What’s Next for Brexit? Six Possible Outcomes
LONDON — Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s decision to suspend Parliament next month has brought a fresh wave of consternation and confusion to Britain’s already chaotic efforts to leave the European Union , while still leaving wide open the question of where Britain will end up on Oct. 31., the day the country is scheduled to leave the bloc. Mr. Johnson says he would rather Britain leave with a reworked Brexit deal but, failing that, it would be out the door anyway. His opponents have sworn to remove any possibility of leaving without a deal, which they say would be economically calamitous.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Sept. Many politics watchers blame Johnson ’s unconventional Brexit tactics on his chief strategist, Dominic Cummings, who masterminded the People who support Brexit and those who oppose it joined forces to protest Johnson ’s norm - busting .
Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson , 55, has the most establishment background possible: educated at the elite Eton and Oxford. But he has never been conventional or stuffy The leader of the disrupters is, of course, President Donald Trump , who has shattered every possible kind of presidential norm .
© Danny Lawson/AP British Prime Minister Boris Johnson delivers a speech in West Yorkshire on Thursday. Editor’s note: The opinions in this article are the author’s, as published by our content partner, and do not represent the views of MSN or Microsoft.
Thirty-five police cadets stood at attention, a perfect made-for-TV backdrop, as Prime Minister Boris Johnson strayed from a police recruitment announcement to trash his political opponents for opposing his Brexit plans and for plotting to keep Britain “incarcerated” in the European Union.
American politicians have long used soldiers and police as props during political speeches. But in Britain, politicians have avoided such staging as inappropriate and tacky — until the arrival of Johnson, the country’s convention-buster in chief.
A man in Islamic dress told a Starbucks employee his name was Aziz. She put 'ISIS’ on the cup.
“I was shocked and angry. I felt it was discrimination,” Johnson told The Washington Post on Friday. The third unusual part: Four days later, after the story hit social media and a reporter tweeted about it, Starbucks called Johnson to claim the company had already rectified the situation in conversation with Johnson’s niece — a person Johnson says doesn’t exist. It is not the first time the global chain has faced accusations of racism and discrimination in a Philadelphia store. Last year, an employee called police on two black men sitting in a downtown location, and they were led away in handcuffs.
Johnson was in Dublin on Monday meeting his Irish counterpart, Leo Varadkar, to try to make headway on one of the thorniest Brexit questions: how to prevent a hard border between the Republic of Ireland, an E. U ‘ The Trumpization of U . K . politics ’: Boris Johnson is busting political norms .
All UK travel corridors to be closed, says Boris Johnson – video. The closure of travel corridors is to protect the UK from the risk of 'vaccine- busting ' Covid variants coming into the country, says Johnson .
“Boris is tearing up the rule book,” said Mujtaba Rahman, an analyst with Eurasia Group.
His tactics have repeatedly defied tradition and precedent in a society that treasures yesterday as a guide for tomorrow.
Related: Boris Johnson: Career in pictures
Born Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson on June 19, 1964, he is the eldest son of Stanley Johnson, a British politician who was the Conservative MEP for Wight & Hampshire East from 1979 to 1984.
Boris was schooled at Eton College, where he won a scholarship, and later at Balliol College, Oxford. While at Oxford, he was friends with David Cameron, who went on to become Britain’s Prime Minister from 2010 to 2016. He was also the president of the Oxford Union – a position previously held by former Prime Minister Edward Heath (1916-2005) and former Conservative leader William Hague.
Brexit’s ‘Doomsday Politics’ Mean Voters May Be Last Chance to Resolve Crisis
LONDON — He jabbed his finger in the air and shook his head theatrically. He dared the opposition to back his call for an election and sneered that the Labour Party’s leader was a “chlorinated chicken.”
LONDON — British Prime Minister Boris Johnson ’s dreams of an election that would clear his path to Brexit by the end of October were decisively dashed after midnight Tuesday morning, leaving him with no obvious means ‘ The Trumpization of U . K . politics ’: Boris Johnson is busting political norms .
