Johnson maintains big public presence
Some question his intentions
LONDON — Less than three weeks after he announced his resignation, and with rumors already swirling that he plans a comeback, Britain’s scandalscarred prime minister, Boris Johnson, received the sort of self-care advice best dispensed by a family member.
“If you ask me,” Rachel Johnson, the prime minister’s sister, said recently on LBC Radio, where she hosts a talk show, “I would like to see my brother rest and write and paint and just regroup and just, you know, see what happens.”
Not much chance of that. Still serving as caretaker prime minister, Johnson has hardly retreated to the background. He recently posed in a fighter jet, then at a military base where he hurled a hand grenade, used a machine gun, and held a rocket launcher during a training exercise with Ukrainian troops.
According to one media report, he stoked speculation that he might try to reverse his resignation, lunching recently with a prominent supporter of a petition for a rule change that could allow him to remain in his job.
And at his final appearance in Parliament as prime minister, Johnson’s verdict on his three tumultuous years in Downing Street was “mission largely accomplished — for now,” before he signed off with words from a “Terminator” movie: “Hasta la vista, baby.”
Johnson, 58, lost his job when a succession of scandals prompted dozens of resignations from his government, but he remains prime minister until early September when one of the two remaining candidates — Foreign Secretary Liz Truss or the former chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak — will take over. As a devotee of the Terminator franchise, Johnson knows about sequels.
“He’s not the kind of person who gives up and goes away to live a quiet life in some nice house in the country and does good work for the local church,” said Andrew Gimson, who is soon to publish a second volume of his biography of Johnson.
“You don’t really get to the top unless you are already quite unnaturally competitive, so it would be very astonishing if he just subsided into private life.”
While a return to Downing Street may be unlikely, Johnson knows how to keep his name in the headlines. That may not be good news for his successor.
Writing in The Times of London, William Hague, a former Conservative leader, warned of the potential for Johnson to articulate “a bundle of resentment, denial, attention-seeking and attempted vindication that will be a permanent nightmare for the new prime minister.”
Downing Street is not saying anything publicly about Johnson’s future, though his allies reject Hague’s comments. They expect Johnson to remain in Parliament and to speak out over any dilution of his strong commitment to Ukraine, any significant shift over Brexit, or a reversal of his still cloudy plan to “level up” the prosperity of neglected regions.
Despite the scandals that led to his resignation, he retains a strong coterie of supporters in the right-wing media and among his party members who will elect the new leader. Backers of Truss have tried to exploit this loyalty and have accused Sunak — whose resignation started the unraveling of Johnson’s job security — of betraying the prime minister. One Cabinet minister, Nadine Dorries, recently retweeted an image of Sunak in the pose of Brutus about to stab Julius Caesar in the back.