After the party, the hangover: Boris survives, barely

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. In New York, I'm John Fassman. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Seven American states hold primary elections today. In San Francisco, voters will decide whether to recall Chesa Boudin, the city's district attorney, in a race that will say much about how crime will play out in November's midterm elections. And Ukraine has fought valiantly using drones, advanced anti tank weapons and high res satellite imagery, but also with century old machine guns that have proven surprisingly reliable and accurate. But first, Boris Johnson is still Britain's prime minister, for now at least that.

The vote in favour of having confidence in Boris Johnson's theatre was 211 votes and the vote against was 148 votes. And therefore I can announce that the.

Parliamentary party does have confidence.

Conservative members of Parliament banged tables and cheered last night in approval at the result of their secret ballot. And Mr. Johnson himself, as you would expect, said he was pleased since I.

Think it's a convincing result, a decisive result, and what it means is that as a government we can move on and focus on the stuff that I think really matters to people.

But the outcome of that vote, with just 59% of his own MPs supporting him, underlines the shaky ground he's on. Questions about leadership and integrity have damaged his standing among voters who helped him triumph in the last general election and among party members eyeing up the next one. And while Mr. Johnson has a proven ability to ride out crises that would be the downfall of other politicians, many now say his days in the top job are numbered.

Britain has woken this morning to a weakened prime minister. The scale of the insurrection in his party against him last night in a leadership contest really surprised his inner circle.

Matthew Hullhouse covers British politics for the Economist.

Far from helping the prime minister move on from a string of scandals it really is a paralyzing result for his government. It leaves him badly wounded. It leaves the question of when he's going to leave office just a matter of time, whether that's weeks or months. And his rivals are jockeying to replace him. That in itself is a reflection of a bitter civil war that is really starting to brew in the Conservative Party over its ideological direction.

So tell us first how this no confidence vote came about.

So the ballot was triggered after more than 54 MPs submitted letters of no confidence in Boris Johnson. That's the threshold of 15% of the parliamentary party necessary to. To trigger a ballot. It came very quickly. Graham Brady, he's the Tod Soda Party grandee who oversees this process, broke the news at dawn yesterday. There was a day of lobbying from Mr. Johnson writing letters to MPs setting out his achievements as he saw them delivering the Brexit, overseeing the COVID 19 vaccination program. He dangled promises to them. Lower taxes, deregulation, more government spending. All very airy stuff. And most of all, he assured them that he was still the man to win the next general election and bring in an unprecedented fifth consecutive term of office. In the end, Boris Johnson won. That itself is not surprising. What is surprising was just how underwhelming the support for him in the party was.

And tease that out for me, Matthew, if you can. You say it's not surprising that he won, but the margin, 211 for, 148 against, was surprising. Why is that on both sides?

What did surprise was the narrowness of that result. It's a worse result than that garnered by Mr. Johnson's predecessor as Prime Minister, Theresa May, when she faced a leadership ballot in December 2018. Now, that was in the context of a genuine deep crisis over Brexit. She won 63% of the vote. What happened next? Well, within six months, she had been dragged out of office. So that really is serving as the benchmark that people are using for Mr. Johnson's own political future.

You mentioned that Theresa May's no confidence vote was triggered by Brexit. What triggered this one for Boris Johnson?

This was different to then. That was really about one faction of the party which was deeply unhappy with one specific policy issue. This was a wide and broad insurrection over a wide variety of issues, the most significant of which is Partygate. This is the scandal over illegal gatherings in the Downing street complex throughout Britain's COVID 19 lockdown, which outraged much of the electorate. And there are ongoing questions about whether the Prime Minister was honest to Parliament. Which for many MPs is a red line. The broader context is that Britain is facing a big cost of living squeeze with high inflation, which again is nibbling into support for the Conservative Party. In a letter to his members, he asked for a golden opportunity to put this all behind them and to unite the party. It's now clear that the opposite has happened, that if the party was divided over partygate, then those splits really have become entrenched.

It wasn't that long ago that Boris Johnson won a resounding popular victory. What did happen to that wellspring of popular support?

