Tag: British prime minister
Britain’s Guilty Men and Women
In July 1940, three journalists published a short, anonymous polemical attack on the failures of British statecraft that forever shaped Britain’s understanding of the Second World War. Guilty Men, by the pseudonymous Cato, accused 15 of Britain’s senior political figures during the interwar years of leading a once prosperous and secure empire “to the edge of national annihilation.” The war may have broken out in 1939, Cato charged, but the genesis of Britain’s misfortunes could be dated
Boris Johnson Has Only Delayed the Inevitable
Boris Johnson lives to fight another day. Britain, meanwhile, lives to endure another day in his shadow, a bit part in the soap opera of his life, watching on as the drama is set on an endless doom loop from comic farce to tragedy.
After months of turmoil over Johnson’s behavior in office, in which he became the first sitting British prime minister ever to be fined for breaking the law, enough of his fellow Conservative members of Parliament finally
Will Britain Survive? – The Atlantic
The grim reality for Britain as it faces up to 2022 is that no other major power on Earth stands quite as close to its own dissolution. Given its recent record, perhaps this should not be a surprise. In the opening two decades of the 21st century, Britain has effectively lost two wars and seen its grand strategy collapse, first with the 2008 financial crisis, which blew up its social and economic settlement, and, then, in 2016, when the
Boris Johnson Has Lost His Mojo
By April 1968, Charles de Gaulle was bored. “None of this amuses me anymore,” the French president told his aide-de-camp, Admiral François Flohic. “There is no longer anything difficult or heroic to do.” Over the previous decade, de Gaulle had returned from political exile to save the country from military insurrection, killed off the Fourth Republic, created the Fifth, ended the creeping civil war over Algeria and negotiated its independence, vetoed Britain’s application to join the European Common Market,
Is Boris Johnson a Liar?
A few months ago, I saw Boris Johnson recount a story about his life that I’d never heard before—and he said something that was not, strictly speaking, true.
With most politicians, hearing a new tale can be unremarkable, but with Johnson—the subject of at least two biographies, countless newspaper and magazine articles, and someone who has been at the center of British political life for decades—almost everything that can be known about him is already known. Revelations that