By Ichie Tiko Okoye
There certainly was more outrage in his voice than the sadness he professed to feel at being forced to “give up the best office in the world,” when British Prime Minister Boris Johnson read out his resignation letter in an address to the British people last Thursday (06 July 2022). His resignation announcement came right after it finally dawned on him that a sizeable number of top government officials and Tory MPs were no longer interested in buying into the distracting conjuring tricks he was deploying in response to a recent slew of ethics scandals.
To all intents and purposes, Johnson has been the English equivalent of America’s Donald Trump. Both are charismatic front men with a knack for manipulating the media. Just as Johnson crystallised a decisive electoral victory with the memorable tag line of “Just get Brexit done!” Trump equally mesmerised American voters with his campaign psychobabble of “Make America Great Again!” – MAGA for short.
Johnson and Trump are perceived to be born-winners with a cult following and mammoth fan bases. But truth be told, their popularity is more the result of political sleight of hand than genuine political pedigree. Both men are incorrigible liars, whether it is unabashedly looking their fellow citizens in the eye and spewing lies in furtherance of their own personal interests and agendas or momentarily succumbing to the malady of selective amnesia whenever convenient or spreading falsehoods about a “stolen election.”
Just as we saw Johnson self-righteously blaming the ‘herd mentality’ of his fellow Conservative parliamentarians for his undoing, Trump regularly savages and intimidates any Republican Party member who publicly disagrees with him, by foisting the derogatory moniker of ‘Republican in Name Only’ (RINO) on his prey.
Trump bequeathed a very acrimonious US relationship with the European Union (EU), the NATO military alliance and the Organisation of American States to his successor to fuss about – the first two of which Russian President Vladimir Putin had hoped to exploit with his terrible blunder to invade Ukraine. Like Trump, Johnson leaves the Gordian knot in the form of the nature of the EU’s international boundary in Northern Ireland to his successor to untie.
Still, there are significant differences between both men. For one, Johnson lacked the kind of solid all-weather backing White evangelicals gave, and continue to give, to Trump – a highly influential right-wing movement that can trace its roots to the controversial ‘Moral Majority’ founded in 1979 by Baptist televangelist and conservative activist Rev Jerry Falwell.
Johnson only resigned because a critical number of his ministers and key party members told him that the time had finally come for him to go – just like three ranking Republican Congressmen undertook the short walk from Capitol Hill to the White House to tell its fellow-Republican occupant, President Richard Nixon, that he either resigned immediately or be tarred with the brush of impeachment.
Apart from holding the rather dubious record of being the only president in the history of the United States so far to be impeached twice – more so in a single term – Trump equally holds another sordid record for presiding over the most unstable cabinet. For example, his tenure saw as many as four White House Chiefs of Staff in the four years he held office! And several of his cabinet members equally resigned in the wake of the assault on Capitol Hill by insurgents on 6 January 2022.
The big difference is how the respective party Establishment behaved and is behaving. Unlike the Tory Party, Trump’s enablers within the Republican Party are too pusillanimous to initiate a high-press manoeuvre to foist the right dose of sanity and realism in him. Congressional leaders, such as then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and ranking senator from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham, and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who openly called out Trump for inciting the insurrectionists eventually recanted just to preserve their political careers.
And unless the unexpected happens – which isn’t absolutely improbable in politics) – Johnson won’t ever make an elective play for the prime minister’s office. Meanwhile, his soul brother in America continues to overheat the polity with drip-drip mulling over the likelihood of contesting in 2024. If Trump ultimately fails to run, it won’t be because of his age; he will be 78, an age that Trumpian devotees on this side of the world ironically deem “too old to run” for a Nigerian President!
Despite the bright prospects of Florida State Governor Ronald DeSantis, the man increasingly seen as the brightest hope of the Republican Party and a politician who entirely owes his rise to national prominence to trying to be more Trump than Trump, neither he nor anyone else in the now-fully-Trumpified GOP would grow the liver to step into the ring against the Master Puppeteer in a GOP presidential primary.
In essence, while Johnson’s resignation means that he
has practically lost control of the Conservative Party, Trump’s electoral loss
to Joe Biden hasn’t undermined in any way, shape or form, the vice-like grip he
maintains on a Republican Party he has recreated to kowtow to his personal
whims and caprices.
That both men are cut from the same megalomaniacal cloth or are, as the popular maxim states, two peas in the same pod, can be clearly discerned from how they behaved after officially leaving office. While an intransigent Trump took the unprecedented step of creating “the Office of the (not “a,” mind you) Former President of The United States” along with the paraphernalia of ‘office’ like letterhead paper and seal, a fuming Johnson similarly took the unprecedented step of decreeing a tenure elongation of three months for himself!
Johnson mustn’t be allowed to get away with his ego-driven ploy to deliberately mix up the Parliamentary and Presidential systems of Government. The oddity (in the form of the Ahmadu Bello-led Northern People’s Congress) that was the Nigerian practice in the First Republic notwithstanding, under the Parliamentary system, the leader of the Parliamentary majority automatically becomes the Head of Government. So by stepping down as Party Leader, Johnson lost the right to remain the Prime Minister, more so when the office of the Deputy Prime Minister already exists to cater for this kind of scenario.
Consider the implications of what happens when a major Government-sponsored bill is defeated in the Parliament. While there is no repercussion under the Presidential system, it automatically triggers the fall of the party in power and opens the door for new elections to be conducted. What will happen if and when a bill presented by Johnson is defeated since there cannot be any vacuum in Government business? Johnson cannot resign a second time since he is no longer a de jure Prime Minister. This would create a constitutional crisis.
Given the Trumpian DNA in Johnson’s genes – as per using any means possible to remain in power – he would most likely have loved to resolve the looming constitutional crisis by sacking the Parliament in the same manner as Oliver Cromwell who, after leading the armies of the Parliament to defeat – and kill – an overbearing King Charles I during the English Civil War, turned around to sack the same Parliament in 1653 and proclaim himself Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland!
Recall that in September 2020 with only a few weeks before the Brexit deadline, he had the brainwave to prorogue Parliament as he feared that MPs were bent on passing laws to stop his preferred no-deal Brexit! And to think that he very easily procured the Queen’s approval. Fortunately, the Supreme Court has since poured water on this dry gunpowder with its resounding decision that no British Prime Minister, Johnson inclusive, has the power – whether real or imagined – to suspend Parliament.
The first lesson to be learned from Johnson’s fall from grace to grass is that the highly contagious fever of nationalism – created and spread by Trump and his MAGA cult followers, and which midwifed a rash of exclusive ultraconservative parties and movements in Europe between 2020 and 2021 - fizzled out relatively quickly principally because it has a very short life cycle in a world that has become an intricately intra-connected global village. It should also be noted that political leaders elected through demagoguery pose a clear and present danger not only to their countries but to the rest of the world.
Another lesson is that developments that fast-tracked
Johnson’s forced exit should teach the rest of us that in pristine democratic
climes, real political power truly belongs to the people, quite unlike the
tottering two-headed monstrosity of the United States or, worse still, the
cannibalistic one-sided feudal apparition of the likes of Nigeria.
No comments:
Post a Comment