Is Boris Johnson Getting the Donald Trump Treatment?

A few years ago, a man with a colorful personal life and interesting hair ran for high political office. He made big promises, built a loyal following, courted controversy at nearly every turn, and won. All the while, detractors from all sides of the political aisle have sought to take him down and drum him out of politics.

Think I’m talking about Donald Trump? I’m actually talking about Boris Johnson.

At the same time that we’re dealing with Trump’s indictment and all the political ripples stemming from it, the UK is reeling from the revelations that Johnson hosted lavish parties at 10 Downing Street while the rest of the country was under severe COVID-19 lockdowns.

Those parties and the fallout from them led Johnson to resign as Prime Minister last year, and on Monday night, Parliament voted to drum him out of the lawmaking body.

“MPs [Members of Parliament] have just voted 354 to 7 in favour of the Privileges Committee report’s finding that Boris Johnson deliberately misled parliament over partygate, and that he should be banned from having a former members’ pass,” reports Isabel Hardman at The Spectator.

“Boris Johnson will be stripped of his parliamentary pass after the Commons voted overwhelmingly to accept the findings of the privileges committee report into partygate,” The Telegraph reports. “Only seven Tories voted against the report after a five-hour debate in Parliament, with 354 MPs across all parties in favour of the conclusion that Mr. Johnson had deliberately misled the House.”

Among the 118 MPs who voted in favor of the motion were several members of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s inner circle. Another 288 MPs chose not to vote, including Sunak and a large group of Conservatives.

On The Spectator’s Coffee House Shots podcast, Katy Balls said that it was telling that these 118 Tories sat through five hours of debate to make their voices heard against the former leader of their party.

“I think for 118 Tory MPs, about a third of the party, to choose to stay late when they don’t have to [in order] to make a point of saying they backed the Privileges Committee is revealing in the sense that this is a group who, they might not, you know, despise Boris Johnson, I think that’d be extreme, but they clearly take issue with Boris Johnson’s conduct and the way he and his team have behaved around it,” she said

At the same time, the fact that Sunak and others chose to abstain from the vote was revealing as well. On the same podcast, Fraser Nelson said that by not voting, Sunak was keeping the voters in mind.

“I think that, given how high feelings are running about this, it was excusable for him, I think, to dodge it,” he said. “There are a huge number of people who think that Boris Johnson was set up, and I think Sunak needs to keep his Tory family together, not so much the MPs because there’s only a small number now who back Boris Johnson, say about 20 or 30, but certainly the voters, and if you seem to be putting a nail into Boris Johnson’s political coffin, that would not help him keep the Tory tribe together.”

Jacob Rees-Mogg, a Johnson supporter and vocal conservative among the Tories, issued a spirited defense of the former PM during the debate, calling the motion a “deliberate attempt to take the most unfavourable interpretation that the committee can of Mr. Johnson’s activities.” He then ridiculed the committee for allowing anyone to criticize it — going so far as to compare the committee to the Chinese Communist Party — but he ended up not voting.

The parallels are surprising. Regardless of whether you think Donald Trump did anything wrong with his classified documents, it’s easy to see the indictment as a witch hunt against a former president who ran afoul of the establishment left. Along the same lines, you may or may not think that Boris Johnson should have held the parties during COVID lockdowns, but the motion to bar him from Parliament smacks of making a political statement.

With all the differences between us and our British cousins, it’s fascinating to see political scandals that are moving in a similar fashion.