In the end, it was almost a Trumpian departure for Boris Johnson, humiliating in its form. Where Joe Biden’s predecessor went out of his way to cling on to power after the presidential election of November 2020, the British leader tried every trick in the book to ensure that he did not have to leave 10 Downing Street.
It did not occur to Johnson that in democratic politics there is such a thing as decency and self-respect, that when these attributes of the human character go missing, life --- even a political life --- loses meaning. Donald Trump thought an insurrection, an assault on the Capitol would prevent Biden’s ascension to the presidency. He has been tarred for life.
For Boris Johnson, the delusion that despite so many people in the government, fifty of them, submitting their resignations and walking away, he would go on exercising leadership was at work. Even as the whole of Britain, and among them were many of his defenders, knew power was draining away from him, he persisted in his belief that he could carry on. On Thursday morning, he realized that the end of the road had been reached.
It should not have happened this way. With so much scandal piling up around him, with the police imposing a fine on him, the ethical thing for Johnson would have been to resign before people began to demand his resignation. That it took Sajid Javid and Rishi Sunak to quit office to turn up the heat on Johnson was a happening the departing prime minister should not have let come to pass. Had democratic principles been important for him, Johnson would have taken the plunge before Javid and Sunak did, before all those others did.
Johnson was left, in the end, presiding over a government unravelling in chaos. And yet he went on shouting out the refrain that he was given a mandate by the British electorate in 2019 and he intended to uphold it --- by staying on. He clearly forgot that in a parliamentary form of government, it is not the leader of a party who gets a mandate.
It is the party, through seeing its candidates get elected in their constituencies, which comes by a mandate. Boris Johnson got the lines blurred between parliamentary and presidential government. It is only in the latter that one individual comes by a mandate. In the former, the party is all.
Certainly Johnson has fought a hard battle to stay on in office. But it was an ugly battle, for he was defying the country and clearly not willing to acknowledge the moral failings which were chipping away at his leadership minute by minute.
He spoke, at Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday, of carrying on even as the just departed Sajid Javid delivered him a stinging rebuke on his style of leadership from his new place a few rows away in the House of Commons. It was a hollow man, an enervated Johnson, who yet tried convincing the country that he was in charge.
Aspiring to power takes tenacity and intelligence. Leaving power is often a tale of heartbreak. But being forced from power, as Richard Nixon learnt by way of Watergate, is plain disgrace. Boris Johnson perhaps did not remember the shame Nixon went through before his fellow Republicans told him the game was up.
And not until Johnson’s ministers, among them his loyalist Priti Patel and his new chancellor Nadhim Zahawi, informed him that the only way for the governmental haemorrhaging to stop was for him to go, did he read the writing on the wall. Indeed, the writing had been there for weeks. Johnson pretended it was not there. Or that it would be erased.
Societies go through indescribable pain when their leaders, consumed by hubris and narcissism, have to be dragged out of office kicking and screaming. And that is what British society has done to Boris Johnson. He brought it on himself. He remained blissfully oblivious to political tradition.
Harold Macmillan made way, for reasons of physical as well as political health, for Alec-Douglas Home in 1963. In 1976, Harold Wilson happily handed over the baton to James Callaghan. Margaret Thatcher went away when her party no longer felt confident about her leadership. David Cameron and Theresa May resigned because they knew it was the sophisticated thing to do.
All these politicians belong in a class where urbanity has lent them distinction. That is not what one can say about Boris Johnson. He refused to go gently into the night. When he did go, no one lent him a lantern for him to light his way to gentle, respected retirement.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is a journalist and biographer.