It is truly dizzying to live in the UK these days, if you have a good memory. Life under Boris Johnson’s government means that whatever they tell you today, it will all have changed by tomorrow. Whatever you remember, it never happened like that. What Johnson did was not as it seemed, or it was someone else’s fault. Johnson came to power thanks to lies, half-truths and sleights of hand. Back in 2019, his friends in the Conservative Party and his critics who cared about the future of the United Kingdom all hoped that he would not be able to continue in that vein as Prime Minister.
Eighteen months after his election victory, the opposite is the case. Johnson has remained true to himself and is now more popular than ever before. In the wake of the pandemic and the UK’s successful vaccination campaign, nothing seems to stick: not his catastrophic mismanagement at the beginning of the pandemic, nor his fractured relationship with the truth, not even the frequent cases of corruption within his cabinet. Furthermore, the growing damage done by Brexit to the British economy is rarely discussed in the country. Even his government’s increasingly authoritarian assaults on citizens seem to go unnoticed by the public. Johnson has shifted his party so far to the right that attacks on the justice system and the media are part of everyday life, with potentially fatal consequences for parliamentary democracy in the UK.
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