The Morning Dispatch: Boris Johnson To Resign

Happy Thursday! To the vacationing child who brought three Giant African Land Snails home to Florida as a souvenir 60 years ago: What were you thinking??

Officials in the Sunshine State are now attempting to eradicate the slimy creatures—which can spread parasitic brain worms, lay thousands of eggs throughout their lifetimes, and are considered one of the most invasive pests on the planet—for the third time. We wish them the best of luck.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• A lot can change around the world while you’re asleep: The BBC reported early Thursday morning that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who has endured a remarkable sequence of political scandals and faced a wave of party resignations this week, is set to resign later today. As we hit send on this newsletter, Johnson was expected any minute to make a speech announcing he is stepping down.

• A large—but unconfirmed—number of civilians were killed in Ethiopia’s western Oromia region on Monday, less than three weeks after a similar attack left more than 200 civilians dead. As before, the Ethiopian government and the Oromo Liberation Army are blaming each other for the massacre, which primarily targeted the Amhara ethnic group. “We will pursue this terrorist group to the end and eliminate it with our people,” Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed said of the OLA, while an OLA spokesman accused Abiy of “pointing fingers” and “escaping accountability.” The Ethiopian Human Rights Commission attributed the attack to the OLA, which has aligned itself with Tigrayan rebels in the country’s ongoing civil war.

• Law enforcement officials in Lake County, Illinois, provided an update yesterday on their investigation into Monday’s mass shooting, telling reporters the 22-year-old man charged with seven counts of first-degree murder confessed to firing more than 80 rounds into the crowd assembled at Highland Park’s annual 4th of July parade. Fleeing in his mother’s car after the shooting, the man also contemplated—but ultimately decided against—opening fire at a second 4th of July celebration in Madison, Wisconsin, police said.

• The Food and Drug Administration announced Wednesday it will work with overseas baby formula manufacturers to allow them to access the American market permanently, not just during the current shortage. Two American companies—Abbott Laboratories and Reckitt Benckiser Group—accounted for about 80 percent of all formula sales in 2021, making the market particularly vulnerable to supply chain disruptions. 

• The U.S. labor market—while still extremely tight—has begun to cool somewhat, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Wednesday. Job openings in the United States declined slightly from record highs at the end of May, when there were 11.3 million unfilled jobs nationwide, down from 11.7 million a month earlier. The quits rate—the percentage of workers who quit their job during the month—ticked down from a near-record 2.9 percent to 2.8 percent, and the number of layoffs and discharges increased slightly to 1.4 million.

• The Federal Reserve on Wednesday released minutes from the central bank’s June meeting, revealing committee members’ concerns that longer-run inflation expectations could be beginning to drift up to levels “inconsistent with” their 2 percent objective. Participants “concurred that the economic outlook warranted moving to a restrictive stance,” the notes read, and they “recognized the possibility that an even more restrictive stance could be appropriate if elevated inflation pressures were to persist.” The Fed is slated to make its next decision on target interest rates—likely raising them another 0.75 percentage points—on July 27.

• A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association this week found that COVID-19 was the third leading cause of death in the United States between March 2020 and October 2021, behind only heart disease and cancer. Approximately one in eight deaths over that time period was attributed to COVID-19, and in 2021, the virus was the leading cause of death among people ages 45 to 54.

• Pat Cipollone—White House counsel to former President Donald Trump—has reportedly reached a deal with the January 6 committee to sit for a videotaped interview on Friday. The committee issued a subpoena to Cipollone last week following testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson—aide to Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows—that indicated Cipollone was gravely concerned with Trump and Meadows’ efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

• President Joe Biden on Wednesday announced his intent to nominate Phil Washington—currently CEO of Denver International Airport, formerly CEO of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority—to lead the Federal Aviation Administration. The position has been vacant since March, when Steve Dickson—a Trump-appointee—resigned less than halfway through his five-year term. 

Goodbye, Boris, It’s Been Nice

They’re clearly still not over us: This week, as Americans celebrated their independence from Great Britain, the United Kingdom is having a complete and total meltdown.

We’re joking about the timing, yes, but not about the meltdown. Prime Minister Boris Johnson is set to announce his resignation Thursday after more than 50 members of his government resigned in protest this week over a string of scandals—including, most recently, the news that Johnson promoted a member of parliament to a vote whipping position despite knowledge of sexual misconduct allegations against him.

The prime minister, who served for roughly three years—and also served roughly for three years—had resisted calls for his ouster as recently as this morning in the United Kingdom. But multiple British news outlets have reported that Johnson has agreed to resign his position and is prepared to make a public statement at No. 10 Downing Street soon.

