophic consequences”. The group’s call for an immediate circuit breaker and other measures to slow transmission was brushed aside. Nadra Ahmed, the chair of the National Care Association, called Johnson’s response “a huge slap in the face” for a sector that looked after a million vulnerable people. “It’s hard to find the words to express my debt.” This would protect the NHS and, in the words of Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser, lead to the build up of “ some kind of herd immunity”. An inquiry by MPs in October 2021 was scathing about this strategy. In anticipation of a huge wave of infections, the government ramped up hospital capacity with the Nightingale field hospitals. To some he got “ the big decisions right”. To others he oversaw one of the UK’s worst ever public health failures.

In a viral video a member of the British public said she felt "terribly sorry" for the isolated queen as No. 10 parties were exposed to have taken place.

I just felt terribly sorry." To the unidentified woman featured in the @politicsjoe TikTok interview, finding out that the government had been breaking its own rules on social distancing measures at the same time as the queen and the rest of the country had been following them properly was a "final straw." In the viral video uploaded to social media platform TikTok by channel @politicsjoe, a member of the public said that seeing the queen in that moment was "very, very bad" and was compounded given that illegal social gatherings were revealed to have taken place at 10 Downing Street the night before the funeral. "Yes," the unidentified woman responded, "the picture of the queen sitting on her own at Prince Philip's funeral. The queen was photographed at Philip's funeral sitting by herself, while members of her family remained socially distanced from the grieving monarch in line with government directions. Queen Elizabeth II's lonely appearance at the funeral of Prince Philip in 2021, as she socially distanced in line with Boris Johnson's COVID restrictions, was the "tipping point" for the prime minister, according to one Brit interviewed in a now viral video.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced his resignation Thursday after droves of top government officials quit over the latest scandal to engulf him, ...

He called Papua New Guineans cannibals and likened Muslim women who wear face-covering veils to “letter boxes.” When allegations of Downing Street parties emerged, Johnson told lawmakers “there was no party” and no rules were broken. He told members the government would not “seek to implement new policies or make major changes of direction.” “In the last few days, I tried to persuade my colleagues that it would be eccentric to change governments when we’re delivering so much and when we have such a vast mandate,” Johnson said. The timetable for that process will be announced next week. Johnson stepped down immediately as Conservative Party leader but said he would remain as prime minister until the party chooses his successor.

After just shy of three years in the role Boris Johnson is finally set to resign as prime minister as his tumultuous tenure, mired in scandals and ...

He also claimed that he had been given a mandate by the British public thanks to the overwhelming majority he achieved at the 2019 general election. Now Johnson has resigned it's fair to say that Twitter is having a field day or should that be days... Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

The resignation of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson demonstrates that populism and Brexit were not a good mix, said French Finance Minister Bruno Le ...

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'I got to the third paragraph before realising this was a spoof!' commented one person on the viral post.

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As many as a dozen candidates are eyeing up replacing British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who is quitting...

But in his speech to the country announcing his exit, he did not use the word "resign" or "resignation", and described his forced departure as "eccentric". In the meantime, Johnson, brought down by a series scandals and a loss of trust in his integrity, remains in the job, a situation that opponents, and many in his own party, say is untenable. Johnson told his cabinet of top ministers - some of whom were appointed after the announcement he would be resigning - that he would not be making any big changes of direction that would tie the hands of his successor.

LONDON (AP) — Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced his resignation Thursday after droves of top government officials quit over the latest scandal to ...

LONDON -- Boris Johnson has resigned as Conservative Party leader after months of ethics scandals and a party revolt. But he remains Britain's prime ...

If party officials press Johnson to quit sooner and he refuses, the chaos engulfing the government could worsen in the short term. Whoever takes over from Johnson will try to rebuild the Conservative Party's popularity. The final two candidates will be put to a vote of the full party membership across the country -- about 180,000 people -- by postal ballot. LONDON -- Boris Johnson has resigned as Conservative Party leader after months of ethics scandals and a party revolt. They are demanding he step down as prime minister and let an interim leader take the reins. All Conservative lawmakers are eligible to run, and party officials could open the nominations within hours.

Conservative members of the British Parliament woke up on Friday morning with one hell of a hangover. Now begins the search for a new leader who can both ...