‘ The Trumpization of U . K . politics ’: Boris Johnson is busting political norms . The legal wrangling is far from over. A high court in Northern Ireland on Thursday dismissed the claim that a no-deal Brexit and the imposition of a hard border on the Irish island would wreck the peace process there.
Johnson started off his career as a journalist. After a brief stint as a management consultant, he worked as a reporter for The Times in 1987, before getting sacked for making up a quote. He then worked as a correspondent for The Daily Telegraph, covering the European Community during 1989-94 before becoming assistant editor in 1994.
Of his time at The Telegraph, Johnson remarked; “Everything I wrote from Brussels was having this amazing, explosive effect on the Tory party, and it really gave me this, I suppose, rather weird sense of power”.
In 1994, he became a political columnist for The Spectator, and later went on to become the editor of the magazine in 1999, a role he continued until 2005.
In 1997, he was chosen as the Conservative candidate for Clwyd South in the House of Commons. However, he lost to Martyn Jones of the Labour Party. A few years later, Johnson again stood for Parliament and was elected as an MP for the Conservative seat of Henley-on-Thames in 2001, replacing Michael Heseltine. Around this time, Boris appeared in multiple television shows including the BBC’s “Have I Got News For You” (1990- ) from 1998 onwards.
Julie Bishop defends her private sector positions since quitting politics
The former foreign minister, as well as former defence minister Christopher Pyne, have come under fire for taking on jobs in industries that overlap with their former portfolios. Both insist they are fully complying with the Statement of Ministerial Standards, which bans former ministers from using information they've obtained in office for private gain, and from lobbying government officials on issues relating to their portfolios for 18 months.
‘ The Trumpization of U . K . politics ’: Boris Johnson is busting political norms . “You have a world of the rule of law, and you have a He noted that one idea recently discussed was Johnson sending the E. U . a request asking for a delay, along with a second letter saying he did not intend to use the delay.
Boris Johnson had big plans for 2020. With the Brexit question that had torn the nation apart for nearly four years finally settled, the Prime Minister was ready to spend some of the political capital he'd earned with his landslide election victory to bring the nation together. Then Covid-19 happened.
Despite being embroiled in various scandals at the time, including the publication of an insensitive editorial about the city of Liverspool in The Spectator in 2003 and an alleged affair with a journalist, Johnson was re-elected as a Member of Parliament in 2005.
Even after he was let go from his position as Shadow Minister for the Arts due to his alleged extramarital dealings, in 2005 he became the Shadow Minister for Higher Education after David Cameron was elected leader of the Conservative Party.
The year 2008 saw Johnson become the Mayor of London after he was elected over two-time office holder, Ken Livingstone. As such, he stepped down as a Member of Parliament and continued to hold the post of London Mayor until 2016.
As Mayor, Johnson presided over the 2012 Olympics, which provided a significant boost to the economy. A report by the U.K. Trade and Investment Department suggested that hosting the Olympics led to a £9.9 billion ($12.3 billion) boost in trade and investment.
Boris Johnson Penned Note Calling David Cameron A 'Girly Swot', Leaked Paper Shows
Boris Johnson wrote that David Cameron is a “girly swot” on a private Cabinet paper, it has emerged. A document released this week during a legal challenge of the prime minister’s decision to suspend parliament showed that he described the whole September session as a “rigmarole”.
During his eight years of tenure, homicide rates in London fell from 22 per million to 12 per million people, according to data from the Office for National Statistics.
He also helped introduced the Routemaster London bus, and implemented a public bicycle hire system in July 2010, which have since been popularly termed “Boris bikes.”
(Pictured) Johnson with Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) in London, England, on March 31, 2011.
Around this time his popularity increased considerably, with a June 2014 poll placing him 13 popularity points above Cameron.
