Boris Johnson has completed his march to the British prime minister’s office in 10 Downing Street, defeating rival Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt in the Conservative Party leadership election.
His victory was overwhelming, with 92,153 votes to Hunt’s 46,656 out of an eligible electorate of 159,320 party members and an 87% turnout.
Johnson, 55, member of Parliament for Uxbridge and South Ruislip, is a former mayor of London and biographer of Winston Churchill who was educated at Eton and Oxford. He won 160 votes out of 313 Conservatives MPs against Hunt’s 77 and Michael Gove’s 75. That led to a run-off this week in which Johnson secured a majority of 160,000 party members in a postal ballot.
“It’s right and timely that they have someone who supported Brexit actually becoming prime minister,” Luke Coffey, a Heritage Foundation analyst and U.S. Army veteran who was a British defense ministry adviser, told the Washington Examiner.
New York-born Johnson, a former journalist, arrives at Downing Street with an eye on the Oct. 31 Brexit deadline to lead the United Kingdom out of the European Union. That leaves him just more than two months to resolve one of the most divisive controversies to rock London and the broader network of Western allies in decades.
“The side everyone sees of Boris Johnson, that everyone knows, is kind of a quasi-goofy, relaxed caricature of a British toff,” said Coffey. “But in reality he’s very astute, very clever, very smart and ambitious.”
It will take skill for Johnson to succeed where outgoing Prime Minister Theresa May failed in the three years since a majority of U.K. voters backed Brexit. Her tenure at the top of British politics was broken by the competing pressure to provide the benefits of an economic relationship with the EU while securing London’s control over U.K. borders and independence from the onerous regulations that govern the common European market.
Johnson hopes to break the logjam by signaling to Brussels that he is willing to leave the EU even without an agreement for new economic relations.
“There is abundant scope to find the solutions necessary — and they can and will be found, in the context of the Free Trade Agreement that we will negotiate with the EU … after we have left on October 31,” Johnson wrote in a Sunday newspaper column.
President Trump could play a key role in Johnson’s success, if he brokers a parallel free trade agreement that helps keep the British economy afloat throughout the standoff with the EU.
“They’re obviously putting a lot of eggs in the basket that the president is going to come through with a really favorable bilateral trade deal for the Brits,” John Hannah, a senior counselor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based think tank with close ties to the Trump administration, told the Washington Examiner. “My guess is that he’ll probably drive a really hard bargain.”
Coffey, on the other hand, thinks Trump might feel an incentive to work with Johnson because of his own support for Brexit and the expectation that the two leaders will get along better than Trump and May.
“Trump sees Boris as someone he can work with,” Coffey said. “Also, I would point out that this is the world’s fifth-largest economy … That limits America’s ability to, I think, just take advantage of the talks.”
Johnson’s plan, like May’s before it, is complicated but the fraught relationship between Ireland, which remains part of the EU, and Northern Ireland, a region of the United Kingdom. The two principalities share an open border due to a landmark 1999 Good Friday agreement, raising fears that a divorce between the EU and the United Kingdom could bring back a hard border, dividing the island and upending the hard-won peace between Irish Protestants and Roman Catholics.
“We can come out of the EU on October 31, and yes, we certainly have the technology to do so,” Johnson stressed, suggesting that the negotiating teams could come up with a plan to inspect goods that pass between the UK and Ireland without restoring a hard border. “What we need now is the will and the drive.”
British economic officials warn that a no-deal Brexit would spark a recession, while leading analysts outside the government believe that a recession is already beginning. Those forecasts have contributed to opposition even within Johnson’s party, raising the prospect of an insurgency against his leadership almost as soon as he takes office.
The acrimonious atmosphere in London, displayed recently by the unprecedented leak of confidential memos in which the U.K. ambassador to the United States criticized President Trump, has worrisome ramifications for U.S. interests. The British government has “ground to a halt” due to internal controversies over Brexit, as a May ally recently observed. And, Hannah thinks that U.S. foreign policy leaders will learn to regret Brexit if it leaves the U.K. on the periphery of European foreign policy debates.
“It was always extremely valuable, particularly within the EU, to have the Brits inside the tent arguing on behalf of America’s position,” said Hannah, who worked in the State Department during three different presidencies. “I just worry that we’re going to lose that. And, America will be fine getting through that, but I think the Brits are going to find themselves in a more difficult and less influential position as a result of it.”
Coffey believes that Brexit will free the United Kingdom to partner more closely with the United States on policies opposed by other leading European powers, such as Trump’s maximum pressure campaign against Iran, for instance.
“Britain, outside of the EU, won’t be constrained by the EU’s lowest common denominator foreign policy,” he predicted.
Johnson will have a high-stakes role in determining which prediction proves correct — in addition to his responsibility for either outcome, as one of the leaders of the Brexit movement over the last several years.
“He’s the type of person that recognizes his particular place and role in history right now,” Coffey said. “He’ll be acutely aware of how he will be viewed in the future.”
