No one has ever seen the like before in modern times. Britain’s storied Parliament has made plenty of history over the centuries — from the rhetorical clashes between the great Victorian rivals William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli to William Wilberforce’s campaign to prohibit British ships trafficking in slaves to the Americas.
The chamber of the House of Commons echoed with Winston Churchill’s resounding wartime speeches galvanizing the British to stay the course in the fight of the nation’s life against Adolf Hitler.
“Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous states have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail,” he told the Commons on June 4, 1940, days after the British forces were plucked from the beaches of Dunkirk.
But the British Parliament’s record book is being re-written as Brexit sinks its teeth into the country’s body politic, tearing apart political parties, ripping up well-established conventions and rules and turning friend against friend. On Thursday, the brother of Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Jo, a pro-EU lawmaker, quit as a cabinet minister and MP, saying he was “torn between family loyalty and the national interest.”
Amid the high drama, histrionics and frequent breaches of verbal propriety traditionally demanded in the ‘mother of parliaments,’ this week has seen a series of startling firsts for British politics.
No British prime minister has been rebuffed by the House of Commons in the fashion Boris Johnson suffered when a majority of lawmakers wrestled control of parliamentary business from the government to start passing legislation to delay Britain from leaving the European Union.
For Johnson loyalists and Brexiters this was an exercise in turning the British constitution upside down with parliament grabbing the role reserved for the government, transforming itself from legislature to executive in the process. For pro-EU lawmakers, and others worried about the economic impact on jobs and livelihoods from Brexit, initiating legislation was a necessary act of accountability and oversight and done in the national interest.
Johnson, who has only been prime minister for six weeks, suffered four parliamentary defeats in quick succession — that has never happened before to a British prime minister. “Not a good start,” jeered an opposition lawmaker after one of the rebuffs.
Nor has modern British politics seen such a large purge of lawmakers from a political party.
Twenty-one Conservative lawmakers were expelled from the party by Downing Street for voting alongside the opposition parties to delay Brexit. Among them 79-year-old Ken Clarke, the longest continuously sitting British member of Parliament, and former finance minister Philip Hammond — as well as Winston Churchill’s grandson, Nicholas Soames.
Asked if this was the end of the Conservative party of his grandfather, Soames said: “No. But it’s a bad night.” Clarke’s view is that it might mark the end of the Conservative party in all but name. The Conservatives have become the “Brexit party re-badged,” he lamented.
And never before have opposition parties blocked a bid by a government to hold an early general election. Instead, in a moment of surprising unity, they bandied together to block an early election Johnson tried to trigger and make as their priority passing legislation to thwart a so-called no-deal Brexit.
On Wednesday, Johnson accused opposition parties of running scared. But according to the leader of Britain’s main opposition Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, Johnson’s ballot offer was “a bit like an offer of an apple to Snow White from the Wicked Queen… offering the poison of a no-deal [Brexit].”
For all of Johnson’s taunts about opposition parties being afraid of how British voters will judge them, the truth is there isn’t a sitting lawmaker who’s not fearful of what an election may hold.
Despite the opposition parties seeing off Johnson’s bid midweek to hold an election on October 15, a snap poll is only weeks away. Once the legislation blocking a no-deal Brexit has received the queen’s assent, the opposition parties will lift their bar on an election.
Can Johnson win it?
Few pollsters are ready to hazard a firm prediction; many see a hung parliament as the most likely outcome. Johnson’s game plan is to focus on voters who want to leave the EU. His mass expulsion of rebel lawmakers was carried out to kill off the idea that the Conservatives are not fully committed to Brexit.