It really is an extraordinary story of hubris and nemesis, as you say, John. He won a remarkable victory back in December 2019, working majority of 87, a big landslide. People were talking about him being in power for 10 years, remaking the political landscape in his image. What was apparent then and is more apparent now is that that victory was built on weak foundations now within the Conservative Party itself. So this is amongst the people who voted for against him last night. He really was a desperate choice. He was the last ditch candidate because of this crisis that we're talking about with Theresa May. He said, I am the only guy who can get you out of this, who can deliver Brexit. Defeat Jeremy Corbyn, the far left Labour leader, reunite the party. And so many people sort of held their noses and plumped for him on that basis. Within the country, he appeared to be popular in the sense that he won this large Conservative majority and in parts of the country there was genuine support for him. Really. Actually, when you look at the numbers, the support for Johnson was not that great. In the 2019 campaign, he was more popular than Jeremy Corbyn. Certainly the problem was that his inner circle actually seemed to have bought their own propaganda and seemed to have convinced themselves genuinely that he was untouchable, that the public were indulgent of all his errors and foibles. That led, I think, to a certain hubris which informed this behaviour of a party gate, this sense of invulnerability in Parliament, but also this very late pivot towards correcting their behaviour later on. Even Last night, as MPs were queuing up to vote, Mr. Johnson's allies were going around talking about how popular he was in the country. Nobody minded how everybody'd had a drink in their life. And so really this sense of hubris and invincibility has laid him low, I think.

But hubris or not, he did win this vote of confidence. Does that give him a little bit of breathing room? Do you think he leads the party through to the next general election?

No. It leaves him paralysed. And it means that the only thing on the minds of Conservative MPs, and then by extension Westminster, is how long has he got and when is he going to be dragged out? By whom? There is more to come. There is an investigation by the Privileges Committee of the House and Commons, who are investigating whether Mr. Johnson lied to Parliament over partygate. We have two by elections in Britain on June 23, both in Conservative seats. One is in Wakefield in the north of England. The other is in Tiverton and Honiton in the south west. The Conservatives are on track to lose. Both, if they do, will be a reminder for the Conservative MPs that Boris Johnson is dragging them down and potentially putting their jobs at risk. And all the while, we have an informal leadership contest which has been going on for months and is going to intensify. And that contest really is going to be something of a civil war. It's not really just going to be a struggle for Downing Street. But the much bigger question is, what is the future of the party? What is its ideological direction? Was the course that Boris Johnson took the party on in 2019 towards a more big state conservatism, higher spending, muscling aside, all these checks on the executive, was that an aberration or was that the wave of the future and something that deep down, the British people still want? That's a question that they have to answer. It's going to be a wide and long and bitter contest with all these debates thrashed out in public in often quite painful fashion.

Matthew, thanks so much for your time this morning.

Thank you, John.

This is a unique moment in American and San Francisco history. There's a growing national consensus that the criminal justice system is broken.

And for the first time, meet Chesa Boudin, San Francisco's District attorney elected in 2019. He's an ultra progressive prosecutor who promised to revolutionize criminal justice and put fewer people in prison.

As District Attorney, I'll ensure that our criminal justice system works for all of us, not just the wealthy and well connected.

My campaign is about common sense reforms.

That will make us safer.

But Mr. Boudin is facing a backlash after people who were not charged with serious crimes by his office went on to commit them, making some of the city's residents feel less safe. Today, San Francisco's voters decide whether to recall Mr. Boudin with his progressive policies themselves being put on trial.

A lot of people will hear this news and think this is A provincial spat. It's really anything but.

Alexandra Sewich Bass covers California and Texas for the Economist.

This is a litmus test of values in a city that's always been on the bleeding edge of social and political change.

So let's take a step back before we discuss the election itself. What did Chesa Boudin promise when he first ran for district attorney?

Chesa Boudin ran on a criminal justice platform in 2019. He made absolutely no secret about his agenda. He wanted to end cash bail and put fewer people in jail. He favored rehabilitation. And he promised to come in and shake up how San Francisco did things. It is really important to note, one interviewee once told me, and I think it's a great summary of San Francisco. She said, San Francisco is a city that designs solutions to other people's problems. And you could actually say that about Chesa Boudin. He ran on a platform of ending mass incarceration, but in fact that wasn't San Francisco's problem. Even when he came in in 2019, there were 106 adults in prison for 100,000 people, which is about a fifth of California's in the nation's rate. So in order to achieve what Chesa Boudin said he wanted to do, he had to not sentence people in a city that wasn't necessarily jailing a lot of people anyways. And so he's made some hard and controversial calls to achieve his platform.

