Nine summers ago, Boris Johnson, who was then the mayor of London, let it be known that he was looking for a constituency where he could stand as a Member of Parliament. On August 26, 2014, he whacked in (Johnson’s words) an application to become a candidate in Uxbridge and South Ruislip, a safe Conservative Party seat just to the north of Heathrow Airport. Uxbridge has had only two Labour M.P.s in a hundred and thirty-eight years; the last one left office in 1970. Johnson’s predecessor, John Randall, was an heir and the managing director of Randall’s, the local department store; a few years after stepping down, he became a lord. That year, Johnson was the most popular Conservative politician in Britain. Being the mayor of a liberal city—big on profile, less so on responsibility—had been a largely joyful platform. Brexit; Downing Street; his third wife; children Nos. 6, 7, and 8; global infamy; the downfall—it was all to come. “I want to get him back in Parliament,” David Cameron, then the Prime Minister, said of Johnson at the time. “If you have got a great striker, you want him on the pitch.” On the night in 2015 that Johnson won his seat, he wore a pair of dress shoes from Randall’s and bid farewell to his predecessor: “I am literally in his shoes now.”
This June, Johnson gave up his last remaining public office when he resigned as an M.P. He always saw resigning as a loser’s option. “There are no disasters, only opportunities,” he wrote in a newspaper column, in 2004. “And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters.” But a disciplinary panel of the House of Commons left Johnson with no choice. The Committee of Privileges, which was made up of seven of Johnson’s colleagues, including four Conservative M.P.s, concluded that he had deliberately misled Parliament and “committed a serious contempt of the House” amid his repeated denials that there had been parties and social gatherings in Downing Street during Britain’s pandemic lockdowns.
The committee started investigating Johnson while he was still Prime Minister, before the wave of mass resignations that drove him from government, last July. During the inquiry, Johnson alternately charmed and castigated his fellow-M.P.s. The day after he was shown an early, confidential copy of the committee’s findings, on June 8th this year, he announced that he was resigning as an M.P. and described the process as a “kangaroo court” and a “witch-hunt,” conducted in revenge for Brexit. In response, the committee revealed that, had Johnson stayed on, it would have suspended him as an M.P. for ninety days, potentially triggering an election in Uxbridge and South Ruislip, and it recommended that he be denied an entry pass to the Palace of Westminster. No British Prime Minister’s political career has ended in such official ignominy. “It is very sad to be leaving parliament—at least for now,” Johnson wrote, in his resignation statement.
Johnson’s departure helped trigger three simultaneous by-elections, which took place this week. (A close ally, Nigel Adams, also resigned his seat, in North Yorkshire; another Tory M.P., David Warburton, stood down in Somerset, after allegations of drug use and sexual misconduct, the latter of which he denies.) All three constituencies were won easily by the Conservatives at the last election, in 2019, when Johnson—riding high—won an eighty-seat majority in the House of Commons. But all three were now tossups. In three and a half years, the Conservatives’ parliamentary majority has shrunk to a little more than sixty, and the government of the Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, in place since October, has been dogged by inflation, strikes, and a distinct lack of bounce and direction.
Two days before the election in Uxbridge, I stopped by the campaign headquarters of Danny Beales, the Labour candidate aiming to succeed Johnson, where a Party official told me that the race was too close to call. On the high street, I met Harry Essuman, a retired flight-planning analyst for British Airways’ cargo division, who was on his way to upgrade his cell phone. He was done with Johnson. “He will come to be known as the worst person ever to have become Prime Minister because he proved blazingly that he doesn’t give a toss about the little people,” Essuman said. “He cared only for one person: him.” Fifty-seven per cent of voters in Uxbridge and South Ruislip voted to leave the European Union while Johnson was their M.P. On the day I visited, a new poll showed that sixty-three per cent of British people over all now think that Brexit was more of a failure than a success. Essuman, who had believed in Brexit, was among them. “Those who led us in there didn’t know what to do with it,” he said.
Johnson’s record as a local politician was patchy, shall we say. He never lived in the neighborhood. In 2018, when he was the country’s Foreign Secretary, he memorably flew to Afghanistan for the day in order to avoid a parliamentary vote on the future of Heathrow Airport, one of the largest local employers, which Johnson had previously dreamed of closing. A promise to build a new hospital in the constituency—as part of a larger program of forty new hospitals, announced while Johnson was Prime Minister—was more of a maybe. (Earlier this week, a report by Britain’s National Audit Office found that the program was running late and over budget and would not be completed until well into the twenty-thirties.)
