By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, June 07, 2022
God save the queen — and, maybe, we owe her an
apology.
The people of the United Kingdom may be a little
embarrassed by their prime minister just now, but they should be proud of their
political system.
Boris Johnson survived the no-confidence vote he was
subjected to on Monday evening, but he probably is on his way out: Though he
held on, he got less than 60 percent of the votes of Conservative Party MPs,
and that’s a bad omen. Margaret Thatcher did better than that in a 1989
leadership challenge, winning more than 80 percent of the votes — and was out
of power a year later. Boris Johnson, whatever his virtues, is no Margaret
Thatcher. Theresa May won a confidence vote with 63 percent during the Brexit
crisis and was out of power in five months. John Major limped on after the 1995
challenge to his leadership and probably would have been deposed by
Conservative MPs if the voters had not done the job themselves, giving the
Tories their worst defeat in the 20th century and launching Tony Blair into
power.
You’ll notice that British leaders seem to get subjected
to confidence votes pretty often. I should clarify here for those unfamiliar
with the British system that these are challenges from within their own parties,
not from the opposition. In the United States, it is rare for members of
Congress to break very seriously with presidents of their party, a habit that
congressional Democrats are about to demonstrate as they get ready to sink with
the USS Malarky. Not since Ronald Reagan’s primary challenge to
President Gerald Ford has the United States seen something nearly equivalent to
the kind of intraparty leadership challenge that Britons witness regularly.
And though my republican heart does not love my writing
so, I suspect that we can thank Her Majesty for that.
In the United States, we deify presidents. British prime
ministers have more real power within their system than U.S. presidents do
within ours, because they wield executive and legislative power at once, but in
the United States, we identify the nation with the president in a cultish and
mystical way. Because the Brits have a monarch to serve that role, they need
not invest their prime minister with the duty to personify the country.
And so they are free to kick their PM around a little
bit. That’s a good thing.
Bojo’s no-nos were flouting Covid restrictions and then
being less than entirely honest with Parliament about the extent of his
violations. Because the British are a basically decent people — and because the
British Parliament, unlike our Congress, has not exchanged self-respect for
self-importance — it is the lying to Parliament that seems to have rankled the
prime minister’s exasperated colleagues. For an American, that is
positively quaint: Our presidents — Obama, Trump, Biden, take your
pick — lie constantly, even when they don’t need to, even when lying hurts them
more than it helps them. They seem to lie just to keep in practice.
The closest thing we Americans are going to see to what
the United Kingdom has just gone through is the apparently small-ball — but
symbolically important — recall campaign against San Francisco district
attorney Chesa Boudin, currently under way. Boudin has presided over an explosion of crime in San Francisco and an implosion
in the city’s quality of life. Shootings are up, vagrancy is up, public drug
use is up, shoplifting has been effectively legalized, and some people in San
Francisco — mainly liberals and Democrats — have had enough. The Boudin recall
is a kind of referendum on whether the Democrats intend to be the party of the
New Deal or the party of social-justice Twitter. I am not much of an admirer of
the New Deal or those who made it, but I do hope that Boudin is recalled — the
United States would benefit enormously from having at least one political party
that is not entirely insane.
As things stand, the despairing part of me sometimes
thinks (the thought soon passes) that if George Washington could see what we
had made of things, he might wish that he’d made his peace with King George,
who may have been as crazy as a soup sandwich but surely was a more impressive
figure than . . . take your pick. I am not sure that the U.S. presidency really
is “the hardest job in the world,” as so many people say, but I don’t think Joe
Biden is ready to do battle with a bowl of lime Jell-O.
Surely General Washington and his men didn’t freeze their
asses off at Valley Forge for this.
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