The defenestration of Boris Johnson had little to do with morality. At its core, it was about revenge.
The defenestration of Boris Johnson had little to do with morality. At its core, it was about revenge.
B oris Johnson, the U.K.’s Conservative prime minister and the biggest vote-swinger of his generation, was defenestrated with unseemly alacrity last week (though he will remain in the post until his successor is found).
The straw that broke the camel’s back, we are told, was deputy chief whip Chris Pincher. After a heavy night of drinking and groping party guests at the Carlton, an exclusive country club, a stone’s throw away from Buckingham Palace, he resigned. “I’ve embarrassed myself and other people,” he said.
In short order, the focus turned to Boris. Had Boris known about Chris Pincher’s proclivities? He, and No. 10, insisted that they had been unaware of “specific” warnings on the matter. By early July, however, Conservative Party staffers accused the prime minister of “failure to act on warnings” of sexual misconduct by Mr. Pincher. Labour Party leader Keir Starmer and others wasted little time in attacking Boris for promoting Chris Pincher to the important position of deputy chief whip this February. Within the week, with senior colleagues asking for his resignation, Boris lost all authority. Boris, it was said, needed to go. Morality demanded it. And so he went.
But was morality really the reason for his ousting? Was the man who won the largest Conservative Party majority since Thatcher removed from office because he had been unclear about Chris Pincher, or perhaps because the Pincher scandal was the last straw after a series of missteps by Boris that could no longer be ignored?
There is, in fact, reason to question these explanations, and to believe instead that this was a successful and coordinated attempt by powerful individuals and factions aggrieved by Boris to have their revenge and lance the Brexit boil.
For one thing, Chris Pincher’s appetites had in fact been known for years. And he was not alone. Indeed, in 2017, a group of Westminster researchers compiled a list of almost 40 Conservative MPs, including several cabinet ministers, accused of making unwanted sexual advances or behaving “inappropriately” toward colleagues and junior staff. The allegations ranged from forgivable and amusing, such as affairs between consenting adults, to more than a little disturbing. Under the heading of “allegations,” one can read: “Impregnated former researcher and made her have abortion & had sexual relations with other female researchers.” (The accused MP still sits on the Green Benches.) With such lascivious details, the spreadsheet went viral in October 2017.
The outlet that first reported on the allegations noted that it could not confirm all of its details. But it’s interesting to note now that Chris Pincher’s name was on the list. His entry read: “inappropriate with male researchers and heavy drinker. Touched Tom Blenkinsop (former Labour MP).”
This revelation prompted me to write for the Daily Mail about my experiences with Mr. Pincher in 2001. As a recent Olympian with political aspirations, I went to Conservative Central Office to explore politics as a potential career. I met Pincher on my first outing with the organization. That same evening, unprompted, he tried to force a sexual encounter, which I rebuffed.
In early November 2017, this story became front-page news. Within days, Chris Pincher, also deputy chief whip under Theresa May, Britain’s hapless former prime minister, resigned. Soon, however, Theresa May re-instated him. Between his resignation and his re-instatement, Theresa May had ironically backed a new code of conduct. As she wrote to the Leader of the House, she was “determined to take tough action to protect Westminster staff against sexual harassment.” How then could she re-instate a man, who had practically acknowledged his guilt? And why did other parties acquiesce with no real opposition?
Pincher served as a member of Parliament and minister under three Prime Ministers: David Cameron, Theresa May, and Boris Johnson. He had been active in politics since the early 1990s. He was a known quantity, not just to the Conservative Party but to all parties — Labour, Liberal Democrats, Scottish National Party included. If Pincher was good enough for all parties in 2017, why did he suddenly become a government-ending liability in 2022?
Answering this question requires understanding the long-standing silence over such matters in Parliament. There is a tacit mutually assured destruction (MAD) agreement in place in British politics. It says something like this: We will not talk about your perverts, and you won’t talk about ours. As Lucy Powell, current Labour shadow secretary of digital, culture, media and sports, admitted when the list was released in 2017, the Labour Party is “not going to be immune from it.”
When a sex scandal does break out, political parties tend to close ranks quickly. A little mud might be thrown for show, but the enthusiasm quickly dissipates. Political parties tend not to benefit from dwelling on the topic. Spend too much time on it, and it is only a matter of time before the “sex-harassment boomerang” comes flying back.
Political parties have become experts at brushing aside such unwanted intrusions in their daily affairs. They use the twins of deflection and obfuscation to throttle any story: First, the complainant becomes a “disgruntled” individual, whose motives are self-evidently dishonest, or worse a “failed candidate”; and, second, an internal inquiry of sorts is mentioned, the protocol of which is a mystery to all bar those who wield the power.
In the meantime, events occur and stories grows old. Attention is drawn to newer fields. The perpetrator is soon cleared of wrongdoing; the victim is erased from collective memory. Such stories rarely, if ever, lead to a political leader’s demise. Otherwise, the leader of the Labour Party himself might well have seen his reign a Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition cut short. Just this year, Labour’s Lord Ahmed of Rotherham was convicted, along with his brothers, of a serious sexual assault against an eleven-year-old boy and the attempted rape of a young girl in Rotherham in the ’70s.
