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LONDON — A defiant Boris Johnson was battling to stay in power as prime minister Wednesday after his government was rocked by the resignation of several ministers who said they could no longer serve under his scandal-tarred leadership.
Months of discontent over Johnson’s judgment and ethics within his governing Conservative Party erupted with the resignations of Treasury chief Rishi Sunak and Health Secretary Sajid Javid within minutes of each other on Tuesday evening.
In a scathing statement to Parliament Wednesday, Javid said he had concluded that “the problem starts at the top and that is not going to change.”
“This week again, we have reason to question the truth and integrity of what we’ve all been told. And at some point we have to conclude that enough is enough,” added Javid. “I believe that point is now.”
His comments came after Johnson faced a tough Prime Minister’s Questions, an often rowdy weekly session during which parliamentarians quiz the premier on a wide variety of issues.
Although he was repeatedly asked whether he would quit, Johnson vowed that “the job of a prime minister in difficult circumstances when you’ve been handed a colossal mandate is to keep going.”
Even as the session was taking place, Johnson’s Environment Minister Jo Churchill and Housing Minister Stuart Andrew both released letters announcing their resignations from the Cabinet.
Johnson also fired Cabinet Minister Michael Gove on Wednesday, a shocking move that further indicates he refuses to leave his position. Gove’s dismissal was a late burst of added drama to a day of twists in Westminster.
Within an hour of news breaking on Gove’s firing, Simon Hart posted a letter he wrote resigning as Secretary of State for Wales to his Twitter account.
“I have never been a massive fan of Ministerial resignations being the best means of forcing change,” Hart’s letter read. “Colleagues have done their upmost in private and in public to help you turn this ship around, but it is with sadness that I feel we have passed the point where this is possible.”
In total 38 MPs have quit the Government since Tuesday evening and the string of resignations from both the liberal and right-wing branches of the Conservative Party showed that the danger to Johnson was far from over.
How we got here
The final straw for Sunak and Javid was the prime minister’s shifting explanations about his handling of sexual misconduct allegations within Conservative ranks.
The latest scandal came to light last week when Chris Pincher resigned as Conservative deputy chief whip amid complaints that he had groped two men at a private club. That triggered a series of reports about past allegations leveled against Pincher and questions about why Johnson promoted him to a senior job enforcing party discipline.
Johnson’s office initially said he wasn’t aware of the previous accusations when he promoted Pincher in February. But by Monday, a spokesman said Johnson knew of allegations that were “either resolved or did not progress to a formal complaint.”
When a former top civil servant in the Foreign Office said Johnson had been briefed about an allegation against Pincher in 2019, Johnson’s office changed its story again, saying the prime minister had forgotten that Pincher was the subject of an official complaint.
It was all too much for ministers who have been sent onto radio and TV to defend the government’s position, only to find the position changing by the hour.
The Pincher affair is the latest in a series of embarrassing incidents that have forced Johnson to do public U-turns.
Critics questioned Johnson’s ethics last year after a government report found that he had acted “unwisely” when he allowed a Conservative Party donor to settle an invoice for some of the redecoration costs of his Downing Street residence before paying it back.
In the past few months, he has also been fined by police and slammed by an investigator’s report over lockdown-breaching parties in government during the Covid pandemic. In June, Lord Christopher Geidt became the second ethics adviser to quit in less than two years, after admitting Johnson might have broke ministerial rules over the scandal dubbed “Partygate.”
Johnson survived a no-confidence vote by his party in which 41% of Conservative lawmakers voted to oust him.
