Johnson takes over as British leader.
LONDON >> His jacket neatly buttoned, his hair corralled into chaos-free submission, Boris Johnson stood outside No. 10 Downing St. on Wednesday and in his first moments as prime minister promised to do what so far has proved impossible: lead Britain through an orderly, on-time exit from the European Union.
“The doubters, the doomsters, the gloomsters — they are going to get it wrong,” he declared. “The people who bet against Brexit are going to lose their shirts.”
It was a supremely confident, at times grandiloquent address from a man whose silver-tongued talk often surpasses his performance. After a lifetime of joking and blustering and maneuvering his way into jobs and then sabotaging himself with poor preparation and deceitful behavior, Johnson, 55, seems determined to prove he can put aside his court-jesterish ways and rise to the occasion.
He seemed unbothered by the fact that he is entering office with a paper-thin working parliamentary majority and at a time of deep divisions within the country and in his own Conservative Party.
In his speech, he vowed to flood the streets with new police officers. He promised to improve health care, to spend more on education, to bolster railroad infrastructure, to promote animal welfare, to improve satellite systems, to increase salaries, to be the prime minister for all of Britain, to restore trust in democracy and, among a dizzying array of other things, to “liberate the U.K.’s extraordinary bioscience sector from antigenetic modification rules.”
His pro-Britain pronouncements and kitchen sink’s-worth of programs seemed designed as a feel-good distraction strategy, something shiny and positive to counter the gloom, alarm and discord touched off by the Brexit referendum three years ago. But Brexit was where Johnson’s speech began and where its most serious promises lay.
Above all, Johnson vowed, Britain would leave the European Union by Oct. 31, “no ifs, or buts,” with or without a deal setting out the terms of its departure. “The British people have had enough of waiting,” he said.
And though later in the day he purged the old guard from his Cabinet and appointed a series of loyalists and die-hard Brexiteers to the newly vacant posts, it is still a mystery how he, or they, propose to carry out Brexit.
Some members of Parliament, even from his own party, have vowed to prevent Johnson from allowing the country to slide into a no-deal Brexit, a scenario that Parliament has already rejected but that the prime minister says would be preferable to delaying further.
Meanwhile, a number of Cabinet ministers who served under the outgoing prime minister, Theresa May, resigned before Johnson took office, declaring that they could never countenance working for him.
Philip Hammond, the chancellor of the Exchequer; David Gauke, the justice secretary; Rory Stewart, international development secretary; and David Lidington, the de facto deputy prime minister, had all said they would refuse to serve in a Johnson Cabinet, and all were among a dozen people who resigned, or ended up being fired, over Johnson’s accession.
Meanwhile, the opposition parties were not very impressed by Johnson’s enthusiastic promises.
“Boris Johnson is about to learn that there is a massive gulf between glib throwaway lines that delight the Tory faithful and the difficult decisions of leadership,” Keir Starmer, who is responsible for Labour’s Brexit policy, said on Twitter.