In the 12 years since taking power, the party has already seen a version of Conservatism that represents every point on that ideological base. "I honestly think it was a stitch-up and now we have to find someone who simply doesn't exist: someone with his electoral appeal," the ally adds. "They are now going to have to stomach someone who will inevitably be a lot softer." "That is going to be hard to battle against when we've been in power for so long and people are naturally already turning away from us." The official also pointed out that Johnson's version of the party was necessary in 2019 to resolve the Brexit crisis and win an election, but that his particular brand of populism wouldn't work without the popularity. Not least because the party's MPs now have the authority to get rid of him through its own internal rules -- a level of authority they didn't have until this week.

The unorthodox leader is responsible for his own undoing and the predicament British Conservatives find themselves in.

It was applause of gratitude and of relief, the sort of cynical, ironic applause we Brits are good at. The truth is that the defenestration of Johnson does make a Labour government more likely. And in a slew of local elections in May, the Tories were thrashed. It’s the sort of combo that engaged voters in Brexit and which Johnson was supposed to develop with his historic majority into a more coherent long-term program—let’s call it “Johnsonism.” In June the Conservatives lost their fragile mandate over the Yorkshire seat of Wakefield, one of the crucial “Red Wall” Labour-voting constituencies that Johnson had managed to woo in 2019. In all cases voters appeared to vote tactically, forsaking party preference to choose the candidate most likely to beat the Conservatives in each seat. Few contenders are able—and certainly not willing—to continue Johnsonism after Johnson. Javid’s colleague, Rishi Sunak, who resigned as finance minister on the same day, was once widely tipped as a successor because of his fiscal discipline and clean image. But resignations abounded as the pandemic exposed Johnson’s vacillation and lack of attention to detail. Dominic Sandbrook, British historian and journalist, wrote this week that Johnson was always best playing Ronald Reagan: the showman who was aware of his own intellectual limitations and willing to surround himself with the best and the brightest to compensate. So what of the succession? But the case against Johnson emerged eventually, and in two parts. At the heart of government, Johnson’s critics claimed, lay an ideological void.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced his resignation Thursday after droves of top government officials quit over the latest scandal to implicate him, ...

"In the last few days, I tried to persuade my colleagues that it would be eccentric to change governments when we're delivering so much and when we have such a vast mandate," Johnson said. Cummings said Johnson even now is "playing for time" and will try to stay on if he's allowed to remain in office until the fall. He told members the government would not "seek to implement new policies or make major changes of direction." When allegations of Downing Street parties emerged, Johnson told lawmakers "there was no party" and no rules were broken. In a tweet, he urged the Conservative Party to "Evict TODAY or he'll cause CARNAGE." Russia "would prefer someone who is not so antagonistic or belligerent," he added. The timetable for that process was set to be announced next week. I want you to know how sad I am to be giving up the best job in the world. Johnson said they had been through "so much," but he did not signal any of it was his fault. "I know there are many people who are relieved, and perhaps quite a few who will also be disappointed. And my friends, in politics, no one is remotely indispensable," Johnson said. "As we have seen at Westminster ... when the herd moves, it moves.

Analysis: Partygate was the last straw, but the long view of history will count a broader catalogue of corruption.

Cummings agreed in a court challenge that one of these had been awarded because he knew the people involved, but argued they were the best for the job and extreme urgency justified the decision. It was some of Hancock’s personal contacts who were in the spotlight when it came to contracts for the government’s £37bn NHS test and trace programme. Alex Bourne, who had owned the Cock Inn, near to Hancock’s old constituency home, was named as the sole subcontractor for the work in a DHSC Covid contract. Ayanda, a “family office” finance house in London, was awarded two PPE contracts for a total of £252m after being referred to the VIP lane because its representative, Andrew Mills, was an adviser to Liz Truss, the then trade secretary. Critics complained nevertheless that more open appointments and procurement, even in the emergency of the pandemic, were important to safeguarding government business from potential corruption. Meller said he was extremely proud of his contribution to the PPE effort. He was cleared of deliberate wrongdoing by fellow MPs – they found Ross had ultimately paid for the villa although he did not own it – but the tone of seeking favours and a casual disregard for the rules was set. It was not until 2 March that he chaired Cobra. The lack of leadership and a characteristic reluctance to act contributed to the UK’s high Covid death toll, according to Johnson’s critics. The Randox Covid contracts were just one example of what was initially politely tagged Johnson’s “chumocracy”. Randox and Matt Hancock, the then health secretary, both claimed that an investigation into the contracts by the public spending watchdog, the National Audit Office (NAO), had vindicated them. But in years to come, his era as prime minister is likely to be remembered for something even more corrosive than Partygate: a cronyism that favoured the politically connected with top jobs and Covid contracts worth billions. He did not check the details of financial arrangements for the £15,000-a week villa they had stayed in when he declared it as a gift from Ross in the MPs’ register. The morning after, following a U-turn, the Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, called Johnson out for “corruption” and the opposition finally began to gain traction.

