As you may have heard, the past couple days have not gone entirely swimmingly for Boris Johnson. After asking for and receiving permission last week to suspend Parliament between mid-September and mid-October in order to reduce the amount of time his opponents have to thwart a no-deal Brexit, the entire gambit blew up in his face—or, to borrow a U.K. phrase, he really “cocked it up.” On Wednesday, Johnson, who kicked out 21 Conservative Party lawmakers on Tuesday for voting against his government, suffered a pair of defeats that made the time he got stuck on a zip line look somehow not that embarrassing.
First, MPs voted 327 to 299 in favor of forcing the government to seek a three-month extension to the October 31 Brexit deadline if it can’t reach a deal with the European Union by October 19. (Johnson, who has been spreading lies about the bloc since he was working at the Telegraph’s Brussels bureau, has said the U.K. will exit on Halloween “do or die, come what may.”) In addition, the House of Commons rejected Johnson’s call for an October 15 snap general election that might have allowed him to cut the opposition off at the knees.
Despite BoJo receiving his second major defeat on only his third day in Parliament, the U.K. is extremely far from in the clear:
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