(Rotherham, as a reminder, came to the national attention in 2012 when an earth-shattering grooming scandal involving over 1,400 under-age girls and Pakistani gangs was exposed, along with the official cover-up that enable it over the course of decades.)
In May 2022, Mike Hill, former member of Parliament for Hartlepool, was ordered to pay £434,435 in compensation to a sexual-harassment victim. The tribunal in delivering its decision held that Hill had “assaulted, harassed, and victimised” a parliamentary worker. Mike Hill, like Chris Pincher, had been suspended when sexual-harassment allegations were made in September 2019. However, within the month, he was reinstated, subsequently backing Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner as leader and deputy leader of the Labour Party. The list of such transgressions is long and bipartisan. Some have even argued that the nature of Parliament itself is to blame.
Given the abundance of the kind of behavior of which Pincher was guilty, it becomes much harder to identify him as the sole cause of Boris’s resignation.
Some might say that “Partygate” and a series of “small lies” made Boris’ position untenable. However, as the U.K. local election, which took place in May this year, showed, “Partygate” was a London-centric obsession. The Conservatives held their own across the country, losing much fewer seats than psephologists had expected. In fact, Labour only made substantial gains in London. These elections, the best actual proxy we have, were a timely reminder that Keir Starmer lacked the tools and charisma to beat King Boris on the rough streets of Northern England, formerly a Labour stronghold. As for the accusation of Boris being a “liar,” it would be interesting to see how many of our current holier-than-thou politicians would still be in position if such peccadillos were the criterion.
The defenestration of Boris Johnson then had little to do with morality. The “Chris Pincher” affair was a convenient trigger. But at its core, it is all about revenge. Boris has never been forgiven by his high Tory caste and by the London-dwelling Labour-Liberal leadership for his role in tipping the scale for Brexit and dismantling at a stroke close to 60 years of our country’s foreign-policy intellectual construct.
Indeed, our entry into the European Union was a deeply held Conservative Party project and strategy. After 1956 and the debacle of the Suez Canal, the Churchillian wing of the Conservative Party was replaced by the Halifax one, known to history as the appeasers. To them, Great Britain was in terminal decline. Only outside intervention could help rectify this unfortunate course. Shared sovereignty, a shibboleth of the period, with continental allies would be the premise of this new Jerusalem. The drafting of the 1972 European Communities Act makes it clear that the intent was to turn London into a regional capital of a greater European Imperium.
Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher threw a wrench into these works by showing that the U.K. did not need to rely on Europe to recover its national might. As a result, she became vilified in her own right, the subject of constant, Boris-like, personal vitriol. In the meantime, the Labour Party, hitherto staunchly Euroskeptic, was seduced into bushy-tailed Euro-enthusiasm by Jacques Delors, then European Commission president, in 1988. The European Commission would become an ally in Labour’s fight against Thatcher’s victorious Conservatives (though it was Europhilic Conservatives who ultimately ousted Thatcher). And the European Union would enable the re-introduction of socialism in the U.K., undone by Thatcher, through the back door.
This scheme seemed to work at the government level. Remain had overwhelming parliamentary support in June 2016, on the eve of the referendum on EU membership. As with the topic of sexual exploitation in Parliament, there was broad but tacit agreement between all parties on the European Union. The tactics were simple: Labour and the Lib Dems would play the good cop to the European Union; the Conservatives the Bad Cop. All agreed with the final aim: Ever-closer union, leading to an eventual European Federal State.
But when the votes had been counted, a majority of the country — and two-thirds of constituencies — voted Leave. A greater gap between ruler and ruled could not really be imagined: Two forces with totally different views of governance.
And Boris became the emblem of this historic rebellion. Did he join the Leave Camp out of a sense of opportunism? Perhaps. Be that as it may, Brexit could not have been accomplished without him. But even as the country made its view on the EU known, many of its governing elite remained sour. Witness the years-long undermining of Brexit after the referendum by individuals throughout our politics. Witness also the sustained attacks on Boris’s character.
And yet, despite all the vitriol poured on Boris’s head over the last three years, he remained relatively popular outside of London. A recent interview with Northern Englanders can be taken as representative of a sentiment widespread in the places that backed Boris (and backed Brexit): that Boris, a flawed but effective leader, whose flaws were known to the voters who backed his resounding 2019 majority, was the victim of a media campaign to oust him, driven by the elites still bitter that he got Brexit done.
Chris Pincher, distraught as he probably currently is, cannot be the sole reason for Boris’s expulsion. He was merely a pretext. The real motive was revenge against Boris for getting Brexit done. If those who engineered this plot to oust Boris had their druthers, they’d reverse Brexit entirely. But one aspect of Boris’s legacy is to have made that virtually impossible. This story isn’t over yet, however. It remains to be seen what further form this revenge will take, what seeds this ousting has sowed, and which political party will reap the whirlwind.