Boris Johnson will quit today after his new Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi told him to go and another eight ministers walked out demanding he accepts reality. MailOnline has more.
The PM has admitted defeat half-an-hour after a shattering intervention from Nadhim Zahawi, who was only appointed on Tuesday night in the wake of Rishi Sunak’s departure. He told Mr. Johnson that his situation is “not sustainable”.
A No. 10 source said Mr Johnson has spoken to Tory 1922 Committee chairman Sir Graham Brady and agreed to stand down, with a new Tory leader set to be in place by the party conference in October.
Boris Johnson is on the verge of quitting after his new Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi told him to go and another eight ministers walked out demanding he accepts reality.
A spokeswoman said: “The Prime Minister will make a statement to the country today.”
Although he stopped short of resigning, Mr Zahawi appears to have struck the killer blow with his public call for Mr Johnson to give in. He tweeted: “Prime Minister: this is not sustainable and it will only get worse: for you, for the Conservative Party and most importantly of all the country. You must do the right thing and go now.'”
Education Secretary Michelle Donelan, who was installed in post at the same time as Mr. Zahawi, also declared she is quitting, barely two hours after Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis fell on his sword.
Up to then the PM had vowed defiance despite the overwhelming evidence of his authority draining away.
However, it is far from clear that Mr. Johnson staying on until October – more than two months – will be acceptable to Tory MPs. More than 50 Government members have resigned, and there will be questions over whether they can simply be reappointed, or would even agree to that.
George Freeman, who announced he was resigning as science minister this morning, said Mr. Johnson must apologise to the Queen and advise her to call for a caretaker PM.
“Boris Johnson needs to hand in the seals of office, apologise to Her Majesty and advise her to call for a caretaker Prime Minister,” he said.
“To take over today so that ministers can get back to work and we can choose a new Conservative leader to try and repair the damage and rebuild trust.”
At 6.47am, Mr. Lewis tweeted that he could no longer continue without “honesty, integrity and mutual respect”.
Minutes later Treasury minister Helen Whately followed suit saying “there are only so many times you can apologise and move on”.
Security minister Damian Hinds and science minister George Freeman had followed by 7.30am, and pensions minister Guy Opperman by 7.50am.
Meanwhile, Wales minister David T.C. Davies publicly announced that he had refused a promotion to take over from Welsh Secretary Simon Hart, who quit last night. The Attorney General, Suella Braverman has called for Mr. Johnson to resign and said she is only staying in place to keep the Government functioning.
With the resignation tally now standing well over 50, the Government has been unable to find a minister willing to go on the airwaves to speak up for the PM this morning – with total silence coming from his team.
The Chief Whip Chris Heaton-Harris was seen going into Downing Street early, after the lights were seen on in the PM’s flat deep into the night.
With the once-popular, charismatic leader felled, will the Tories repeat history by installing a dull, largely competent but electorally disastrous new John Major, or will they manage to find a leader who can unite the party and win elections with a focused, clear-sighted, genuinely conservative administration? Even writing that makes it seem unlikely.
Read Toby’s tribute (of sorts) to the man he first met at Oxford 40 years ago here.
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Just to do a ‘Captain Obvious’ here and point out that education, before we even include the disastrous mess that is higher ed, has changed dramatically since the decades mention above. So it seems a no-brainer to me that “education has zero causal effect on fertility” and it’s more to do with the woke ideological crapola kids are being brainwashed with these days. Kids should be attending school to get educated, not indoctrinated.
I would say that western civilisations have much more choice about having children or having a career than most poorer countries, this can be put down to a better education.
Not so much choice in places like Niger so they just do what is nessasary
They will probably never have a career to pay for a pension so children are their insurance policy for old age, the more the merrier as upto 50% of their children may not make it to adulthood.
I certainly agree with your ideological element though, just look at that self important little git Rachel Zegler!