Still, people in the district loved Johnson as their own. Outside a branch of Marks & Spencer, Debbie Cusmans, who was wearing pink shorts and a matching hip bag, spotted my open notebook and came over to tell me that Johnson had been betrayed. “That Rishi Sunak has set him up,” Cusmans said. (Sunak and his wife, Akshata Murty, are thought to have a net worth of around five hundred and thirty million pounds.) “On behalf of everybody that voted for Boris Johnson as our M.P. and our Prime Minister, it’s completely wrong,” Cusmans said. “They’ve taken our votes away from us.” Like many Tories, Cusmans was also deeply suspicious of Sadiq Khan, the Labour mayor of London, Johnson’s successor in the role. Later this summer, London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone, which levies a twelve-and-a-half-pound daily charge on people driving older, polluting cars in the central part of the capital, will expand to the edges of the city. Improving London’s air quality is, arguably, Khan’s most urgent priority and the ULEZ had become a major issue in the by-election, with even Beales, the Labour candidate, saying that its extension should be delayed. “We don’t need the ULEZ here. We don’t need to pay twelve-fifty,” Cusmans told me. “I like Danny. But I don’t like what Sadiq Khan is trying to do to Uxbridge.”
It was only when I reached the quieter, suburban streets in the east of the constituency that I met an actual Labour voter. Linda Arlidge, a former local-government official, had already sent in her postal vote for Beales. “We’ve been lied to for years,” she said, of Johnson. “And I hope people reflect on that, and realize it’s not just the lies in Parliament that he’s recently done. It’s right back.” The three by-elections, on the eve of the summer recess, were an opportunity to protest thirteen years of Conservative-led governments in Britain and to lay the groundwork ahead of a general election next year. The Labour Party is currently twenty points ahead of the Tories in the opinion polls. (The gap was about ten when Johnson resigned as Prime Minister.) “I think it’s really exciting,” Arlidge said. She was wheeling a suitcase. I let her go and sat down at a bus stop next to Harjit Singh, a retired postman. He pulled out his phone and showed me a picture of him with a younger and more polished-looking Johnson, from about ten years ago. “After that, I just blessed him,” Singh said. “God will help you. You will go very high.” Singh was prepared to overlook Johnson’s misdemeanors along the way. “People blamed him when they were suffering with the corona and he was enjoying the party,” Singh said. “Otherwise, he was not bad.”
Johnson’s political legacy is much the same as his persona—entirely unserious and totally inescapable. It is easy to forget how, for three years or more, British public life was a playpen for his ego, his absurd vocabulary. (Since June, Johnson has been a columnist for the right-wing Daily Mail, writing about his experience taking Ozempic—“I was going to start to resemble a chiselled whippet”—among other subjects.) And yet the effects of his premiership lie all around. The economy stutters on, hampered by the needless, masochistic consequences of Brexit. When I visited Uxbridge, the government had just added bricklayers, masons, roofers, roof tilers, slaters, carpenters, and fishing-industry workers to the country’s national “Shortage Occupation List,” a roster that already includes care workers, engineers, and Web designers—a lot of the Europeans who have left, in other words. The night before, the House of Lords had passed Britain’s draconian new Illegal Migration Bill, which will allow the detention and deportation of children and refugees who arrive in the country in small dinghies across the English Channel. The law, which was condemned by the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, is an attempt to codify Johnson’s theatrical policy of shifting Britain’s asylum seekers to Rwanda, which is currently held up in the courts.
Meanwhile, the Johnson-shaped cloud of corruption refuses to lift from the Conservatives. For weeks, the Party has been locked in an embarrassing row over the former Prime Minister’s attempts to bestow various honors on his closest allies. (Johnson reportedly tried and failed to wangle a knighthood for his father; his hairdresser became an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.) One of Johnson’s nominees, Baroness Owen of Alderley Edge, is twenty-nine years old and worked as his aide for a little more than a year. She will become the youngest life peer in British history. “His premiership serves as a warning to those that follow,” Hannah White, of the nonpartisan Institute for Government, wrote, last month. “That, above all else, is the true legacy of Boris Johnson.”
The vote in Uxbridge went down to the wire. Shortly before two in the morning, election officials ordered a recount for Beales and Steve Tuckwell, the Conservative candidate, who were separated by fewer than five hundred votes. Tuckwell and the Tories ended up hanging on to the seat with a majority of four hundred and ninety-five—a victory that Tuckwell put down to dislike of the ULEZ charge. “Sadiq Khan has lost Labour this election,” Tuckwell said, once the votes were counted. He made no mention of Johnson, or of his shoes. Elsewhere, it was a dispiriting night for Sunak and his government. The other two Conservative constituencies fell: Selby and Ainsty, in North Yorkshire, to Labour; and Somerton and Frome, in Somerset, to the Liberal Democrats. In both seats, the Tory vote declined by more than twenty per cent. The next morning, Sunak arrived in Uxbridge for a photo opportunity with a tired-looking Tuckwell at a crowded café. “Westminster’s been acting like the next election is a done deal. The Labour Party has been acting like it’s a done deal,” the Prime Minister told the BBC. “The people of Uxbridge just told all of them that it’s not.” Johnson tweeted his congratulations, the ghost at the feast. ♦