Johnson has a long track record of keeping calm and carrying on through scandals that would lead most other leaders to step aside; in British political circles, he’s often referred to as “Teflon” or a “greased piglet.” Just last month, for example, he survived a no-confidence vote over his involvement in parties at Downing Street in 2020 that violated his own government’s COVID-19 lockdown restrictions, making him the U.K.’s first sitting prime minister officially guilty of breaking the law. He won just 59 percent support from members of his own party in the no-confidence vote.

Johnson had hoped to hang on through the latest scandal, too. By his party’s current procedures, he was safe from another such vote for at least one calendar year, and the Conservatives’ 1922 Committee—which oversees such leadership challenges—had declined this week to change those rules. But the committee also decided to move up its executive elections to early next week, when anti-Johnson Conservatives were likely to take control and change the bylaws, clearing the way for another attempt to oust him.

And after the spate of resignations—at a pace of roughly one an hour over the last 48 hours—Johnson was unlikely to survive again. After initially misleading the press, this week Johnson admitted he’d been told in 2019 about allegations of sexual harassment against Conservative parliament member Christopher Pincher. Johnson promoted Pincher to deputy chief whip in his government in February, despite Pincher having quit a similar role in 2017 over allegations of unwanted sexual advances. Pincher resigned last week after new reports surfaced that he’d drunkenly groped two people at a club. Johnson dodged questions Wednesday about whether he once quipped that Pincher was “Pincher by name, pincher by nature,” or had said that “all the sex pests are supporting me.”

Pincher isn’t the only Conservative recently accused of misconduct. Two other Tories left Parliament in the past few months—one was jailed for sexual assault, the other was caught watching pornography in the House of Commons. The Conservatives lost both by-elections to replace them, with the votes being widely interpreted as a rebuke of Johnson and the party as a whole. “This should be a wake-up call for all those Conservative MPs propping up Boris Johnson,” Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey said. Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, a Tory and 1922 Committee leader, conceded Conservatives might need to “take steps to have a new prime minister.”

Nearly lost in the scandal scrum this week was Johnson’s confirmation that, while foreign minister in 2018, and shortly after the Salisbury poisoning of ex-Russian Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, he met with Russian billionaire and former KGB agent Alexander Lebedev without other officials or his security team. 

This string of scandals—combined with voters’ discontent over high inflation and a housing shortage—have undermined Tories’ confidence in Johnson’s ability to lead or help them win elections. The prime minister has an abysmal 23 percent approval rate, per YouGov, and just 13 percent of British voters believe him to be trustworthy. He also still faces a likely damaging report this fall from a parliamentary committee investigating whether he lied to Parliament about the COVID-19 lockdown parties.

So on Tuesday, Minister for Children and Families Will Quince, Health Secretary Sajid Javid, and Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak resigned. “I am instinctively a team player but the British people also rightly expect integrity from their Government,” Javid wrote in his resignation letter to Johnson. “The tone you set as a leader, and the values you represent, reflect on your colleagues, your party and ultimately the country.”

“Treading the tightrope between loyalty and integrity has become impossible,” Javid told members of Parliament (MPs) Wednesday, explaining his decision. “At some point we have to conclude that enough is enough.”

Their resignations triggered a cascade of exits—from cabinet members to junior ministers—that escalated Wednesday while Johnson reshuffled his team and defended himself before Parliament. As he promised members that his government was ensuring “safeguarding is done” to make sure Ukrainian refugees are safely housed, his government minister in charge of that safeguarding announced her resignation.

“As of tonight there aren’t enough people to keep the business of the government going,” Camilla Cavendish, a policy director under David Cameron, told the BBC Wednesday. “Members of Parliament have already been told there aren’t even enough people on the bill committees to actually get the legislation through—that is the fundamental business of government.”

So, what’s next? With Johnson set to announce his resignation, Conservative MPs and official party members will be tasked with choosing the next leader of their party, who would in turn become the next prime minister. Javid and Sunak are widely seen as potential replacements—though Sunak has lost popularity recently thanks to his own involvement in the Downing Street parties—as are Johnson’s Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, his Defense Secretary Ben Wallace, and Jeremy Hunt, former health secretary and foreign secretary who currently chairs of the Health and Social Care Select Committee. Sky News reports that Truss is abruptly ending a trip abroad in Indonesia to return to London to prepare her bid for leadership. A Sky News poll of Conservative Party members taken over the last two days found that Wallace is by far the most popular potential leader in head-to-head contests with other potential candidates, nearly doubling the support for Sunak, Truss and Hunt. 

Johnson’s departure marked a swift reversal from his position some 24 hours earlier, when he insisted he would not leave his post. Despite a parade of his own ministers and allies pleading with him to step down, Johnson opted instead on Wednesday to fire—sorry, sack—senior policy minister Michael Gove for disloyalty after Gove confronted Johnson Wednesday and told him to resign for the good of the Tories and the country. James Duddridge—Conservative MP and steadfast Johnson ally—told Sky News the prime minister is in a “buoyant mood and will fight on.”

