TOXIC LEADER

Back in 2019, the Conservatives elected Boris Johnson as their leader because they believed he could win where others failed.

Indeed, he was a favourites of his voters in parts of the country where his party would never have dreamed of winning. Thus, less than three years ago, Johnson led the Conservatives to their biggest election victory since 1987, when the party won more than 55% of the seats in the House of Commons.

At the time, it was indeed expected that he might spend a decade or more in Downing Street. But now, after two and a half years, everything is over. Johnson lost support among his fellow partisans, among 100,000 ordinary members of the party, and the support of 67 million Britons. His leadership finally collapsed after dozens of ministers resigned from their posts in early July.

Johnson had become so toxic to his own party that his influential colleagues like the former Prime Minister John Major demanded he leave immediately, without waiting for the election of his successor. Johnson himself wanted to stay on until October, before the Conservative Party Congress.

Finally, it was agreed that the Tories would select the two main contenders by July 21, before the vacation, and on September 5 all party members will decide who will be the new Conservative leader and prime minister.

The mission seemed easy, but there was such an inflow of applications for premiership that it was required to drastically complicate the registration process for nominees. Otherwise the parliamentarians would not have been able to decide on the two favourites before the holiday season.

Thus, it was decided that only those who received the support of 20 MPs would be able to register as candidates, although normally 8 would suffice.

Playing dirty games

Immediately after Johnson's resignation, Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, the chief architect and coordinator of military aid to Ukraine, became the Number 1 candidate in the race. But Wallace, who ran Johnson's 2019 election campaign, announced he would not nominate himself to replace his boss.

At present, the main favourites are Penny Mordaunt and Rishi Sunak. With Mordaunt leading in the polls among the party's ordinary members and Sunak among the Conservative MPs.

Penny Mordaunt, 49, is the only female MP in the House of Commons who is a reservist in the Royal Navy. She is also the incumbent State Minister for Trade Policy , who refused to left the government in early July as opposed to many of her colleagues.

Her relationship with Johnson is difficult to call unclouded because after Theresa May, under whom Mordaunt was the first female defence secretary in the UK, he demoted her. It is speculated that she fell out of favour because she backed Jeremy Hunt in the 2019 leadership contest, not Johnson.

Penny Mordaunt has also been the State Minister for International Development and State Minister for Women and Equality. In 2016, she was a key figure in the campaign to leave the EU and was deputy co-chair of the Joint Committee on the Withdrawal Agreement during the Brexit negotiations.

The Conservatives highly expect her to consolidate the party in these difficult times.

Until recent months, many Conservative MPs saw Rishi Sunak, 42, as the front-runner in the leadership race after Johnson. He has earned most of his political capital by leading the UK economy during the coronavirus pandemic as Chief Secretary and then Chancellor of the Exchequer.

His ratings soared when he pledged to do "whatever it takes" to help people survive a pandemic in the spring of 2020 and announced £350bn of support.

But this was followed by a series of unpopular measures, such as an increase in national insurance, which predictably moved his rating rankings down. Nor did fines for breaking bans during the pandemic add to its popularity.

But the biggest hit to Sunak's credibility came in the spring with the news that his wife Akshata Murthy, daughter of Narayana Murthy, the Indian billionaire and co-founder of IT services giant Infosys, was evading taxes on her overseas income. She explained this by not being a UK resident.

Moreover, Sunak did not declare all of his wife's income in the parliamentary Register of Interests of MPs, despite the requirement for ministers to declare any family wealth "that may be deemed to be in conflict". Yet, Rishi Sunak still enjoys a lot of support from fellow Tories.

In general, the upcoming election for a new Conservative leader promises to be full of mutual compromises.

Boris Johnson refused to support any of the candidates, stating in his usual sarcastic way that he would agree to any successor that the ‘Darwinian system of leadership contest’ would produce.

The left-liberal The Guardian, on the other hand, believes that over the next few weeks Tory ministers will do and say anything they can to launder their reputations and blame the catastrophic failure of this government on Boris Johnson alone. "The most incredible thing is that we must believe that those who enthusiastically defended Johnson when he lied, cheated and recklessly failed to deal with a deadly pandemic must now lead us on,” says the newspaper.

Formal leader

Theoretically, until Boris Johnson addresses the Queen and formally resigns as Prime Minister, he still has the same responsibilities and rights as before he resigned.

In reality, however, he is not entitled to make any radical new policy decisions and has promised his new cabinet not to make any "major changes of direction".

And he can still represent the UK abroad. But will there be countries who want to do business with him when he has no real powers? He has been disliked before, to put it mildly, but had to be tolerated as leader of the state.

Few in Europe believed his words. Jens Zimmermann, chairman of the German-British parliamentary group of the Bundestag, says that "whenever we managed to find some common ground, we always felt that Johnson was ready to sacrifice the bilateral relationship for domestic gain at any moment".

It is after Johnson's involvement in the Brexit negotiations that even staunch UK allies such as Denmark and the Netherlands are showing clear signs of impatience. Particularly on a post-Brexit deal for Northern Ireland. The UK's relations with the neighbouring Republic of Ireland have also deteriorated. According to Irish Prime Minister Taoiseach Michael Martin, they have become "strained and complicated".  He said Johnson's departure could be an opportunity for a "reset".

The Johnson government's bill currently making its way through the UK parliament aimed at unilaterally rewriting the post-Brexit international treaty on Northern Ireland has angered even the most phlegmatic EU politicians. "London is unilaterally violating agreements... and does so for its own foreseeable motives. We in the EU cannot accept this," German Foreign Minister Annalena Berbock said.

Johnson’s eccentric behaviour also irritates his European colleagues.

During a meeting with German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier in Berlin in November 2016, Johnson tried to greet the Social Democrat with a fist punch. Steinmeier responded with an awkward handshake. French President Emmanuel Macron was annoyed by Boris Johnson's habit of joking and assuming a Wild West-style shooter pose whenever they met at international events.

But on Ukraine, Johnson and European leaders found much common ground. "On Ukraine, his position was firm and unwavering," European newspapers wrote.

Upon learning of Johnson's resignation, the US President Joe Biden praised the strength and resilience of special relationships between the US and the UK, and avoided mentioning Boris Johnson himself or his legacy. Biden has never made a secret that he relied on Johnson as a reliable ally in his attempts to organise a united European response to Russia's actions in Ukraine. And they worked together to counter growing Chinese influence in the Pacific.

Russia's reaction to Johnson's resignation was predictable. Presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov once said that Johnson "really doesn't like us, and we [don't] like him". Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that the moral of story [concerning Johnson's resignation] was that "no one should ever try to destroy Russia".

Only Ukraine expressed regret at Johnson’s resignation. President Vladimir Zelensky called the prime minister immediately after he announced his resignation and thanked him for his support in "the most difficult of times".

Political stalemate

Apparently, there is no clear frontrunner in the current leadership struggle in the UK. The ruling Conservative Party is riven by factional disputes, while there are serious divisions within over the measures to be taken as a response to the deepening economic crisis.

Even if Tories can avoid a general election until they appoint a new prime minister, it may not be long before he (or she) is still forced to hold a national vote to break the political deadlock and seek a personal mandate.

Either way, everybody on both sides of the Channel can say with relief that there is now a real chance that Britain begins to rebuild its relationship with the EU.