Boris Johnson Resignation: Tensions with Sunak and Rifts in the Conservative Party

His bombastic resignation from parliament has exacerbated tensions with Prime Minister Sunak and rifts in the Conservative party

On Friday, the former Conservative prime minister of the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson, resigned from his role as MP after learning the result of the inquiry by the House of Commons committee, from which he was heard last March, regarding the notorious scandal such as “Partygate”. Also last Friday, two other Conservative MPs very close to Johnson, Nadine Dorries and Nigel Adams, resigned. Both said they did so for age and professional reasons, but the resignations could have something to do with their failure to be nominated for the House of Lords: their candidacies, proposed by Johnson as former prime minister, were rejected last week by the commission in charge of it.

The resignations of Johnson, Dorries and Adams have been interpreted as a kind of political sabotage against the current Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who now faces a by-election of three members of parliament, at a time when polls indicate the Conservative party of the United Kingdom very much at a disadvantage than the Labor Party.

Il Committee of Privileges is the commission of inquiry of the British Parliament which had been tasked with investigating the responsibilities in the so-called “Partygate”, the scandal concerning the parties organized in the prime minister’s residence in Downing Street, London, between May 2020 and April 2021, in violation of the restrictions introduced by the government itself to counter the coronavirus pandemic. Johnson had been heard by the commission in March 2023, and had spoken for more than three hours.

Friday the Committee of Privileges he delivered privately Johnson a dossier with his own conclusions: the text of the document will be made public on Thursday morning, but Johnson’s resignation speech last Friday partially revealed its content. That is, that the former prime minister, when he declared that all the measures on social distancing imposed by his government had been respected during the holidays in question, would have lied in parliament.

The committee, which does not have the power to suspend MPs, had nonetheless called on parliament to proceed with a vote on whether and for how long to suspend Johnson from his role as MP, and a suspension appeared very likely. If it had lasted more than ten days, the suspension would have triggered a procedure called “recall petition”: a collection of signatures is set up in the electoral college of the parliamentarian subjected to the suspension, and if the signatures reach at least 10 percent of those entitled to vote in the constituency, the MP is removed and a by-election is set up to replace him.

To avoid all of this, Johnson chose to resign, making a very combative and critical speech against the allegations. Johnson’s resignation is held politically very importantand an attempt to create controversy and destabilize the government: last Friday, in his speech to parliament, Johnson also harshly criticized current Prime Minister Sunak, accusing him of raising taxes again, failing to exploit the possibilities of Brexit and not being “conservative enough”.

The simultaneous resignations of two other MPs make the situation for the current prime minister Sunak even more complicated: three by-elections have a strong political weight, especially if candidates from other parties win. Johnson, who lost his direct political power by choosing to resign, still has a strong following within the Conservative party (although he no longer enjoys much support from the electorate). Furthermore, he still has a strong influence on the media, especially on some newspapers close to the Conservative party such as the Daily Telegraph.

Tensions between Johnson and Sunak are nothing new. When he resigned as Prime Minister Johnson had earned the right to propose nominations to confer various official honors, and last week he had asked to Sunak to forward a request to House of Lords Appointments Commission, the independent body made up of members of the House of Lords which is responsible for overseeing honours. Johnson had included forty proposals, among which three were for the title of Lord – therefore a seat in the UK House of Lords – to Conservative MPs close to him.

Sunak had initially agreed submission of the request, receiving a lot of criticism due to the fact that eight of the people proposed by Johnson to receive the honor were linked to the “Partygate” scandal. There House of Lords Appointments Commission rejected the request, and last Friday Johnson had asked Sunak to submit another, effectively putting pressure on the commission, but Sunak had refused, declaring that Johnson, with his request, had demanded “that I do something that I did not consider correct”. In response Johnson called Sunak’s words «garbage», arguing that submitting a new request was instead a «simple formality». Among the candidates for nominations to the House of Lords were also Nadine Dorries and Nigel Adams, the two MPs who resigned last Friday.

Currently polling UK elections they favor the Labor party, which is 16 per cent ahead of the Conservatives. According to some observers, the only strategy that Sunak could adopt to recover the electorate and win the next political elections (which will be in January 2025) is to pander as much as possible to a “quiet period”, during which hopefully the UK economy improves, inflation slows down and no feuds or splits are created within the Conservative party.

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