We All Lost Confidence a Long Time Ago | | Moya Lothian-McLean: Motions of no confidence used to bring down entire governments. Now they merely inflict one more wound to the flank of already-ailing premiers. Boris Johnson emerged from Monday night's vote superficially victorious. As predicted, he wasn't ousted then and there. No immediate successor had emerged as a clear alternative, and rebels who wanted him gone weren't organised, either around an ideological cause, like Brexit, or literally. One MP told The Guardian's Peter Walker that "as far as he knew, there wasn't even a WhatsApp group" for the mutinous.
But with 41% of Tory MPs voting to turf him out of office, the result didn't deliver the mandate Johnson would have hoped for. For all his bluster about both party and country being able to "move on" from the fracas, he knows from experience that – for the time being – his authority is shot. His own attempts to supplant Theresa May, using Brexit as a vehicle, helped culminate in a 2018 no confidence vote against the then-prime minister. She won, by a greater margin than Johnson, yet six months later was still forced to resign thanks to her lack of support. Even the prime minister's pet papers have recognised the severity of the situation. "Authority crushed" announced the normally at-heel Telegraph this morning.
The thing is, Johnson could 'recover' his political standing in the party with some 'bold' policy (that never manifests) or one of those magic electoral victories he's so fond of constructing out of spit and a bit of carefully directed xenophobia. As the archetypal 'Teflon Tory', he's rubber, we're glue. Whatever bounces off him sticks to the general public instead. Yet Johnson is hardly the harbinger of this. Rather, he is the peak of a trend that has seen the quality of parliamentary politicians degrade over many decades until a large swathe reflects the rot of the system that sees them selected and elected in the first place. | |  | OPINION Monkeypox is Giving Us Another Lesson in Medical Stigma by Dr Melissa Chowdhury and Dr Rita Issa
If we don't learn the lessons of Covid-19 and the HIV/Aids epidemic, each new virus will bring the same old forms of discrimination. Dr Melissa Chowdhury and Dr Rita Issa explain. Read more... |  | ANALYSIS Don't Ignore Biden's Shadow War by Oliver Eagleton
With Joe Biden looking set to double down on America's drone programme, Oliver Eagleton argues that the return to traditional warfare in Europe must not eclipse evolving modes of conflict elsewhere. Read more... | | | Billionaires pour millions into mainstream media outlets. Not because they expect their channels or sites to be popular - but because they help to warp politics in their favour.
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