The embattled, soon to be discarded prime minister, plans to stay in office until his fellow Conservative Party members choose his successor by the fall.

David Gauke, writing in the New Statesman, explained that May and Cameron “may have been flawed, but Johnson is different. The race to succeed Johnson kicked off Friday, with lawmaker Tom Tugendhat out of the gates early. Any Conservative lawmaker can put their name in the hat as long as they have enough nominations. He previously stood in for Johnson while the prime minister was seriously ill with covid. Cameron left because he lost the Brexit referendum to Johnson. Many are wary of what Johnson might do during his last summer at No. 10.

He was famed for his ability to escape a political scandal. What brought down the British prime minister in the end?

We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. But even he was unable to maneuver his way out of his latest misstep. There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.

The acrimonious relationship between Boris Johnson and Russian leader Vladimir Putin is not a surprise. In the European Union, officials are hoping for better ...

The acrimonious relationship between Boris Johnson and Russian leader Vladimir Putin might not come as a surprise to many. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Johnson spoke Thursday after the resignation speech. In the European Union, officials are now hoping for better relations with the United Kingdom. Zelenskyy "thanked the Prime Minister for his decisive action on Ukraine, and said the Ukrainian people were grateful for the UK's efforts," according to a Downing Street spokeswoman. - In the European Union, officials are hoping for better relations with the United Kingdom. As events unfolded in the U.K. Thursday, the spokesperson for the Kremlin, Dmitry Peskov said: "He doesn't like us, we don't like him either," according to a Reuters translation.

Boris Johnson's resignation as British prime minister is not just a portentous political event. His time in office — and the nature of his departure — throw up ...

The end of any leader's career is an opportunity to reflect on what expectations we have of our democratic representatives. The fall of Johnson could be taken as a historical juncture to be built upon — and not just in the U.K. These might all have attracted a degree of weary popular interest in the Westminster soap opera. Further, Johnson's end came in the immediate wake of accusations of serious sexual misconduct against a senior figure in his government. Parliaments, which are supposed to hold governments to account on behalf of the public, need to assert their power. Some have argued that the political debate preceding the Brexit referendum was a nadir; that public hopes and fears were cynically exploited by politicians who did not even believe the substance of their own messages.

After weathering numerous storms that would have sunk others, Boris Johnson's time as prime minister comes to an ignoble end, mired in scandal and having ...

He claimed he “got Brexit done”, despite currently being involved in a major dispute with the EU over the deal he signed in 2019 and now wants to change. Johnson either does not believe, or does not want to admit, that he is unpopular with voters. Some claim that staying in post a little longer is just another attempt by Johnson to ride things out until they calm down, a tactic that has worked so many times before. Johnson tried to present himself as a successful prime minister brought down by the whims of his party following their “herd instinct”. Johnson may have resigned as party leader, but he is not yet gone. Despite his best efforts, Johnson will not be remembered in the manner he tried to portray himself in his speech. For all the current talk about the importance of honesty and integrity, the fact is that until very recently, numerous MPs and ministers were outwardly supportive of Johnson no matter how disingenuous that required them to be. But the resignations were coming faster than he could replace them – including Michelle Donelan –who Johnson had appointed education secretary just two days before. Despite the growing pressure to go, Johnson insisted on staying. He tried to replace the vacancies, but there were just too many. He had fired Michael Gove – the levelling-up secretary and was attempting to fill vacancies. When health secretary Sajid Javid and chancellor Rishi Sunak resigned, it seemed the writing was on the wall for Johnson. But given his “Teflon” track record, many wondered whether this time would be any different.

In his time as Mayor of London and Prime Minister, he has relished the opportunity to dress up, be it as a police officer, fishmonger, or serious politician.

Boris Johnson plays tennis Especially if it gave him an opportunity to dress up. Boris Johnson plays football

As many as a dozen candidates were on Friday eyeing up replacing Boris Johnson as British prime minister after he was forced to quit by his own party, ...

