On the evening of Tuesday, June 14, a flight was scheduled to take off from the UK heading toward Rwanda. As the jumbo jet sat on the runway, it contained what the BBC described as ‘up to seven’ passengers, a group of people who had risked their lives crossing land and sea to seek asylum in Britain. The BBC estimated that the chartering of the aircraft would have cost the British taxpayer at least half a million pounds.

This event represented the first stage in the UK government’s strategy to stem the flow of refugees making the perilous trip across the English Channel. It had been condemned by human rights groups as breaching international law. The Archbishop of Canterbury had described the plan as ‘the opposite of the nature of God’. On the morning of the flight, he was joined by twenty-four other Church of England bishops in denouncing it as an ‘immoral policy that shames Britain’. Prince Charles, the heir to the throne, reportedly called the scheme ‘appalling’.

In a dramatic last-minute ruling, the European Court of Human Rights grounded the flight, requiring that the case be afforded further consideration by the British justice system. The following morning’s Daily Mirror called the event a ‘cruel farce’. The Express newspaper claimed the Prime Minister had threatened to ‘ditch human rights laws’ in an ‘angry’ response to this setback. The Telegraph reported that the government was even reconsidering the country’s alignment with the European Convention on Human Rights. 

A week later, it was announced that Boris Johnson’s administration would introduce to parliament plans to circumvent the European ruling. These would form part of new proposals for a so-called ‘Bill of Rights’ which the Law Society of England and Wales has already depicted as setting government upon a ‘collision course with the rule of law’. So, no worries there.

The same week as its stalled deportation of those refugees, the UK government published draft legislation intended to reverse key elements of an agreement it had itself brokered with the European Union in December 2019 as part of its Brexit deal. Boris Johnson’s administration planned to ditch the Northern Ireland Protocol, the mechanism which (by establishing customs checks for trade across the Irish Sea) has allowed for the maintenance of a soft border on the island of Ireland – the border between the Republic of Ireland, as a member of the EU, and the province of Ulster, as a part of Brexit Britain. Again, it stood accused of breaking international law.

This development resulted in fresh calls for the reunification of Ireland from those in Northern Ireland who prefer to be part of an Irish nation within the world’s greatest trading bloc, rather than a junior constituent in the UK suffering from economic stagnation and political crisis. 

The Scottish Nationalist government in Edinburgh simultaneously launched a fresh campaign to push for their country’s independence from the United Kingdom. Boris Johnson – who had in 2019 named himself as Britain’s first-ever ‘Minister for the Union’ – now looks set to preside over the fragmentation of the nation.

That week, Britain’s Office for National Statistics reported that rates of pay relative to inflation had fallen at the fastest rate for more than a decade. Continuing rises in the costs of fuel and food have added to a cost-of-living crisis that impacts the lives of ordinary working people across the country, people who have been finding it virtually impossible to afford to feed their families, travel to work, take their children to school, and heat their homes. A survey published this month showed that price rises had forced more than half of the respondents to skip meals. At the same time, the Bank of England announced projections that the rate of inflation would grow to 11 percent by the end of the year. By last Thursday, it was already at its highest level in forty years.

Meanwhile, in the wake of the peak of the pandemic, the country’s public healthcare system is in meltdown, with waiting times for paramedic services in England exceeding three times the national targets in cases of such serious medical emergencies as heart attacks and strokes. Hospital waiting lists have reached record levels, with a staggering one-in-five British people currently in the queue for treatment. Twenty-four thousand people each month are waiting more than twelve hours to be seen in accident and emergency departments.

The government has at the same time admitted that it will have to burn four-billion-pounds-worth of useless personal protective equipment which it had procured by unconventional processes and at great profit to its associates, during the height of the Covid crisis. Boris Johnson once promised that Brexit would offer a weekly dividend of £350 million to be spent on Britain’s National Health Service. Those funds have never materialized, except possibly in the pockets of some of his ministers’ friends. 

In April, the British Prime Minister was fined by London’s Metropolitan Police for his participation in a series of unlawful drinks parties that had taken place at the heart of government, in breach of Covid-19 restrictions, during periods of national lockdown imposed by that administration. Mr. Johnson has told parliament and the press that no such social gatherings had taken place, that he had not attended any such parties, that those parties had not broken any rules, that he had been unaware that those rules had been broken, and that he was terribly sorry, but that he had acted in good faith and had never lied to anyone about any of this. Toward the end of May, an official government report detailed degrees of drunken delinquency during those parties (including instances of vomiting, violence, and horribly boorish behaviour) that would have put even a second-year medical student at one of the country’s older universities to shame. 

