Calls are mounting for British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to resign after he was fined on Tuesday for breaking COVID-19 lockdown rules by attending a gathering in his office
A senior British minister said on Wednesday that Prime Minister Boris Johnson did not set out to break COVID-19 laws with malice and is mortified after he was fined by police for attending a gathering during lockdown, as calls mounted for Johnson to quit.
However, David Wolfson, a junior justice minister, did resign on Wednesday, saying “recent disclosures lead to the inevitable conclusion that there was repeated rule-breaking, and breaches of the criminal law”. “I’m not saying that the prime minister isn’t a flawed individual. We’re all flawed in different ways,” transport minister Grant Shapps told Sky News. “The question is did somebody set out to do these things with malice?”
Johnson won a landslide election in 2019 on a promise to complete Britain’s exit from the European Union, but his premiership has been marked by a series of dramatic events, from suspending parliament over a Brexit impasse and his own experience of COVID-19.