If he's done what he said he's going to do, why is there this recall election?

Chesa Boudin made no secret about his agenda and he's getting a lot of pushback for some of the problems that have arisen during so the court system was closed, a lot of people became homeless. Drugs have really proliferated. He would put the blame at Covid and say that the recall is a politically motivated attack on him, that people were against him from the very get go, people who are not criminally justice reform minded and Republicans are intent on taking him down. That is not the truth. The people who support the recall are of various different political stripes, various income levels. This is not a Republican attack, but I think that ultimately frustration has really mounted and people feel that the pervasiveness of homelessness, the pervasiveness of drugs and then certain types of crime rising has made San Francisco a less safe and enjoyable place to live and they blame Chesa Boudin for that.

Let's talk about crime for a minute. Just how bad is it? Is it in fact up since he took office.

It depends on the type of crime we're talking about. So crimes that really matter to people, like shootings and burglaries, have risen. We've seen crimes that San Francisco has always had, for example, car break ins, which used to target tourists. Those have declined, but the criminals have moved from cars to homes. And so that's really given people a sense that especially in certain neighborhoods, that they are not as safe as they were before. Another very controversial area is drug dealing and drug crimes. And Chesa Boudin's office has been much more loath to prosecute drug dealing. In 2021, his office managed only three convictions for drug dealing. And you compare that to 2018 under his predecessor, who had 90 convictions for drug dealing that year alone. I spent some time in the city's Tenderloin district, which is an area hit really hard by drugs, to see things for myself.

So we're going to walk through the open drug scenes of south of Market and the Tenderloin in San Francisco. Many people are armed. There are drug dealers here who tend to enforce their trade with machetes. I've never had any trouble, but we always do a safety talk before we go for a walk. And the basic to it is pay attention to your fears. If you're afraid of something, you may be detecting something important and you should vocalize it until me about it, because fear is a gift and there's obviously no downside.

I was shown around by Michael Shellenberger, who is an author who is also running for governor as an independent. He is a critic of San Francisco's current policies. He wrote a book called San Francisco, which argues that the city continues to throw money at homelessness when it really needs to grapple with addiction.

The party doesn't really get started until 6 o', clock, but you can see them doing drugs right there on the median.

Right next to a police officer.

Right next to a police officer, right?

Yeah.

Police car.

Yeah, right in front of the Whole Foods.

That's kind of a perfect San Francisco image.

Yeah, that tells you kind of everything. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

We walked around for about an hour. At 11 o' clock in the morning, it was pretty clear who was dealing drugs. I counted about 20 dealers. They wore a uniform of black trousers, hoodies, hats, with either gray or black backpacks. And they weren't at all worried about being noticed. Many of them were standing on the sidewalk right as police cars went by. And they didn't make any effort to hide.

This is a street that we just saw somebody overdose on a Couple weeks ago. How's it going, guys?

Just down the road from City hall in United Nations Plaza, San Francisco has opened a supervised drug injection center. It's currently against federal and state law, although California is thinking about changing it.

They always point out it's like, this is the city that led the charge against smoking, and here it is creating a specialized fentanyl and meth smoking area as part of United Nations Plaza. So we're coming up on it now. This is the linkage center. It was a bait and switch. They said it was going to be for getting people into rehab. But the main part of it here, all of the outdoor part, is for people to smoke meth and fentanyl under city supervision with zero pressure or encouragement to get off of drugs. They call it radical hospitality.

The hope by opening this drug injection center is that it will take people off the street. But in fact, people are still using as much as they ever were. The polls suggest it's going to be really tough for Mr. Boudin. People are not choosing an alternative. They just have to dislike him to vote for the recall. And that makes these votes very hard to survive. Often some city officials have even come out publicly to support the recall. So you'd expect the government to be forming a united front, but that's not at all the case in San Francisco.