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A field of candidates to replace departing Prime Minister Boris Johnson began to take shape Friday, even as some Conservative Party lawmakers pushed to get ...

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson gestures as he leaves 10 Downing Street in London on July 6, 2022, a day before announcing his resignation. I worked on ...

We invite you to join the discussion on Facebook and Twitter. Jessica Tarlov is head of research at Bustle Digital Group and a Fox News contributor. But at the most basic level, the public trust isn’t something to be trifled with. Norms and limits matter. But there are very real lessons for our own leadership class here in America from the Boris Johnson experience. A politician has nothing without the public trust. The big Brexit sell, coupled with mismanagement, lies and sidestepping of other issues, all added up to a huge betrayal. And whether Britons are talking about it explicitly or not, as they sit around their kitchen tables, Brexit underlies critical aspects of society that are affecting quality of life at very difficult times. As Anne Applebaum writes in The Atlantic, “The electorate was promised that departure from the EU would lead not only to fewer immigrants but to greater prosperity, more welfare spending, less crowded hospitals. That doesn’t mean that the “haves” versus the “have nots” isn’t a very real issue. It felt completely unnatural to hear him talk about how bad globalization had been for most Britons or the breakdown of society due to the vast gap between the elites and everyone else. Johnson rolled out his hugely popular fleet of “Boris Bikes” and added cycle lanes throughout the city; while he was mayor, the homicide rate fell 50 percent; and the Greater London Authority built nearly 100,00 affordable homes.

“People have known that Boris Johnson lies for 30 years,” writer and academic Rory Stewart, a former Conservative member of Parliament, said recently. “He's probably the best liar we've ever had as a prime minister. He knows a hundred different ways to ...

He has at least one other child, a daughter born during a liaison with a married adviser when he was the (still-married) mayor of London, in the 2010s. In 2016, serving simultaneously as mayor of London and a member of Parliament, Johnson betrayed the Conservative Party leader, Prime Minister David Cameron, when he led the pro-leave side of the Brexit debate, contrary to the party’s position. When he was editor of the Spectator magazine, he lied to the editor, Conrad Black, promising not to serve in Parliament while working at the magazine. Born Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson — he began using “Boris” in a sort of rebranding exercise in high school — the soon-to-be-ex prime minister has a long and well-documented history both of evading the truth and of acting as if he believes himself to be exempt from the normal rules of behavior. His resignation speech, in which he vowed to remain in office until the Conservatives could choose a new leader, was notable for its lack of self-awareness and its misreading of the curdled mood of his former supporters. (Johnson repaid the money.) There were the private text messages he exchanged with a wealthy British businessman over his plan to manufacture ventilators in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, which raised questions of impropriety.

His political career has consisted of chucking rocks over the walls of the neighbours. The damage will last for years, says Irish Times columnist Fintan ...

Johnson made the rule of law and the honouring of treaties into another of his bad jokes. Even while Johnson was doing good by supporting Ukraine, he was simultaneously giving Vladimir Putin grounds to believe that the west only pretends to believe in the rule of law. He played with the delusions of his admirers in the Democratic Unionist party, egging them on or abandoning them as the mood took him. He deliberately trivialised the problems of the Irish border, comparing it to the line between two traffic zones in London. He dismissed Northern Ireland as the tail that was wagging the Brexit dog – an irritating appendage, in other words. The worst aspect of this is his reckless sabotaging of the Good Friday agreement. The soundtrack to Johnson’s political career is the crash of breaking glass as he chucks rocks over the walls of the neighbours across the Irish Sea and the Channel. The construction products of Johnson’s imagination – Boris Island, the garden bridge in London, the fabulous bridge that was going to connect Scotland to Northern Ireland – were fantasies whose very grandiosity made them infantile. It was the destructive side, that pleasure in political vandalism, that became real – a reality in which Britain seems likely to be trapped for a long time after his departure. It is hard to think of a figure at once so fatuous and so consequential, so flippant and yet so profoundly influential. As Europe faces two overlapping existential crises (the climate crisis and the invasion of Ukraine), Johnson’s Britain has made itself a source of further disruption and uncertainty. A dense but delicate network of connections and relationships – with Ireland as well as with the continent – has been cut or badly frayed. His triviality has diminished it in the eyes of the world. Yet he has remade the political architecture of Britain, of Ireland and of Europe.

In Britain, prime ministers are not directly elected by the public. General elections work more like congressional elections in the United States, where the ...