“The job of a prime minister in difficult circumstances, when he’s been handed a colossal mandate, is to keep going,” Johnson told Parliament when members of his party asked what, exactly, it would take for him to resign. “That’s what I’m going to do.”

That is not, in the end, what he did. Johnson is expected to remain in his position until a replacement is chosen.

Worth Your Time

• For more on Boris Johnson’s resignation, check out the latest from The Atlantic’s London-based staff writer, Tom McTague, published yesterday before the latest news. “What Britain has is a prime minister with instincts, sometimes good, sometimes bad, who almost as a point of principle refuses ever to temper or abrogate them in any way,” he writes. “These same instincts now look as though they will cost Johnson his job. He continually disregards official advice, and attempts to bypass the rules or ignores them altogether, seeing them as little more than officialdom’s devices to control him. … This is the great paradox about Johnson: He is both the most self-aware political leader I’ve come across, a leader who seems to genuinely reflect on his character flaws, and the one who seems most determined to do absolutely nothing about them. And so Britain bounces from scandal to scandal, instinct to instinct, without direction or purpose, unmoored and ungoverned.”

• Why is it important to write our laws down? “Law that is not fixed and knowable is only arbitrary power with a literary companion and a little democratic pretense,” Kevin Williamson writes for National Review. “If the meaning of the law is not fixed—if, for example, you insist that your government is organized according to the principles of a ‘living constitution’—then you cannot know what the law is, because the law is only what some judge or functionary says it is at any particular moment. A man inclined to abide by the law can never be entirely sure that he is doing so, and he can never be entirely sure that he is breaking the law. Such an unknowable law is, properly speaking, no law at all—it does not meet the minimum requirement for functioning as law. … [And] the deal that Americans signed up for was a government of laws, not a government of arbitrary power.”

• Gallup is out with its annual look at Americans’ confidence in various institutions, and … it’s bad. “This year’s poll marks new lows in confidence for all three branches of the federal government—the Supreme Court (25%), the presidency (23%) and Congress,” Jeffrey Jones writes. “Five other institutions are at their lowest points in at least three decades of measurement, including the church or organized religion (31%), newspapers (16%), the criminal justice system (14%), big business (14%) and the police. … Americans’ confidence in institutions has been lacking for most of the past 15 years, but their trust in key institutions has hit a new low this year. Most of the institutions Gallup tracks are at historic lows, and average confidence across all institutions is now four points lower than the prior low.”

Something Wholesome

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Toeing the Company Line

• On the site today, we’ve got an excerpt from Paul Miller’s new book The Religion of American Greatness: What’s Wrong With Christian Nationalism. And Audrey shines a spotlight on both parties’ efforts to fundraise off the news generated by the January 6 committee (“I’VE BEEN SUBPOENAED!”). 

• Did you get your reading done? The inaugural episode of The Dispatch Book Club is officially out! Click here for instructions on how to subscribe to the members-only podcast feed. This month, Sarah spoke with neuroscientist David Eagleman about his book, Livewired. Up next? The Extended Mind, by Annie Murphy Paul.

• On yesterday’s episode of The Dispatch Podcast, Steve is joined by The Bulwark’s Tim Miller for a conversation about Miller’s new book, Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell. What did the Trump years reveal about D.C. political culture and the various factions within the GOP? Is it possible for sane center-right journalism to thrive in today’s climate?

• FTC Commissioner Noah Phillips dropped by The Remnant yesterday for an exceedingly wonky conversation with Jonah about efforts to rein in Big Tech, new approaches to antitrust law, the prevalence of monopolies in today’s economy, and the state of the FTC generally. And on today’s episode, Jonah is joined by another Noah—Rothman, the associate editor of Commentary Magazine—for a conversation about his new book, The Rise of the New Puritans: Fighting Back Against Progressives’ War on Fun. 

• Jonah expands on that conversation with Rothman in Wednesday’s G-File (🔒). “One of the things I like about Noah’s argument is that he fully concedes that puritanical zeal is not a right-wing or left-wing thing; it’s a human thing that plays itself out in less-than-tidy ideological categories,” Jonah writes. “The old Moral Majority types of the 1980s were clearly on the right, but psychologically they resemble today’s left-wing Puritans in their moral panic over various forms of wrongthink.”

• Are the worst of the supply chain snarls behind us? Not necessarily, Scott notes in this week’s Capitolism (🔒). “Unknown problems—new international conflicts, new COVID variants or policies, natural disasters, and the like—could imperil this spring’s (relative) supply chain calm,” he writes. “But it seems to me that we should be far more concerned these days about the known problems: in particular, troubled labor negotiations affecting U.S. port and national freight rail systems.”

Let Us Know

With new Gallup data showing Americans’ trust in various institutions has fallen to all-time lows, are there any institutions in the United States you trust more now than you did a few years ago? What have those institutions done right to gain your trust?