In August of the same year, he announced that he would run in the upcoming general election.
A year before his term as Mayor ended in 2016, Johnson won the Uxbridge and South Ruislip seat and thus returned to Parliament in 2015. The election heralded the first clear majority Conservative Party win since the 1990s.
In early 2016, as Britain was grappling with a polarising debate on whether or not to leave the European Union, Johnson hinted his position as being on the Leave side of the discussion; “If we can't get the reform we need, Britain has a great, great future elsewhere and outside in a different relationship".
PM's office says Brexit will happen on October 31, 'no ifs or buts'
A bill demanding that Prime Minister Boris Johnson delay Britain’s withdrawal from the EU on Oct. 31 if he cannot get a divorce deal became law on Monday but his office insisted that Brexit would happen by that date, “no ifs and buts”. Parliament was also likely to reject Johnson’s call on Monday for a snap general election, which he is seeking in order to break a deadlock over Brexit that has intensified since he took office in July pledging to get on with the departure.
On February 21, 2016, he officially announced that he would campaign for a British exit from the EU. “I will be advocating Vote Leave – or whatever the team is called, I understand there are a lot of them – because I want a better deal for the people of this country, to save them money and to take control. That is really what this is all about", he had said.
Johnson said that Cameron’s (R) warnings to leave the EU were “scaremongering” and “wildly exaggerated”. He also drew flak for making racially insensitive comments about the then President of the United States, Barack Obama, when the Obama said that he thought Britain should remain in the EU.
Later, he also went on to say that the European Union is using various methods inspired by dictators to create a superstate. “Napoleon, Hitler, various people tried this out, and it ends tragically. The EU is an attempt to do this by different methods” he said, drawing severe criticism and inviting controversy.
With Britain voting to leave the EU on June 24, 2016, and Cameron announcing his resignation, there were speculations that Johnson could be the next Prime Minister. However, after Michael Gove announced his candidacy, Johnson declared that he would not run. Gove soon dropped out of the race in any case.
Following Theresa May's appointment as Prime Minister on July 13, 2016, Johnson was recruited as the new Foreign Secretary. This was widely criticized, considering Johnson’s many controversies and remarks about foreign leaders made during the referendum campaign.
She fled North Korea for a better life. How her lonely, impoverished death became political
When they heard the news about Han Sung-ok, they gathered from all corners of the capital and other South Korean cities near and far. Most had never met the 42-year-old single mother, who long ago had escaped from North Korea. She and her 6-year-old son Dong-jin had little contact with the outside world in the months leading up to late July, when they were found dead in a low-income Seoul apartment, possibly of starvation. require(["inlineoutstreamAd", "c.
However, in July 2018, he resigned from May’s cabinet because of his disagreement with the way she was handling Brexit negotiations. Later that year, he condemned her publicly by saying the deal she was working on would be “substantially worse” than staying in the EU.
Following his resignation as Foreign Secretary, he returned to Parliament and resumed his role as a columnist for the Daily Telegraph. The following month, the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments said that this was a breach of the ministerial code, as Johnson would have to wait for three months before taking up a new job after quitting.
During this stint at the Telegraph, Johnson ran into trouble with Islamophobic comments, which were later written off as him using “provocative” language, but that he was “respectful and tolerant” and entitled to use “satire” to make a point.
Not one to shy away from potentially controversial statements, he said in March 2019 that millions of police funding was being wasted on child sexual abuse allegations. Even though this was heavily condemned, Johnson remained a favourite among speculators that he would replace Theresa May as Prime Minister.
On May 16, 2019, he confirmed he was to run for leadership of the Conservative Party. U.S. President Donald Trump at the time seemed to back Johnson by stating he would be an 'excellent' choice for the role.
On June 12, 2019, Johnson launched his campaign to lead the Tory party and made it clear that he does not want a no-deal Brexit. He stated that after two missed deadlines and three years, Britain must finally leave the EU by the extended deadline of October 31, 2019.