The report omitted consideration of the so-called ‘Abba party’ hosted by the Prime Minister’s wife in the couple’s Downing Street flat in November 2020. It has been claimed that details of this event had been excluded following an intervention by Mr. Johnson’s Chief of Staff. The report nevertheless published photographs of Mr. Johnson at other banned gatherings raising a glass to cheer on his carousing colleagues.

For this is a flag-waving braggart of a Prime Minister who professes to have gone out of his way to make his people proud to be British. (It’s true, he has. Just not very proud, that’s all.) He expects everyone to dance along to his tune. One of his most devoted backbench supporters suggested that it was fine for Downing Street to party through lockdowns, as teachers and nurses had been doing the same. His Press Secretary and the Leader of the House of Commons both made jokes out of it. 

It’s as if they’ve been trying to convince the entire nation to share the burden of their boss’s disgrace. He is the first British premier to be sanctioned for lawbreaking while in office. He is the first resident of Downing Street to be investigated on a charge of lying to parliament. Unless Donald Trump, Count Dracula, or Mr. Bean make a bid to lead the British Conservative Party, it would be difficult to imagine anyone worse in charge of the UK.

Halfway through this month, his chief ethics advisor resigned after having asserted his belief in the legitimacy of questions as to whether Mr. Johnson’s involvement in those illicit social gatherings constituted a breach of the government’s ministerial code. His resignation letter alluded to further ‘measures which risk a deliberate and purposeful breach of the ministerial code’ – specifically, plans to transgress transnational trading obligations. His predecessor had resigned in November 2020, on the grounds that Boris Johnson had ignored his recommendations in relation to the enforcement of that same code. To lose one ethics advisor may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two in as many years looks like carelessness. Or crookedness.

Earlier this month, Boris Johnson survived a vote of no confidence in his leadership triggered by his own MPs. More than four in ten voted against him. Senior figures in his own party, including one of its former leaders, have continued to demand that he quit. He has steadfastly refused to resign.

This would not have been the best context in which a government might try to defend a pair of seats in mid-term by-elections. Yet, that is precisely what the ruling party just last Thursday had to do.

Last Thursday’s polls also took place during a week of crippling rail strikes during which half of all lines were closed and only a fifth of train services was scheduled to run. The press has been full of talk of the prospect of further industrial disputes, involving such key public sector workers as teachers and nurses. On the day of the by-elections, it was announced that British Airways staff had voted to strike.

The circumstances of the departures of the two Tory parliamentarians vacating those seats did not make the situation any easier for the Prime Minister.

Shortly before polling day, The Times newspaper published a story that claimed that Boris Johnson had once attempted to appoint his future wife (with whom he was having an extramarital affair at the time) to a senior government position, but that he had been warned that it would be unethical to do so. The Times report swiftly disappeared, amidst whispers that it had been suppressed by Downing Street. The Prime Minister’s office confirmed that it had spoken with the paper before the story was dropped. This only served to heighten concerns as to the probity of the man at the top of this knavish administration.

Questions have often been raised in relation to the moral tone (or lack thereof) set by Boris Johnson as the head of Great Britain’s government. He is generally considered untrustworthy, whether in relation to the consistency of his policy pledges, his professional honesty, his financial transparency, or his fidelity in personal relationships. However, his conduct has rarely been considered as poor as that of the former incumbents of those two Conservative seats being contested last week.

The MP for the West Yorkshire constituency of Wakefield was, in April, found guilty of sexual assault on an underage boy. In May, he was jailed for eighteen months.

The MP for the rural constituency of Tiverton and Honiton in the southwest of England resigned from parliament at the end of April after admitting to twice viewing pornography on his mobile phone in the chamber of the House of Commons. He claimed that the first occasion had been an accident, which had occurred while he had been researching farm machinery online.

Those disgraced MPs represent the very worst of an administration tainted with misconduct, venality, hypocrisy, brazen dishonesty, and the breach of both domestic and international laws, a government that has seemed set on securing Britain’s reputation as western Europe’s pariah state.

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These by-elections had been seen by many as a test of public confidence in Boris Johnson’s moral, political, and economic leadership of the country. Last Thursday had never, let’s face it, been destined to be a glorious day for British democracy; but the contrasting geographies and demographics of the two seats up for grabs guaranteed to make the contests interesting.

