I know very little of UK politics, but I like to read The Guardian and Partygate looks like this huge scandal. Wasn’t it just that Boris Johnson attended a party during the pandemic? Why is it such a big deal that it’s causing all sorts of political drama?
In: 9
There are several factors behind it. First, many politicians and journalists (including many members and supporters of the Conservative Party) have really never liked Johnson but supported him because they thought he was uniquely electable. This was particularly important to them because, in 2019, Britain was in the unusual position of having an opposition party that wanted to make sweeping reforms and that many in the upper echelons of society were terrified by. Once Johnson’s personal popularity seemed to vanish they had no reason to support him any more. Compounding that is that the opposition Labour Party now has probably its most right-wing leader in its history, so the rich, the media, and big business feel much less threatened by them.
Second, there really has been an outpouring of public anger, particularly from people who avoided seeing loved ones during the lockdowns. The fact that Johnson himself put the lockdown laws in place makes things much worse, because British politics always tends to be obsessed with hypocrisy (doing bad stuff = OK, doing bad stuff but telling other people to do good stuff = evil).
Third, the way him and his team reacted to the scandal was pretty incompetent. Instead of trying to play the situation down and change the subject, he kept getting indignant and categorically denying things that later turned out to be true.
Fourth, there was a series of other scandals around the same time that didn’t get quite so much attention but upset various groups of people and led to a sense that he was just lurching from one scandal to the next. In particular, there was a series of relatively low-level corruption allegations. And there was a whole thing about him appointing a guy to a senior position who was promptly the subject of numerous sexual harassment and sexual assault allegations. Johnson denied knowing anything about the allegations when he made the appointment, but then a witness came forward saying that they had heard him making offensive jokes about the allegations. And all of this was handled badly too: he kept angrily denying stuff and then sheepishly admitting that he had been mistaken.
Latest Answers