It's A...! Michael Phelps and Nicole Johnson Welcome Baby No. 3
Family of five! Michael Phelps and his wife, Nicole Johnson, are now the proud parents of a third baby.
Johnson was hailed as the front-runner in the race to become the next Prime Minister, according to a poll of party members that was published on June 13, 2019. After several other leadership contenders were voted out of the race, Johnson is now competing solely against Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt, with the winner to be declared in late July of 2019.
On July 23, 2019, it was announced that Johnson had defeated rival Jeremy Hunt to become the leader of the Conservative Party and the next Prime Minister of the UK. Of the result, Johnson said it was 'an honor and a privalege' to be elected as the new leader. He stated his priorities were 'to deliver Brexit and unite the country'.
Britain famously has no written constitution. Its fundamental guide is not a document but an ethos — a centuries-long history of laws, legal rulings and traditions combined with a collective national assumption about the way things should be done.
In his six weeks in office, Johnson has detonated many of those assumptions in his effort to keep his promise to lead Britain out of the European Union by Oct. 31.
He ordered Parliament closed for five weeks. Suspensions themselves are not unusual but typically are not for that long, and not in the middle of pivotal moments in history.
He ejected 21 lawmakers from his Conservative Party for voting against him. They included some of the party’s most iconic figures and even Winston Churchill’s grandson, Nicholas Soames.
He said “shit” on the floor of Parliament, on national television.
He called his chief rival, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, a “chlorinated chicken” during a Parliament debate, instead of the traditional “right honourable gentleman.” Even more inexplicably, he then hurled another schoolboy taunt at Corbyn, calling him a “great big girl’s blouse.”
After all that, Johnson has refused to say whether he would comply with a law passed by Parliament to avert an abrupt and chaotic “no-deal Brexit” next month, without economic and social safeguards agreed with the E.U. “I would rather die in a ditch” than request another Brexit delay, he said — setting up an unprecedented standoff.
A cross-party group of lawmakers have lined up a legal team and are prepared to go to court to force Johnson to comply with the law, the BBC reported Saturday.
Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, 55, has the most establishment background possible: educated at the elite Eton and Oxford. But he has never been conventional or stuffy, and even his scarecrow thatch of blonde hair refuses to conform.
© AP/AP Johnson hosts his first Prime Minister's Questions in the House of Commons on Wednesday. As a foreign correspondent in Brussels, he made a name for himself with incendiary, and factually dubious, stories about the bumbling and planning of E.U. bureaucrats.
As mayor of London from 2008 to 2016, he was perhaps best known for getting stuck dangling from a zip line during the Summer Olympics.
And when he resigned as Britain’s foreign secretary last year, he undiplomatically called then-Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit plan a piece of excrement.
Johnson has been considered a shrewd politician, who long aspired to Britain’s top job. But, as some of his unorthodox tactics begin to backfire, he may not be able to keep the job for long.
He does not have a single legislative win in his six weeks at 10 Downing Street. Livid lawmakers, in what little time they had left before the scheduled suspension, delivered him three embarrassing defeats last week: taking control of the legislative agenda, disrupting his Oct. 31 Brexit plan and rejecting his call for a general election on Oct. 15.
Johnson is expected to lose a second call for an election Monday. His opponents say they worry he’d manipulate the calendar to force through a no-deal Brexit. Opposition parties have found new cohesion in standing firm against his demands.
Meanwhile, an open rebellion in Johnson’s Conservative Party has cost him his governing majority, making it practically impossible for him to move even non-Brexit legislation. Conservatives, who were already divided about whether to accept a potentially destabilizing no-deal Brexit, are more deeply split than ever.
© Andrew Milligan/AP Johnson accidentally steers a bull into a police officer during a visit to Scotland on Friday. Johnson paid a deep personal price for his blunt-instrument tactics on Thursday, when his younger brother Jo Johnson resigned as a Conservative legislator and a government minister, citing “unresolvable tension” “between family loyalty and the national interest.”
