Boris Johnson’s political death can’t wait until autumn

Prime Minister Boris Johnson is greeted by staff and his son Wilfred as he arrives back into No. 10 after resigning as the leader of the Conservative Party. Picture: Supplied

Resigned? No he hasn’t. A prime minister offers their resignation to the person who asked them to form a government. That person is the monarch, not the parliamentary Conservative Party, the press or the political editor of the BBC. Boris Johnson has promised to resign in the autumn: he has not, I repeat not, resigned.

This will not do. To put the least charitable gloss on things – always good advice in this man’s case – he has bought himself a couple more months.

There’s a war on. There’s a looming domestic economic crisis to handle. The Prime Minister’s own new chancellor has already indicated that he has no confidence in this boss. We cannot sail into the summer with a disgraced, derided and effectively paralysed captain at the helm.

At the very least Dominic Raab, the Deputy Prime Minister, could serve as interim until the autumn: a constitutional novelty, no doubt, but our constitution is unwritten and can be developed to meet an obvious, urgent need in a new situation.

The situation is new because we’re faced with the complete and personal disintegration of a national leader’s authority. This is a political death, not an orderly stepping-back. What imaginable big decision that events this summer might require does anyone now think should be taken by Johnson? To say that he can’t be asked to decide anything big is to say that we don’t need a leader of the government at all.

Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab could be called on to hold the fort if Johnson leaves, as he should, immediately. Picture: Getty Images

But we do. Suppose, for instance, a prime minister had a devastating stroke. In those circumstances, isn’t this what we’d do: put him aside at once? Johnson has suffered a comparable collapse, the only difference being that it is political not physical. In the deepest sense, we already don’t have a prime minister. There is no reason why Johnson could not leave Downing Street now, and Raab hold the fort until a new leader had been chosen by the Conservative Party.

And it need not take until October. What’s all this guff we’re hearing about “in time for the Tory conference”? What has a party conference to do with it? It cannot be beyond our wit to foreshorten the process of selecting a new leader. A week could be allowed for hats to be thrown into the ring, and another week before the hustings.

Immediately after that, Tory MPs could winnow down the candidates to the requisite two, and – eschewing speaking tours of the country – it should not take more than a fortnight for the national party membership to have listened to the pitches of both on national media, received and returned their ballot papers, and a winner announced. That’s about five weeks from now.

A political party that tells us in early July that it cannot produce a new leader until October should invite derision.

Johnson now needs to be finished off: completely, with dispatch.

With Boris it isn’t over until it’s over. It is now up to his party to see to that. Not until there’s a stake through his heart can we be sure he’s gone.

The Times