BoJo’s No-Nos and the Comparative Sanity of British Politics

G od save the queen — and, maybe, we owe her an apology.

The people of the United Kingdom may be a little embarrassed by their prime minister just now, but they should be proud of their political system.

Boris Johnson survived the no-confidence vote he was subjected to on Monday evening, but he probably is on his way out: Though he held on, he got less than 60 percent of the votes of Conservative Party MPs, and that’s a bad omen. Margaret Thatcher did better than that in a 1989 leadership challenge, winning more than 80 percent of the votes — and was out of power a year later. Boris Johnson, whatever his virtues, is no Margaret Thatcher. Theresa May won a confidence vote with 63 percent during the Brexit crisis and was out of power in five months. John Major limped on after the 1995 challenge to his leadership and probably would have been deposed by Conservative MPs if the voters had not done the job themselves, giving the Tories their worst defeat in the 20th century and launching Tony Blair into power.

You’ll notice that British leaders seem to get subjected to confidence votes pretty often. I should clarify here for those unfamiliar with the British system that these are challenges from within their own parties, not from the opposition. In the United States, it is rare for members of Congress to break very seriously with presidents of their party, a habit that congressional Democrats are about to demonstrate as they get ready to sink with the USS Malarky. Not since Ronald Reagan’s primary challenge to President Gerald Ford has the United States seen something nearly equivalent to the kind of intraparty leadership challenge that Britons witness regularly.

And though my republican heart does not love my writing so, I suspect that we can thank Her Majesty for that.

In the United States, we deify presidents. British prime ministers have more real power within their system than U.S. presidents do within ours, because they wield executive and legislative power at once, but in the United States, we identify the nation with the president in a cultish and mystical way. Because the Brits have a monarch to serve that role, they need not invest their prime minister with the duty to personify the country.

And so they are free to kick their PM around a little bit. That’s a good thing.

Bojo’s no-nos were flouting Covid restrictions and then being less than entirely honest with Parliament about the extent of his violations. Because the British are a basically decent people — and because the British Parliament, unlike our Congress, has not exchanged self-respect for self-importance — it is the lying to Parliament that seems to have rankled the prime minister’s exasperated colleagues. For an American, that is positively quaint: Our presidents — Obama, Trump, Biden, take your pick — lie constantly, even when they don’t need to, even when lying hurts them more than it helps them. They seem to lie just to keep in practice.

The closest thing we Americans are going to see to what the United Kingdom has just gone through is the apparently small-ball — but symbolically important — recall campaign against San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin, currently under way. Boudin has presided over an explosion of crime in San Francisco and an implosion in the city’s quality of life. Shootings are up, vagrancy is up, public drug use is up, shoplifting has been effectively legalized, and some people in San Francisco — mainly liberals and Democrats — have had enough. The Boudin recall is a kind of referendum on whether the Democrats intend to be the party of the New Deal or the party of social-justice Twitter. I am not much of an admirer of the New Deal or those who made it, but I do hope that Boudin is recalled — the United States would benefit enormously from having at least one political party that is not entirely insane.

As things stand, the despairing part of me sometimes thinks (the thought soon passes) that if George Washington could see what we had made of things, he might wish that he’d made his peace with King George, who may have been as crazy as a soup sandwich but surely was a more impressive figure than . . . take your pick. I am not sure that the U.S. presidency really is “the hardest job in the world,” as so many people say, but I don’t think Joe Biden is ready to do battle with a bowl of lime Jell-O.

Surely General Washington and his men didn’t freeze their asses off at Valley Forge for this.