When a succession of Cabinet rebels lined up to tell Boris Johnson to resign on Wednesday evening, he batted them all away with the same excuse: “I won 14 million votes. They were won by me, not by the Conservative Party. I have a mandate and a duty to finish the job.” But he’s wrong, says Fraser Nelson in The Daily Telegraph: you can’t impose a presidential model on a parliamentary democracy. Johnson “wanted a fan club but needed a team”, says one Cabinet member. “He was Meghan to our House of Windsor.”
Conservative MPs share the blame for this mess too. They like power and tend to follow “anyone who brings it”. Too many of them voted for the rise in National Insurance, “in defiance of their manifesto”, and too many went along with lockdown without asking any questions. Now Johnson has finally resigned, the Tories can “stop moaning” and move on to discussing Britain’s problems and how to fix them. “Are the culture wars real – and worth fighting? Why on earth are five million people on out-of-work benefits during a worker shortage crisis? What does NHS reform look like, and would anyone vote for it?”