The fantasy of Brexit Britain is over
The country is being cut down to size
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THE Boris Johnson era is over. But the turmoil has only just begun.
For the third time in under a decade, a crisis at the top of the Conservative Party has ousted a sitting prime minister. Where his predecessors had been brought down by Brexit, Johnson’s reign was broken by a series of crises. Some, such as chronic labour shortages and a surging cost of living, were material. Others, notably Johnson’s rule-breaking through the pandemic, were ethical. By the end, the problem was fundamentally electoral: A string of defeats and miserable polling convinced Conservative lawmakers that Johnson’s electoral pulling power was at an end.
Yet the 2 candidates vying to replace him are unlikely to offer anything better. Both served in Johnson’s cabinet — Rishi Sunak as chancellor of the Exchequer and Liz Truss as foreign secretary — and are implicated, directly or by association, in the scandals that felled him. More pressingly, neither displays any idea of how to cope with Britain’s structural problems, offering either a cut in taxes or in spending. For the country, both options are bad. The chaos of recent months isn’t going anywhere.