The prime minister’s nightmare week ended with his speech before the West Yorkshire police cadets, where he stumbled and bumbled for a full minute, trying unsuccessfully to recite the police caution — Britain’s equivalent of the Miranda rights.
As he spoke, a cadet standing behind him fainted.
Mark Burns-Williamson, the West Yorkshire police commissioner, called Johnson’s performance a “political stunt” and demanded an apology. He said police had been told Johnson planned to focus solely on public safety spending.
“It clearly turned into a rant about Brexit, the opposition and a potential general election,” Burns-Williamson told reporters. “There’s no way that police officers should’ve formed the backdrop to a speech of that nature.”
Johnson is part of a wave of populist leaders around the globe who are challenging norms and asking why things can’t be done differently. Leaders in Hungary, Poland, Italy, the Philippines and elsewhere are doing and saying things that seemed unthinkable just a few years ago.
© Simon Dawson/Bloomberg People protest Johnson near the Houses of Parliament in London on Wednesday. The leader of the disrupters is, of course, President Trump, who has shattered every possible kind of presidential norm. While Johnson and Trump are vastly different in many ways, they seem to feed off each other and admire each other’s nonconformist styles.
“Boris knows how to win. Don’t worry about him,” Trump said last week.
“He has many, many good qualities,” Johnson said about Trump this summer.
Jon Tonge, a politics professor at the University of Liverpool, said Johnson’s speech in front of the cadets was “straight from the Donald Trump playbook, deliberately imported . . . the Trumpization of U.K. politics.”
Emily O’Reilly, the European Union’s ombudsman, said Johnson and Trump have both succeeded through force of personality and an “intuitive sense of what appeals to their base, often to the darker or more anarchic, unconventional side of that base.”
She noted that in the United States and Britain there has been a “significant exodus of politicians from the centre to what had previously been seen as the extreme.”
O’Reilly said the events of last week “suggest that Johnson may have gone too far in . . . the smashing of parliamentary and party conventions.”
Several legal challenges have been filed against Johnson’s moves. A high court judge in London last week sided with Johnson, ruling that he not acted improperly by ordering Parliament shut for five weeks.
“He’s a rule bender rather than a rule-breaker,” Tonge said.
Britain’s lack of a written constitution leaves the country’s politics particularly vulnerable to someone like Johnson, who may follow the law but chooses not to follow established norms.
“We haven’t previously in the U.K. faced a leadership that was prepared to ignore conventions and precedents,” said Meg Russell, director of the Constitution Unit at University College London.
“It’s putting a great deal of pressure on our traditional constitution,” Russell said. “It could ultimately lead to pressure to nail down these rules more firmly.”
Rob Ford, a political analyst at the University of Manchester, said Britain has no specific laws governing how to interpret and implement referendums. He called that a “time bomb.” The 2016 Brexit vote was close, and the political class can’t agree on how to implement its results, he said.
© Erin Schaff/AP President Trump and Johnson speak last month during the Group of Seven summit in Biarritz, France. Johnson is bending every rule he can think of to push his interpretation — that the will of the people was to exit the E.U. no matter the terms. His opponents say voters didn’t agree to a no-deal Brexit with potentially damaging repercussions, including predicted shortages of food and medicine.
Ford said the “only referee” in that argument is the public, so another vote seemed likely — either the general election Johnson wants, or the second referendum some anti-Brexit opponents favour.
Many politics watchers blame Johnson’s unconventional Brexit tactics on his chief strategist, Dominic Cummings, who masterminded the successful pro-Brexit campaign in 2016. Some here compare Cummings to Stephen K. Bannon, the controversial former chief strategist to Trump.