The Wakefield seat typifies the Brexit-supporting working-class North whose allegiance Boris Johnson seized from Labour in 2019’s general election and whose loyalties he has been trying to secure through his so-called ‘leveling up’ agenda, which has typically tended to prioritize rhetoric over action. The Devon seat, by contrast, is a traditional safe Tory seat, with a majority in 2019 exceeding twenty-four thousand, a constituency of socially conservative farmers and farmworkers who (as one commented in a recent news interview) hardly appeared especially concerned that their friendly farmer MP had been caught watching porn in parliament.

Their failure to maintain their massive majority was always going to be a disappointment for the Tories in Tiverton, although it had appeared increasingly inevitable as the ballot approached. Indeed, the party faithful had looked to have so little confidence in their leader that they’d clearly been steeling themselves for it well in advance of the count. But to lose the seat to the Liberal Democrats was catastrophic for the Conservatives. It was the first time a Liberal had taken the seat since 1923. It was the third time in a year that England’s third-largest party had overturned a large Tory majority to claim a by-election victory. It represented the largest ever voter swing in British by-election history.

For Labour to reclaim the Yorkshire seat on the same night added a calamitous second blow to the government. Even a surprise visit to Ukraine six days before the polls hadn’t given the Prime Minister the electoral boost he needed. On Friday morning, the chairman of the Conservative Party tendered his resignation, saying that someone had to take responsibility for these defeats. It was immediately noted by commentators that his resignation letter had neglected to his assert his faith in Boris Johnson.

That morning, one backbench Tory rebel told the BBC that these results represented a vote of no confidence in Mr. Johnson. The Prime Minister had earlier told reporters that the notion that he should quit was ‘crazy’. His first response to the news was that he would ‘keep going’.

Even more so than the outcomes of local elections at the start of May, Thursday’s by-election results were disastrous for Her Majesty’s Government. These were, as the BBC put it, ‘crushing defeats’. Perhaps most portentously, the Opposition had not only taken back their northern seat but had secured their strongest majority there since 2001.

As many pundits have recently observed, the Labour Party has up until this point conspicuously failed to capitalize as well as it might on the Conservatives’ evident inadequacies. It hasn’t helped that Labour has been struggling with the embarrassing situation that its leader, Sir Keir Starmer, now is, as the Prime Minister recently was, under investigation for breaching lockdown rules. Sir Keir has promised to resign if he receives a police fine, although it is unclear whether he might then intend to stand for re-election.

The rail dispute has also put Labour into a difficult position, with the party of working people uncertain whether it should be seen to back the striking workers or to oppose a strike that affects the lives and livelihoods of many more workers. A directive that its frontbenchers should not join picket lines to support the rail union provoked some rancor within its own ranks, a scenario that reminded voters of the party’s ongoing problems of internal indiscipline.

These issues have underlined a sense that Labour, like the Tories, lacks both direction and leadership. Mr. Starmer has none of Boris Johnson’s casual charm and charisma. He seems decent, honest, and honorable, but is unexciting and uninspiring. He also appears unable to generate the political will to make any significant policy commitments. It is as if he is stuck in a rut of opposition: adept at sniping at government plans, but hesitant to advance alternative ideas. The Guardian’s Rafael Behr last week warned that Mr. Starmer needs to move on from this ‘wallflower strategy’. If he cannot do so, his best hope of reaching Downing Street is for its current resident to remain there for as long as he possibly can.

The morning the reactions to the by-election results rolled in, the eminent election analyst Professor Sir John Curtice suggested that the question of the electorate’s enthusiasm for the Labour Party remains open. Labour did well in Wakefield, but they only took half the votes that the Tories lost. It is unclear whether their win in Yorkshire demonstrates that, despite his ongoing issues, Sir Keir Starmer has started to convince voters of his worth, or merely that Mr. Johnson’s conduct has terminally alienated the electorate. It nevertheless represents a significant boost for the Labour leader, for his credibility and authority both within his own party and across the country.

The Prime Minister’s pig-headed staying power still, of course, offers an invaluable boon for Keir Starmer. Labour will continue to demand that he quits and pray that he stays. It remains to be seen whether the outcomes of these by-elections will be enough to push his party, at last, to wave bye-bye to Boris Johnson.

