Boris Goes to Number 10

It's official. Boris Johnson will be the United Kingdom's prime minister.

According Reuters, "Johnson, the face of the 2016 Brexit referendum, won the votes of 92,153 members of the Conservative party, almost twice the 46,656 won by his rival, Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt."

What now? Boris will replace Theresa May tomorrow. Then the charade of renegotiating Theresa May's Brexit deal with the EU will begin anew. The only difference is that Boris is an avowed "Leave" Tory who campaigned on promises of prorogation -- suspending parliament without dissolving it -- in order to ensure a crash-out from the European Union.

Yesterday the number two official at the Foreign Office, Alan Duncan, resigned over Boris' ascension to Number 10. According to The New York Times,

Mr. Duncan, the Foreign Office minister who resigned, pushed for an emergency vote in the House of Commons on Tuesday to test whether Mr. Johnson could command the support of a majority of lawmakers. Mr. Duncan’s bid for the vote was rejected, but he warned that the government could collapse in the fall.

There will be several months of fiddling, but sometime in September or October, when crash-out looms, a vote of confidence will be called and Boris will lose. Since the Tories have done everything possible to avoid parliamentary elections, Johnson could even try prorogation.

In any event, the Tories are likely headed towards greatly diminished status. Writers in the mainstream have begun to believe their own propaganda about Labour -- that it is split, wounded and ineffectual. I think not. I think Corbyn heading a Labour Party campaigning unabashedly for peace and against austerity wins -- if not an outright majority certainly enough seats to form a coalition government with the SNP.