That move could, and would very likely be blocked by the Conservatives, however, as they are still in charge of the government. When only two candidates remain, members of the wider Conservative Party from across the country vote for who they want to be their next leader. The leader of the party that wins the most seats in parliament generally becomes the prime minister. Over the past few months, Johnson narrowly survived a vote of no confidence by his party, and was fined by police for violating COVID-19 restrictions during Britain's pandemic lockdown, when he attended parties at his official residence. The resignations were in response to the latest in a series of scandals, this one involving former government minister Chris Pincher. Candidates were quick to start throwing their hats in the ring to replace Johnson, while some critics said he should be removed immediately.

The king of Brexit politics fell so far, so quickly, once holding a supermajority of Parliament in 2019. But thanks to Partygate and a litany of other ...

The right-wing press recognizes him as one of its own, and it has rallied to his defense in his final hours. The aspiring successors to Johnson’s throne are unlikely to offer more than a revolution in manners: tougher on sleaze and a few less lies, while the fundamental pillars of Tory Britain — rising poverty, underfunded public services, low taxes on the rich, xenophobia and culture wars — remain in place. Johnson, meanwhile, is expected to resume his role as a mischievous, overpaid journalist for the Tory press. The crucial moment came not with the Pincher revelations or any specific scandal but when, on June 23, Johnson lost two special elections in one day: the first in a traditional Tory area in the South, the second in a post-industrial seat in the North. The Conservatives hadn’t lost the former in almost a century. He indulged in self-aggrandizement, reminding his audience that in 2019 he won “the biggest Conservative majority since 1987.” He dodged any accountability for his predicament, pinning blame instead on the media — which is overwhelmingly pro-Conservative — and the “herd instinct” of his colleagues. “We are watching a still-functioning democracy dispatch its bombastic populist leader because his amorality and narcissistic dishonesty were simply too much,” Michelle Goldberg wrote in the New York Times. But although the timing suggested a connection, the ministers resigning rarely made any mention of the Pincher scandal (unsurprising, perhaps, seeing as there are 56 MPs with sexual-misconduct claims against them). “My little theory about Boris is that it’s when he is really down that he’s at his most dangerous, and that you should buy him like a stock, like a distressed stock, and he’ll be back,” Lord Charles Moore, Johnson’s former boss at the Telegraph, told me in March. “Pincher by name and pincher by nature” was how Johnson reportedly referred to him. He has spent his entire life — from the corridors of Eton and Oxford to his columns for the Daily Telegraph and Spectator to his attention-seeking antics as mayor of London — dreaming of becoming prime minister. Solely with this ambition in mind, he championed Britain’s detrimental departure from the European Union, helped to topple two Conservative prime ministers, and left a trail of betrayal and broken promises behind him. Johnson succumbed to the inevitable: His position was untenable. “It is a wonderful and necessary fact of political biology that we never know when our time is up.

Scandals? Sure. But also inflation and poor growth.

The letters are a response to mounting concerns that such data could be used to surveil women seeking abortions in the wake of the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe. v. “For a quarter-century, the unidentified woman in Pleasant Valley Memorial Park was known as ‘the Christmas Tree Lady,’ because she had placed a small Christmas tree on a blanket next to her, sometime early on Dec. 18, 1996. “The spate of shooting attacks in communities such as Highland Park, Ill.; Uvalde, Tex.; and Buffalo has riveted attention on America’s staggering number of public mass killings. Border crossers are arriving from more countries and in greater numbers than ever, at the same time that Mexican migration has surged to levels not matched since the mid-2000s,” Nick Miroff reports. They warn of the potential for broad government surveillance, as well as ways it could be used to intimidate or harass people seeking abortion. “This morning, the Labor Department reported that 372,000 jobs were created in June, a healthy showing that beat forecasts, which generally expected between 200,000 and 300,000 new jobs. None of this is to say that scandals and personality don’t matter. And though he became prime minister in 2019 after pledging to ‘get Brexit done,’ his government is still mired in the details, even threatening to pull out of its own deal regarding the Northern Irish border.” This era of audacity and rule-breaking in British politics could possibly be about to end. Sadly, in the current circumstances, the public are concluding we are now neither.” The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development recently estimated that Britain would have the worst economic growth of any G-20 country outside Russia next year. But there’s also a lesson in his political riches-to-rags story — from landslide 2019 victory to 2022 vote of no confidence, as my colleague Adam Taylor put it, and ultimately to resignation.

