(CN) – Boris Johnson, a 55-year-old former mayor of London and a reviled Tory figure in European political circles, tightened his grip Thursday on becoming the next British prime minister.
The prospect of Johnson replacing Prime Minister Theresa May and leading Brexit negotiations with the European Union has seriously improved the odds of Britain crashing out of the EU without a deal in October, even as polls show opposition to Brexit has grown in the United Kingdom.
Johnson is the frontrunner in an intense and nasty Tory leadership contest to find the next Conservative Party leader following May’s resignation nearly a month ago after she was unable to get a 550-page EU-U.K. withdrawal deal through a broken and deadlocked House of Commons.
On Thursday evening, the Conservative Party’s 1922 Committee announced that Johnson won 160 ballots out of the 313 votes cast by fellow Tory members of Parliament. The runner-up was Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt, who has vowed to continue working on finding a deal that works for both the EU and the U.K.
These two now will conduct a month-long campaign of hustings where they will meet with grassroots Tories across the country and seek to sell their policies on Brexit and visions for Britain.
A postal ballot of about 160,000 Tory grassroots members, a majority of whom are deeply antagonistic toward the EU, will then elect the next Tory leader. Johnson is very popular among this group and he is seen as the likely winner.
Johnson in Downing Street, the prime minister's office, raises the prospect of Britain crashing out of the EU on unfriendly terms because he was a chief spokesman for the campaign in 2016 that led to a majority of English and Welsh voters to back leaving the EU, dragging with them the rest of the U.K. Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to remain in the EU.
Nonetheless, Johnson has vowed to take Britain out of the EU with or without a deal on Oct. 31, the next deadline the EU gave Britain to sort out its Brexit conundrum.
Speaking Thursday in Brussels during a meeting of heads of EU states, Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said there was a lot of frustration in Europe with Britain and that it was growing ever more likely that the EU would not grant an extension to the Oct. 31 deadline.
“While I have endless patience, some of my colleagues have lost patience, quite frankly, with the U.K. and there’s enormous hostility to any further extension,” Varadkar told reporters.
The events in London seem to destine an embittering of politics and relations between Britain and the EU.
Brexit is by far not the only pressing issue facing an EU that is choosing its own new leaders and formulating new policies positions in regards to a host of issues, among them region-wide tensions in Russia, Turkey and Iran, restructuring the hulking EU bureaucracy and fending off a rise in far-right politics across Europe.
For many, Britain is making a terrible mistake by pushing ahead with Brexit and unraveling decades of ever-closer cooperation with its European neighbors. After World War II and the dissolution of the British empire, former Prime Minister Winston Churchill turned Britain toward Europe, arguing that Britain's safety and prosperity were linked to Europe.