Britain's Tories head for a July 4 beatdown — but the post-Brexit crisis isn't over

I’m not here to praise Rishi Sunak, or to bury him — the soon-to-be-former British prime minister has dealt with both of those tasks admirably, all by himself. If Sunak is remembered for anything, it will probably be as a curious footnote: After becoming the fourth leader of the U.K.’s government within four years, he managed to restore a semblance of political stability and “normalcy” to 10 Downing Street after the tragicomic chaos and self-destruction of the Brexit vote and Boris Johnson’s tenure. It’s no exaggeration to say that Sunak — the first person from a nonwhite immigrant background to hold the office and also the wealthiest prime minister in history — and Keir Starmer, the bluff, bland, profoundly noncommittal Labour leader, are both much closer to being Joe Biden than Donald Trump. We know how that turned out, and we also know who managed to surf the Brexit wave successfully, at least for a while: former bad-boy journalist and London mayor Boris Johnson, who styled himself as Britain’s upper-class-twit Trump cognate, ousted former Prime Minister Theresa May and scored a smashing victory in the 2019 election on a far greater scale than anything Trump could have imagined. His rebranded pro-Brexit, anti-immigrant Tories won an 80-seat majority in Parliament, flipping numerous districts in the “red wall” of previously safe Labour seats across the post-industrial north of England and seemingly reordering the U.K.’s political landscape around a populist rebellion that united affluent suburbanites and the now-legendary “white working class.” We need your help to stay independent Subscribe today to support Salon's original commentary and analysis But that didn’t stick, for a bunch of cultural, political and institutional reasons that exemplify the differences between the two countries and our systems of government.