Pressure mounts on Rishi Sunak: could Johnson's resignation as MP precipitate the UK election?
Boris Johnson's shadow is too long in the UK, and he continues to cause earthquakes even months after he has left Downing Street. And it is that the former prime minister had not left completely but his resignation as a deputy threatens to directly splash the current prime minister and conservative leader, Rishi Sunak, around whom voices are growing that ask for an advance of the elections, scheduled for the moment by 2024 (although it could be delayed until January 2025). There doesn't seem to be a quiet day or month in London.
“It is very sad to leave Parliament, at least for now, but above all I am baffled and horrified that he could be thrown out, in an undemocratic way,” Johnson said in his resignation letter.. He no longer has a seat in the House of Commons, after an end to his political career punctuated by the party scandal (known as partygate).. The investigation, led by a Labor member, has completely killed Johnson.. at least for now. Now the spotlights are on Sunak.
For the opposition, the solution to the instability in the country involves an advance of the elections, and this was made known by the head honcho of the Labor party, Keir Starmer, who is asking Sunak to call elections now. The moment is in fact propitious for the left-wing option, which has been leading the polls with great self-sufficiency for months and seeks to delve into the wound of some Tories that do not recover bellows. The approval of Rishi Sunak is in fact low, especially because of the reforms at the national level, although abroad the unwavering British support for Ukraine in the face of the Russian invasion is seen with good eyes.
Johnson, in his own way, still pulls some strings and maintains the version he gave at the beginning of the investigations. “I have been a parliamentarian since 2001. I take my responsibilities seriously. I didn't lie, and I think in their heart of hearts, the committee knows that.. But they have deliberately chosen to ignore the truth, because from the beginning, their purpose has not been to discover the truth,” he argued, and who knows if it can be again.
Because? Because one of the fathers of Brexit -along with Johnson-, Nigel Farage, does not rule out the founding of a new party that includes the former prime minister, as he assured in an interview with GB News. “If he wants to defend his Brexit legacy, I want to defend my Brexit legacy too, so would there be a possibility of a new centre-right union? It would be Boris Johnson, there would be other MPs joining this as well.” asserted the main architect of the exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union.
Polls remain heavily biased towards Labour.
The latest polls, published at the end of May, gave the Labor Party 44% of the vote, leaving the Conservative with 25%.. Sunak, given the complicated scenario for his team, calls for calm for the moment. The last time the elections in the United Kingdom were brought forward in 2017, and Theresa May did so in full negotiations with Brussels on Brexit, but that dynamic fully favored the Tories: Johnson swept the elections with the best result of training in the last decades. The current situation is very different and experts agree that if Sunak wants to have any chance of winning “he needs to call the elections as late as possible.”
Sunak's memories of the only passage through the polls that there has been in the time he has been in Downing Street are not good, and that is that in the local elections last May the Conservatives suffered a severe setback by losing more than 200 councillors, while Labor won over 110, further boosting Starmer in the polls. The prime minister then did not give too much importance to the result: “What I am going to continue to do is meet the priorities of the people: reduce inflation by half, grow the economy, reduce debt, cut waiting lists for services and stop the arrival of ships with immigrants through the English Channel,” he snapped.