Former Conservative prime minister John Major, in remarks widely interpreted to be a swipe at Cummings, warned in a speech in Glasgow on Thursday against “political anarchists” who threatened to “poison the political atmosphere beyond repair.”
Even if Johnson crashes out of office soon, he has exposed complaints with the way the system was working for many people.
“There were legitimate grievances; the established class failed to a certain extent,” which gave rise to unconventional leaders in the United States and Britain, said Benjamin Haddad, director of the Atlantic Council’s Future Europe Initiative. “If you feel you have been left behind, that the system is not working for you, a more brash, direct rhetoric appeals to many people.”
Haddad said the challenge is to address what was not working: “We need to reinvent the way we conduct politics, the way we find answers to people’s questions.”
Johnson’s behaviour has brought thousands of people into the streets across Britain in recent days. People who support Brexit and those who oppose it joined forces to protest Johnson’s norm-busting.
Nigel Nott, 70, a retired civil engineer protesting in London, said Johnson was breaking tradition to achieve his goals, and “to hell with everyone else.”
“The unwritten constitution works when you have respect and trust in people,” he said. “It does not work in the present circumstances.”
ed to this report.
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It's A...! Michael Phelps and Nicole Johnson Welcome Baby No. 3.
Family of five! Michael Phelps and his wife, Nicole Johnson, are now the proud parents of a third baby.
LONDON — Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s decision to suspend Parliament next month has brought a fresh wave of consternation and confusion to Britain’s already chaotic efforts to leave the European Union , while still leaving wide open the question of where Britain will end up on Oct. 31., the day the country is scheduled to leave the bloc. Mr. Johnson says he would rather Britain leave with a reworked Brexit deal but, failing that, it would be out the door anyway. His opponents have sworn to remove any possibility of leaving without a deal, which they say would be economically calamitous. 
“I was shocked and angry. I felt it was discrimination,” Johnson told The Washington Post on Friday. The third unusual part: Four days later, after the story hit social media and a reporter tweeted about it, Starbucks called Johnson to claim the company had already rectified the situation in conversation with Johnson’s niece — a person Johnson says doesn’t exist. It is not the first time the global chain has faced accusations of racism and discrimination in a Philadelphia store. Last year, an employee called police on two black men sitting in a downtown location, and they were led away in handcuffs. 
LONDON — He jabbed his finger in the air and shook his head theatrically. He dared the opposition to back his call for an election and sneered that the Labour Party’s leader was a “chlorinated chicken.” 
The former foreign minister, as well as former defence minister Christopher Pyne, have come under fire for taking on jobs in industries that overlap with their former portfolios. Both insist they are fully complying with the Statement of Ministerial Standards, which bans former ministers from using information they've obtained in office for private gain, and from lobbying government officials on issues relating to their portfolios for 18 months. 
Boris Johnson wrote that David Cameron is a “girly swot” on a private Cabinet paper, it has emerged. A document released this week during a legal challenge of the prime minister’s decision to suspend parliament showed that he described the whole September session as a “rigmarole”. 
A bill demanding that Prime Minister Boris Johnson delay Britain’s withdrawal from the EU on Oct. 31 if he cannot get a divorce deal became law on Monday but his office insisted that Brexit would happen by that date, “no ifs and buts”. Parliament was also likely to reject Johnson’s call on Monday for a snap general election, which he is seeking in order to break a deadlock over Brexit that has intensified since he took office in July pledging to get on with the departure. 
When they heard the news about Han Sung-ok, they gathered from all corners of the capital and other South Korean cities near and far. Most had never met the 42-year-old single mother, who long ago had escaped from North Korea. She and her 6-year-old son Dong-jin had little contact with the outside world in the months leading up to late July, when they were found dead in a low-income Seoul apartment, possibly of starvation. require(["inlineoutstreamAd", "c. 
Family of five! Michael Phelps and his wife, Nicole Johnson, are now the proud parents of a third baby. 
What’s Next for Brexit? Six Possible... 
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