The Conservatives can be very pragmatic about such things. Only a few lightweight opportunistic no-hopers have tied their fortunes irrevocably to the current Prime Minister’s fate. If there were to emerge a candidate whom the entire party can rally behind as their best chance of electoral success in 2024 (or sooner), then Mr. Johnson’s departure would doubtless be expedited. For the moment, though, no such unity candidate exists.

The Deputy Prime Minister is a notable nitwit whose incompetence was demonstrated during Britain’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, which he had overseen, while holidaying in Crete, in his former role as Foreign Secretary (a position of which he was duly relieved). If you think the current UK Prime Minister is a nincompoop, then you should see his deputy. Last week, it was revealed that Boris Johnson had left him in charge for a few hours while he had undergone minor surgery. It was lucky that, under his brief period of stewardship, we hadn’t declared war on Belgium or adopted chocolate buttons as our official currency.

The current Foreign Secretary is popular with the party but not with the country, mixing, as she does, Home Counties bonhomie with jingoistic zeal. She is renowned for once having displayed an extraordinary degree of public outrage at the discovery that Britain imports two-thirds of the cheese it consumes. This situation was, she bawled at her party’s conference in 2014, ‘a disgrace’. Yes, a disgrace. As she continues to declare her loyalty to Boris Johnson, she might be well-advised to check her dictionary for the meaning of that emotive term.

Meanwhile, the Chancellor of the Exchequer has been tarred with the same ‘Partygate’ controversies which have afflicted his boss. He has also been impacted by questions surrounding his multi-millionaire wife’s tax arrangements, and his own right to permanent residency in the United States.

The Home Secretary is frequently characterized as a sadistic psychopath. Even the Conservative Party tends to draw the line at the celebration of such pure and explicit evil. Her extreme hostility to immigration seems somewhat at odds with her own family background, and this must confuse the hell out of the more overt racists in her party, who might otherwise have pledged to her their undying support. 

The Education Secretary co-founded the YouGov market research organization. He has proven himself to be an intelligent and capable minister. He managed Britain’s highly successful Covid vaccine roll-out. He should be the front-runner to succeed Boris Johnson – if only the Tories’ grassroots members could bring themselves to elect as their leader a man who was born in Baghdad.

A former Health Secretary seems to believe that he’s in with a chance, but that’s only because enough years have elapsed for most voters to have forgotten that he was neither effective nor well-liked during his time in government. The current Health Secretary – who has also previously served as Home Secretary and Chancellor – might get better odds if he hadn’t once been a prominent opponent of Brexit and if his working-class parents had not immigrated to Britain from Pakistan.

Mr. Johnson has surrounded himself with a Cabinet of non-entities unlikely to pose him any significant threat. His Transport Secretary has failed to avert a sequence of PR catastrophes – travel chaos caused by corporate mismanagement and industrial disputes – on land, in the air, and at sea. His Business Secretary has been remarkable for his hostility towards efforts to restore standards of conduct in parliament, and for his impotence in the face of the energy crisis. His Minister for Brexit Opportunities is a Victorian stick insect of a man, a pompous prig who lounges around parliament with a lazy air of entitlement in an unfashionably double-breasted suit.

His Housing Secretary is commonly considered to be clever, competent, and a ruthlessly ambitious, duplicitous, treacherous snake. His Environment Secretary is a bit of a joke. His Culture Secretary is a lot of a joke. The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions has kept her head down since Boris Johnson appointed her in September 2019, and as a result nobody really knows who she is. Her name is Ms. Coffey. One suspects that half her colleagues wonder if she also serves tea.

So, Boris Johnson seems safe enough for now, which is good news for the Labour Party and for satirical journalists but is deeply unfortunate for the country as a whole. He displays the resilience and durability of a tardigrade, and all the intellectual rigour, human empathy, and moral probity too.

This is not the end of the British Conservative Party. But it is clearly time for it to rip this toxic presence, this cancer, from its heart.

The nation once looked to Boris Johnson as a leader of hearty chutzpah, a man who can make it laugh. But it has become increasingly evident that this political jester is directly responsible for many of the country’s worst difficulties and is most adept at making the UK an object for the mockery of the rest of the world, a circus show of a nation, its stilted ministers donning the motley of their tarnished fame, all bluster and slapstick and God only knows what.

But these revels have now receded. The laughter has grown faded and jaded. The joke just isn’t funny anymore.

Send in the clowns? Don’t bother, they’re here.