Goodbye Boris. We’ll not Miss You
Finally, Boris Johnson quits Downing Street after less than three years in the job. He was forced to resign amid recent dramatic political events despite having won a huge majority in the 2019 general election. In a statement outside 10 Downing Street, the embattled Prime Minister said he will step down as Conservative leader once his replacement has been found.
Mr Johnson’s leadership has been hanging in the balance in recent days following a string of resignations from Cabinet ministers. Pressure on the PM ramped up over his handling of the row involving his former deputy chief whip Chris Pincher. Boris Johnson’s support collapsed further as dozens of his own MPs also announced their departures from government and party posts this week. Despite the exodus and a delegation of Cabinet ministers telling him he should go on Wednesday, Mr Johnson initially ignored the warnings and remained defiant.
Now Boris Johnson intends to continue as prime minister until a new leader is in place. That means he would stay in office until the Conservatives choose a new leader, as his predecessors Theresa May and David Cameron did when they resigned.
In his resignation statement the Prime Minister said:
“And I’ve today appointed a Cabinet to serve, as I will, until a new leader is in place.”
Although the era of Boris Johnson is now a thing of the past, his political views and their interpretations are undoubtedly alive in the minds of his supporters and opponents. Moreover, the Prime Minister was for a long time known as a publicist, and, in our opinion, this side of his activity has not yet been fully appreciated.
Boris Johnson was editor of The Spectator magazine from 1999 to 2005. He was also writing for The Daily Telegraph on and off over the couple of decades, and making television appearances. Of course, people’s views change as the years go by, but it’s always worth reading what they thought at the time. It should go without saying that Johnson’s views will have changed over his career, but his political legacy will probably remain with us forever. The evolution of the leader’s political views over the decades is important for understanding the events and challenges of the present.
We invite the reader to look at Boris Johnson’s political portrait through his most famous quotes. They will hopefully help you better understand who has ruled Britain over the past 3 years.
- The male sex is to blame for the appalling proliferation of single mothers. This means addressing the weakness of the modern British man, his unwillingness or inability to take control of his woman and become the head of the family.
The Spectator, 19 August 1995.
- My friends, as I have discovered myself, there are no disasters, only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters.
The Daily Telegraph, 2 December 2004.
- Well, compared with the old British Empire, and the new American imperium, Chinese cultural influence is virtually nil, and unlikely to increase. Far from spreading overseas, as the English language has spread, and Hollywood has spread, Chinese culture seems to stay firmly in China. The Chinese have a script so fiendishly complicated that they cannot produce a proper keyboard for it. And how many people do you know who can speak even a sentence of Chinese? If global domination means anything, it must mean the spread of culture, language and mores, in the way of the Romans, the British, and the Americans. The Chinese aren’t even out of the paddock.
The Daily Telegraph, 1 September 2005.
- Ping-pong was invented on the dining tables of England in the 19th century, and it was called Wiff-waff! And there, I think, you have the difference between us and the rest of the world. Other nations, the French, looked at a dining table and saw an opportunity to have dinner; we looked at it and saw an opportunity to play Wiff-waff.
RTÉ, 25 August 2008.
- My speaking style was criticised by no less an authority than Arnold Schwarzenegger. It was a low moment, my friends, to have my rhetorical skills denounced by a monosyllabic Austrian cyborg.
Birmingham, the Conservative Party annual conference, 28 September 2008.
- I have more in common with a three-toed sloth or a one-eyed pterodactyl or a Kalamata olive than I have with Winston Churchill.
USA Today, 22 February 2016.
- The EU wants a superstate, just as Hitler did.
The Sunday Telegraph, 15 May 2016.
- We cannot turn our backs on Europe. We are part of Europe.
The Forbes, 24 June 2016.
- Let me state that I am a Russophile, a convinced Russophile. I have ancestors in Moscow. I am convinced that I am the first British Foreign Secretary whose name is Boris, and please don’t doubt that I want to improve our relations.
Moscow, Press conference with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, 22 December 2017.
- It is rather like the beginning of Crime and Punishment in the sense that we are all confident of the culprit — and the only question is whether he will confess or be caught. And that tells you all you need to know about the difference between modern Britain and the government of Vladimir Putin. They make Novichok, we make light sabres.
London, 25 March 2018.
