Damaged, Britain’s Boris Johnson manages to win the party’s vote of confidence

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LONDON (AP) — British Prime Minister Boris Johnson survived a no-confidence vote Monday, but a major rebellion in his Conservative Party over the so-called “partygate” scandal has dealt a severe blow to his authority and leaves him struggling. to regain support.

Johnson, who won a landslide election victory in 2019, has come under increasing pressure after he and his staff held booze-filled parties at his Downing Street office and residence when Britain was in lockdown to deal with the pandemic. of COVID-19.

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The vote was a blow to Johnson, with 41% of his lawmakers voting against his leadership after months of scandals and missteps that have raised questions about his authority to govern Britain and tarnished his reputation with the public.

But Johnson, a master of political responses, instead described the vote as a “decisive outcome,” meaning “as a government we can move forward and focus on the things that I think people really care about.”

“We can focus on what we’re doing to help people with the cost of living, what we’re doing to eliminate COVID backlogs, what we’re doing to make streets and communities safer by getting more police out Johnson said. , who for weeks has tried to steer the national conversation away from “partygate.”

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It’s a reversal of fortune for Johnson and underscores the depth of the anger against him. He was greeted with a chorus of jeers and jeers, and some muffled cheers, at events to celebrate Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee in recent days.

Several lawmakers said the vote, in which 211 lawmakers voted for Johnson to 148, was worse than expected for a prime minister who once seemed unassailable after winning the largest Conservative majority in more than three decades. .

“Boris Johnson will be relieved by this vote. But he will also understand that the next priority is to rebuild party cohesion,” David Jones, a former minister, told Reuters. “I’m sure he will be up to the challenge.”

Others were less optimistic, with one Conservative lawmaker saying on condition of anonymity: “Clearly it’s much worse than most people expected. But it is too early to say what will happen next.”

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Roger Gale, a longtime critic of Johnson, urged the prime minister to “go back to Downing Street tonight and carefully consider where you go from here.”

12-MONTH SUSPENSION

By winning the no-confidence vote, Johnson has secured a 12-month reprieve when lawmakers are unable to mount another challenge. But her predecessor, Theresa May, scored better in her 2018 confidence vote only to resign six months later.

Dozens of Conservative lawmakers have raised concerns about whether Johnson, 57, has lost his authority to govern Britain, which faces the risk of recession, rising fuel and food prices and travel chaos inflicted by the strike in the capital, London.

But his cabinet supported him, highlighting what he said were the government’s successes: a rapid rollout of COVID-19 vaccines and Britain’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

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A majority of Conservative lawmakers (at least 180) would have had to vote against Johnson for him to be impeached.

Earlier, a spokesman for Johnson’s Downing Street office said the vote “would allow the government to draw a line and move on” and that the prime minister welcomed the opportunity to make his case to lawmakers.

Johnson, a former mayor of London, came to power in Westminster as the face of the Brexit campaign in a 2016 referendum and won the 2019 election on the slogan “end Brexit.”

Jacob Rees-Mogg, Brexit opportunities minister, told Sky News that completing Britain’s exit from the European Union would be “significantly at risk without his drive and energy”.

Johnson has clashed with Brussels over Northern Ireland, raising the prospect of more barriers to British trade and alarming leaders in Ireland, Europe and the United States about the risks to the province’s 1998 peace deal.

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But it was the months of stories of what happened in Downing Street, including fights and alcohol-induced vomiting, when many people were prevented from saying goodbye to their loved ones at funerals, that did the real damage.

The move prompted lawmakers from different wings of the party to reveal that they had turned against their leader. A former ally accused the prime minister of insulting both the electorate and the party by remaining in power.

“He has presided over a culture of casual breaches of the law at 10 Downing Street in relation to COVID,” said Jesse Norman, a former junior minister, before the vote.

Johnson’s anti-corruption chief, John Penrose, also resigned.

(Reporting by Elizabeth Piper and Andrew MacAskill; Additional reporting by David Milliken, William James, Alistair Smout, Farouq Suleiman, and Helena Williams; Editing by William Schomberg and Grant McCool)