Yes and you raise a good point which is the difference in *motivation* between cultures for having children. Women in some poor country in Africa won’t have any of the opportunities or resources of their counterparts in rich Western countries, therefore their motivation will be based more on necessity, as you say, plus cultural norms/pressure and gender stereotypes will be way more rigid. Over here, women can afford to wait and have kids later in life, have fewer kids or none at all, because they’re no longer deemed an “insurance policy”, unlike generations ago.
Let’s be honest, many in the so-called ‘rich West’ literally can’t ‘afford’ kids anyway because they’re unable to even get on the property ladder, which is the norm before putting down roots and starting a family. And people don’t typically live in multi-generational households, which is normal in other cultures, so childcare is presumably a non-issue compared with here.
Increased wealth.
More live births, lower infant/child mortality, children no longer required as a labour source for the family economy requires reduced birth rates to maintain the “stock”.
Plus sending children to school instead of to work = a cost, not a contributor to parental fortunes.
Parents work fewer hours, have more leisure time and disposable income which they prefer to spend on that rather than children.
Maybe has something to do with it?
Maybe material prosperity has led us to overthink things
I don’t think education is a primary cause of low fertility, though it may be a secondary cause. I think a primary cause of low fertility is little or no religious faith due to increasing wealth. Look at the chart of where high birth rates are found. This cause and effect are summed up by the bible phrase “you can’t worship God and mannon (money)”.
I don’t think it is education per se that makes a person rich. There are many examples that everyone knows of people who left school with few or no exams thar have become rich through hard work.
Increasing wealth includes many factors that would tend to increase birth rates such as improved nutrition and healthcare but the low birth rates in rich countries run counter to this.
Decreasing wealth does seem to encourage higher birth rates. My father’s parents in the 1930s had around 10 children but 3 or 4 died in childhood of diseases that are easily cured today. They were poor but had many children perhaps because unconsciously they knew some would die.
I agree with your point but it’s mammon not ‘mannon’.
Once upon a time, I grew up in an avenue of newly-built 1950’s semis, where at one time up to 30 of us played out in the street, offspring of married couples born before the Second World War.
Then along came “-isms,” “-ists” and “-ism-ist ism-isms,” and the old order changed – for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, but nowadays up to half the time certainly not until death us do part.
The increased cost of housing is also a practical deterrent. Meanwhile on another forum…
https://www.louiseperry.co.uk/p/immigration-is-not-the-answer-to
“…What’s the solution to Britain’s fertility crisis? There are, broadly, three schools of thought:
One is that you can, through carefully structured incentives and social changes, encourage birth rates to rise to replacement levels.
Another is that the ageing population is, given the potential for automation, robotics and AI, actually not *that* much of an issue.
The final school of thought is that nothing can be done about the Western fertility crisis, and that the only solution is to supplement the working age-population with immigration. This, sadly, is the school which currently governs Great Britain.”
Take your pick – bad luck, the Party has already chosen for you.
No, but abortion does.
See this chart:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-born-per-woman?facet=entity&uniformYAxis=0&country=~GBR
1950 total fertility rate (TFR) of 2.22
1961 introduction of birth control pills on the NHS, TFR 2.79
1964 late post-war baby boom peak of TFR of 2.93
1967 Abortion Act, TFR 2.68
1974 introduction of birth control clinics, TFR 1.92
1977 a TFR low of 1.69
2001 a TFR low of 1.61
2010 TFR recovered to 1.92
2020 TFR dropped to 1.57 and leveling off through to 2023.
TFR seems to have stopped falling recently – perhaps it will rise again.
If fertility is reducing and climate change adaptation becomes the preferred policy then fewer people will make the social adjustments easier. We might need robot careers for the old, but even that issue will eventually reduce.
Picking one variable which happens to correlate with another from a whole variety of others which interact, is certain to lead to the wrong conclusion except by chance. See: Climageddon (Arctic disappearing, London, New York, submerged, annual droughts and scorching Summers, etc) perpetually being delayed; predicted 1970s world over-population by year 2 000.