For British public, anger at Boris boils down to questions of fairness

Prime Minister’s Questions, the weekly interrogation of Britain’s top office by elected officials, is always a dramatic high point in Parliament. But Wednesday’s encounter was truly extraordinary: a cacophony of voices – not just from opposition parties but from a senior figure in the governing Conservatives – with a single, bracing message for Prime Minister Boris Johnson: It is time for you to go.

When, or whether, he will do so remains unclear.

But the pressure on him is building, only two years after an election victory that gave his party a commanding majority in the House of Commons. And while Mr. Johnson has a long record of parrying such political challenges, this time seems very different.

The main item on the charge sheet – hypocrisy – isn’t new. Rather, what might be called the new politics of the pandemic are in place: a deeper change in the atmosphere, and the rules, defining what’s seen as acceptable in a political leader.

Mr. Johnson’s main misstep might have been tricky to defend even in more ordinary times: He sanctioned, and in at least one case joined, food-and-drink parties in the official Downing Street residence, at the very time his government’s lockdown rules barred such gatherings for the rest of the country.

But now, it’s personal. It’s being felt as a visceral affront by the many millions of Britons – including voters and politicians who have supported him through earlier political challenges – who have been following the rules, seeing their own family’s lives turned upside down during two long years of the pandemic.

“Everybody knows the stories of relatives attending births via Zoom, not meeting grandchildren, or failing to be present with a dying relative in the critical last moments,” explains Andrew Russell, professor of politics at the University of Liverpool.

The anger being directed at the prime minister and his Downing Street team, he says, is because they’re seen as “not taking that [sacrifice] seriously.”

A failure of fairness

Political reproach has come and gone during Mr. Johnson’s 2 1/2 years as prime minister, including over a plan to seize control of a parliamentary anti-corruption watchdog following a cash-for-access scandal, as well as allegations of party donors paying for the refurbishment of the prime minister’s residence.

But Mr. Johnson has survived the controversies largely thanks to the support he amassed due to Brexit and the patient attitude of the public toward his pandemic policies.

Yet now, there’s real anger, and it shows little sign of fading. As he did during Prime Minister’s Questions, Mr. Johnson has attempted to fend off questions over the parties by saying that critics need to wait until an official inquiry, being carried out by Cabinet Office civil servant Sue Gray, is completed.

But regardless of the outcome of the inquiry, the Downing Street parties broke what Daniel Finkelstein, political columnist at The Times newspaper, describes as the core bond of “reciprocity” with voters. Expecting others to lock down while not doing so themselves has “triggered the fairness norm” in voters’ minds, Mr. Finkelstein says.

The idea of sacrifice has also changed. Professor Russell says the hardships of the pandemic accelerated a sense of togetherness that Britons dub “the Blitz spirit.” While that has somewhat faded as lockdown regulations eased, the pandemic has lifted ideas that altruism and sacrifice are for so-called celebrities as much as for the ordinary citizen.

Earlier in the pandemic, lesser figures around Mr. Johnson experienced the political effects of the anger that their failure to live up to the public’s sense of fairness generated.

When government scientist Neil Ferguson broke lockdown rules, he had to resign. The same happened when former Health Secretary Matt Hancock was found to have breached the social distancing guidelines he had long asked others to follow.
 
And the new pandemic-era intensity of grassroots resentment of such breaches is becoming evident outside Britain as well, most recently in the controversy surrounding tennis star Novak Djokovic’s attempt to to compete in the Australian Open – despite his decision to forgo the vaccinations required for other visitors to Australia.

There’s a growing sense among many people, says Patrick Diamond, a former policy adviser in Downing Street, that there is “one rule for the government and the rich” and another rule for the rest. “That has struck home.”

And it’s hitting home for Mr. Johnson especially. He rose to political prominence in large part due to an ability to connect with ordinary people, to communicate and entertain them in equal measure. But news of the Downing Street parties has appeared in the media in a slow drip-drip, contributing to a sense of unending exposed breaches – and frustration that has now reached a critical mass. “All of a sudden, he finds himself no longer of the people. He looks very much like the elite, doing what he wants,” says Dr. Diamond, now a professor of politics at Queen Mary, University of London.

Are the walls crumbling for Boris?

The debate could be fatal for Mr. Johnson’s tenure, as he faces a growing number of calls to quit. A leadership contest would be triggered if 15% of Tory members of Parliament (54 of them) send a letter of “no confidence” to the powerful Conservative backbench 1922 Committee. There is speculation in the media that between 20 and 40 letters have already been sent to the committee.

Dr. Diamond says that part of the prime minister’s fightback plan is to throw “red meat that will please the Tory base.” The government has already announced plans to take away the BBC funding and send the Royal Navy to push back refugee boats coming from France, both moves popular with the party core. The pressure the prime minister is under also may spur him to enact more radical policies in an attempt to deal with the rising cost of living.

But if Mr. Johnson is found to have breached the ministerial code, his position will become untenable not just to ministers, but to the very people who helped elect him.

Mr. Johnson owes his majority to “red wall” constituencies in the north of England, so called because they long supported the Labour Party, whose color is red. Many of those communities flipped to Mr. Johnson’s Conservatives in 2019, but they have suffered disproportionately in the pandemic. On Wednesday, one of the Tory MPs elected in 2019 in the red-wall region defected to Labour in dramatic fashion, perhaps another sign that Mr. Johnson’s time is running out.

“Voters, especially those in left-behind areas of the country, are constantly in search of trustworthy politicians who can revive their hope in politics,” says Sam Bright, an investigative political journalist from Huddersfield, a red-wall constituency. “Yet, when a politician shatters those hopes, people are unforgiving.”