On Friday last week, Downing Street said firstly that the prime minister had not been aware of any allegations against Pincher when he promoted him in February, ...

She told Johnson it was the only way to “force your hand”. Had she waited the length of a maths lesson, she might have changed her mind. Then he pressed Johnson on why the former whip had been promoted in the first place. There was even a scheduled early evening phone call with the Queen. But, remarkably, Johnson concluded for a moment that he could fight on. The remarkable disintegration of his premiership began the moment he left the Nato photocalls behind. At the preceding G7 in Bavaria, speaking loudly enough for the camera to pick up, he had joked: “Can we take our clothes off?” in a supposed riposte to an old shot of Vladimir Putin topless. At Nato he had at least tried to think long-term, making a public promise to lift defence spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2030.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson resigned Thursday after a series of scandals and missteps caused fellow Conservative Party lawmakers to desert him. (Frank ...

“Them’s the breaks.” Johnson had survived a no-confidence vote last month but emerged badly bruised after only 211 of 369 Conservative members of Parliament said they wanted to keep him as their party’s leader. He won’t want to just be a celebrity. He isn’t someone who I think could exist beyond the limelight. But Johnson, who after refusing for days to step down relented Thursday, will remain in office while the ruling Conservative Party chooses his successor, a process that could take weeks or even months. Johnson has promised to be a lame duck.

U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson is stepping down from his position. As a leader favored by former President Donald Trump, Johnson was dubbed "Britain's ...

The Kremlin said it was a "just reward." " He should have gone a long time ago," was one comment echoed around the U.K. Johnson, in the end, after some three years in the job, said he understood. That last phrase, by the way, had U.K. newspapers scrambling for a translation. One of those not pleased with that: opposition Labour party leader Keir Starmer. "He needs to go completely," Starmer said. "In politics, no one is remotely indispensable."

Brexit has been a chronic drag on British growth, compounding the pain of inflation that is the highest among the G-7 economies.

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Critics of the outgoing Conservative U.K. prime minister experienced considerable schadenfreude after he announced his resignation, in July 2022.

“Did Madame Tussauds in Berlin Place Trump Wax Figure in Dumpster?” Snopes.Com, https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/madame-tussauds-dump-trump/. Accessed 8 July 2022. “Did Madame Tussauds Dress Trump Statue in Golf Attire After Election Defeat?” Snopes.Com, https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-madame-tussauds-golf-election/. Accessed 8 July 2022. Boris Johnson Immortalised in Wax at Madame Tussauds. https://www.blackpoolgazette.co.uk/lifestyle/staycation/boris-johnson-immortalised-in-wax-at-madame-tussauds-3621649. Accessed 8 July 2022. Smout, Alistair, and Kylie Maclellan. “Factbox: The Many Scandals of Boris Johnson’s Premiership.” Reuters, 7 July 2022. Penna, Dominic, and Matthew Robinson. “Full List of Tories Who Have Called for Boris Johnson to Resign over Partygate and Pincher.” The Telegraph, 6 July 2022. The photos were authentic and not the result of digital manipulation, and the descriptions accurately stated that Madame Tussauds in Blackpool had deliberately placed their figure of Johnson outside a nearby Jobcentre Plus, as a joke or publicity stunt. PA Media photographer Peter Byrne took the photographs on July 7, outside the Jobcentre Plus at 8 Albert Rd. in Blackpool — a two-minute drive from Madame Tussauds: Boris Johnson’s figure has proven to be an extremely popular attraction at our sister site in London, and we thought it only right that we ‘level up’ and have our very own wax work of the Prime Minister for our visitors to enjoy too. On July 7, for example, Twitter users posted pictures of the statue, along with captions that characterized the move as expert trolling on the part of Madame Tussauds: As part of that response, social media users enthusiastically shared photographs that appeared to show a Madame Tussauds wax figure of Johnson, relocated to stand outside an employment office in the north-western seaside town of Blackpool — with the joke being that he would soon find himself unemployed and, in theory, in need of assistance finding work. In July 2022, critics of U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson enjoyed a measure of schadenfreude when a series of scandals, and a collapse in support from his government ministers, prompted him to announce his resignation as Conservative party leader and — eventually — as prime minister. Critics of the outgoing Conservative U.K. prime minister experienced considerable schadenfreude after he announced his resignation, in July 2022.