As rumour about the embattled PM’s future fizzes, we look back on Johnson’s second full year of office – 12 months beset with epic gaffes, U-turns, rebellions and clangers.

Battling scandals and crises on multiple fronts, coupled with a plummeting popularity rating, speculation is mounting that Boris Johnson’s reign at No. 10 could soon be over.

Here’s a month-by-month breakdown of Boris Johnson’s biggest blunders of 2021.

January – Johnson declares the New Year “an amazing moment for this country”

January 1, 2021, brought the free movement of people, goods and services between the UK and the EU to an end.

In a message broadcast as the UK completed departure from the EU and the majority of the country was in lockdown, the PM declared the New Year as an “amazing moment for this country” and that he was confident 2021 would be the year when the UK will reach “the end of the journey” back to normal life.

12 months later, with a weakened economy, crumbling exports, rising energy costs, food and fuel shortages, not to mention a record number of Covid infection rates recorded on Christmas Day, Johnson’s gloating New Year speech could not have been more excruciatingly off the mark.

February – Johnson celebrates vaccine target

In February, the PM began to draw up his plan to slowly ease England out of lockdown, after 15 million people in the UK had received their first dose of vaccine. Johnson announced the easing of restrictions as he celebrated the country reaching its vaccine target in an address to the nation.

As the year draws to a close, around 35 million booster jabs have been administered, as the nation continues to ramp up its Covid vaccine booster campaign.

While the hard work of the NHS, scientists and volunteers have helped drive Britain’s vaccination targets and success, criticism has been voiced that new variants like Omicron will continue to wreak havoc because richer countries such as the UK had “stockpiled” hundreds of millions of vaccines.

Among the critics is Gordon Brown, who said it was an “inescapable and unacceptable fact” that of the billions of vaccines administered, only 0.6% ended up in low-income countries.

March – Johnson admits regret over handling of first Covid wave and tells MPs greed and capitalism were behind vaccine success

As the country marked a year since the first lockdown, during a No. 10 briefing, Johnson admitted regret of the handling of the crisis and said there were things he wished he had done differently to tackle the pandemic.

Shortly after the press conference, the prime minister prompted outcry from opposition after he told his own backbenchers in a meeting that the UK’s “vaccine success” was “because of the greed of my friends.”

The PM’s remarks were, of course, quickly retracted.

April – “Rather let bodies pile high”

April was an especially bad month for the PM. Amid mounting pressure to explain a £200,000 Downing Street flat refurbishment, sources told the Daily Mail that Johnson had said he would rather let “bodies pile high in their thousands” than order another national lockdown in October.

Johnson denied the allegation.

May – Dominic Cummings attacks PM for failing public with ‘disastrous’ Covid response mistakes

May saw the Prime Minister’s controversial former advisor appear before a parliamentary committee to deliver an on-camera testimony of the government’s initial response to the pandemic. The damning critique of the government saw Cummings say the response was “completely flawed”, and that Johnson had initially treated the health crisis as a “scare story.” The embattled former advisor revealed that officials had suggested herd immunity could be achieved by encouraging people to hold “chickenpox parties.”

June – Johnson accused of hypocrisy for condemnation of racism in football

The aftermath of England’s loss to Italy in the Euro 2020 final saw the team’s black footballers face an onslaught of appalling racist comments online. Johnson’s messages of the “outrage” of the racial abuse was shamed as “laughably ironic”, given the PM’s history of racist taunts, in which in compared Muslim women to “letterboxes” and described Black Africans as “piccaninnies with ‘watermelon smiles.’

July – PM faces Tory rebellion over international aid

The summer saw the PM heavily criticised across the political spectrum for imposing a temporary reduction of foreign aid from 0.7% of national income to 0.5%. The break of another manifesto commitment resulted in Johnson face a growing bid by Tory rebels to reverse the widely-criticised cut. The rebellion was backed by Johnson’s predecessor, Teresa May.

August – Johnson jokes about Thatcher closing coal mines

The PM put his foot in it again in August by appearing to celebrate the decimation of the coal industry. During a visit to Scotland, Johnson was asked whether the country should stop relying on oil and gas for energy to which he replied that Margaret Thatcher had given green energy a “big early start” by closing coal mines.

September – Empty supermarket shelves puts Johnson’s biggest Brexit lie in the spotlight

By September, supermarkets shelves were desperately bereft of products, as Brexit and Covid took their toll on supply chains. The crisis brought the fore that needlessly leaving the single market has been disastrous and that the shambles engulfing British trade with Europe was an unavoidable price worth paying to leave the EU was Johnson’s biggest Brexit lie.

October – COP26 cock ups

As world leaders ascended in Glasgow on October 31 for the UN Climate Change Conference, Johnson made some epic howlers while representing the UK on the world stage, including sitting next to David Attenborough without a mask, appearing to fall asleep and showing up late.

November – PM praises Peppa Pig World, Owen Patterson sleaze and the axing of Northern Powerhouse rail

November was an especially trying month for the PM.

It started with the Owen Patterson scandal, which saw the PM trying to save the Tory MP from suspension while seeking to rip up the Commons disciplinary process.

As if being mired in sleaze claims wasn’t bad enough, business leaders and Tory MPs were left baffled when, in a sprawling address to the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), the PM extensively praised Peppa Pig World, compared himself to Moses, imitated the noise of an accelerating car, lost his place in his speech and spent 20 second mumbling “forgive me” as he shuffled through paper on the podium. 

The same month saw the axing of Northern Powerhouse Rail, leaving Johnson accused of “selling out” millions of people across the North.

December – Partygate scandal roils British politics

December, where do we start with December?

Thanks to a video leaked by iTV that showed Downing Street staffers laughing about a party that allegedly took place at Downing Street when the rest of the country was in the throws of lockdown last Christmas, ‘Partygate’ has got messier and messier.

Johnson denied there were any parties, but went on to say that he had broke no rules.

The scandal that is roiling British politics saw the PM face a Tory rebellion in a controversy that could seriously threaten his leadership.

The same month has seen Johnson hit by a huge Conservative rebellion. The prime minister suffered the biggest parliamentary rebellion of his premiership and was forced to rely on the opposition support to pass plans for tighter Covid restrictions.

The sheer scale of the rebellion, larger than many senior Tories had expected, is representative of the mounting pressure Boris Johnson is facing from his own party.

Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead is a contributing editor to Left Foot Forward.

Comments are closed.