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Green Party co-leader Carla Denyer has called on Boris Johnson to resign as prime minister for the good of the country.
In a statement made following a tumultuous PMQ’s last week she said that his mixed messaging and hypocrisy around parties held in Downing Street during the two national lockdowns were undermining public trust in both the government’s response to the pandemic and in the political process itself.She said: “It is time for Boris Johnson to resign, for the good of everybody in the UK, to allow the country to focus on tackling the pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis, as millions of people across this country want”.
Going on to say that: “Politicians like Boris Johnson undermine trust in the government, in public health advice and ultimately in our democracy. The unedifying spectacle in Westminster today makes it seem as if this is all one big joke but let us remember that more than 150,000 people in the UK have died from covid, and this sham of a government is distracting us from the real work at hand”.
Pressure has piled on Johnson to resign following a week of revelations and clumsy evasions including the scarcely credible claim that he didn’t know a garden party held at Downing Street in May 2020 was against laws passed by the government he leads.
Further pressure has been created by the defection to Labour of the MP for Bury South Christian Wakeford, who said that Johnson was “incapable of offering the leadership and government this country deserves”.
The coming week could decide Boris Johnson’s future as prime minister with the report into ‘partygate’ being written by civil servant Sue Gray due to be published.
Johnson faces other difficulties with senior Tory MP and chair of the Commons Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs committee claiming that MPs who submitted letters to the backbench 1922 committee were ‘blackmailed’ by party whips.
To trigger a vote of no confidence 54 letters calling for one need to be submitted to 1922 committee chair Sir Graham Brady, to date six MPs have publicly admitted to having done so, it is thought more are holding off to see what happens following the publication of Sue Gray’s report.
There have also been claims made by former minister Nusrat Ghani that her religious faith was a factor in her being sacked in 2020. Speaking to the Sunday Times she said that her "Muslimness was raised as an issue" and that her status as a "Muslim woman... was making colleagues uncomfortable".
These issues were raised in discussions following Ms Ghani’s dismissal from a ministerial post at the Department of Transport in February 2020. In the Sunday Times interview she says she was threatened with being ostracised by colleagues if she persisted with the complaint she had made through the party disciplinary procedure.
The weight of pressure on Boris Johnson and his declining popularity means his resignation looks like something that will happen sooner rather than later. Foreign Secretary Liz Truss and Chancellor Rishi Sunak have both been named as unofficial front runners in any future leadership race, although both have, to date been publicly supportive of the prime minister.
Speaking in her statement Carla Denyer criticised a pollical culture and electoral system that has enabled many of the problems currently in play to arise saying she was under “no illusion that his Conservative replacement will be much better. The trouble is that our political system is so broken that it breeds politicians like Johnson - there’s a culture of hypocrisy and entitlement that goes deep in our political system and we need to change the way our democracy operates to root it out.”