And let's end by going back to the question we began with, whether he survives or doesn't survive. What do you think the backlash against him says about attitudes toward progressive politics and especially progressive prosecutors?

I think that the reason this is important to watch is that it holds significance not just for San Francisco, but for cities more widely and also for the future of the Democratic Party. The first lesson to me that it highlights is the conflict you're seeing within the Democratic Party. It is really hampering functional government. You have people who are very unilateral in either supporting or opposing certain candidates. And if you're on the other side, you're labeled as a Republican or fascist or world. And we've, of course, seen spats like this for many years. You know, it was true with the Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton race, and you see it playing out elsewhere as well. The other thing that the Chesa Boudin recall shows, or may show, is whether or not urban dwellers are turned against progressivism. Chesa Boudin, of course, ran on this criminal justice reform agenda, and it seems like people aren't as comfortable with the lived realities of what he's promised as they were initially at the ballot box. So I think the other thing to watch from this is whether or not we're seeing more of a turn away from progressivism toward moderation. And of course that's extremely significant in a city like San Francisco, which has always been on the bleeding edge of progressivism.

Alexandra, thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you so much for having me, John.

Alright, fire when you're ready.

American Javelin anti tank missiles, British Starstreak surface to air missiles, Turkish armed Bayraktar drones. These items are just some of the latest military hardware being used by Ukraine to resist Russia's invasion. But among all of this high tech kit, Ukraine is also making use of a weapon that's 112 years old.

Ukrainians are fighting off the Russian invaders with the M1910 Maxim gun, a machine gun that was first introduced back in the days when Ukraine was part of the old Russian empire under a tsar.

David Hambling writes about technology for the Economist.

It looks like an antique piece of Victorian hardware because that's pretty much exactly what it is.

And what is this gun like?

It's really a very heavy piece of kit. It weighs 68 kilos, it's got an armoured gun shield and it's on a big two wheeled mount. So as the name suggests, it was introduced back in 1910 and it's a Russian version of the very original Maxim machine gun. This was the first machine gun ever introduced which was developed by an American called Hiram Maxim. The British one was called the Vickers gun. The American one was called the Maxim machine gun. The German one was called the MG08 and they're all basically the same design as this one, the M1910.

So why is Ukraine using a century old weapon?

Well, just from a historical point of view, it's interesting because it was the first real machine gun. Before that they had Gatling guns. Those are hand cranked and can only fire a magazine of 50 rounds at a time. Before you have to change, the innovation that Maxim brought in was this continuous firing. You just press the trigger and the recoil action keeps more bullets loading and firing, so it will keep firing indefinitely and that gives it this awesome sustained fire capability. Though he did find it needed a water cooled barrel in order to keep it at a sensible operating temperature. It was tremendously effective back in Victorian days and in the colonial wars, but it really became most famous during First World War when it mowed down large numbers of infantry during mass attacks.

And so it's huge and heavy, but other than that, how does it compare with more modern, comparable Machine guns.

I think this is very much like your grandmother's old steam iron. It's a big, heavy, clunky piece of kit, but it does do what it was designed for. So back in the day, it was intended as a piece of light field artillery and expected to carry out this sustained fire, firing thousands and thousands of rounds. Whereas in the modern era, what we want is something light and portable. So While the old M1910 weighs about 68 kilos, a modern medium machine gun will weigh about 7 kilos, which means it's the sort of thing that an infantry squad can carry around with them. But the big difference is because it's got a water cooled barrel, it can just keep on firing indefinitely. Maxim used to give demonstrations where he used to cut down telegraph poles with sustained bursts of fire. A modern machine gun, you can fire just a few hundred rounds in a row before it quickly overheats and that causes bad things to happen. It can cause the barrel to bend and go out of shape and become inaccurate. It can also cause the whole gun to become so hot that you get rounds cooking off, which is where bullets actually fire, where you're not pulling the trigger, which of course is extremely dangerous.

How about in terms of accuracy?

It is remarkably accurate. It's actually using the Same round, the 7.62x54mm round, as modern machine guns use, but it's actually rather more accurate than they are because it's on this giant heavy base. You've got an extremely stable firing platform. It's accurate out to well beyond 1000 metres. So it's actually right on point.

So how many of these old grandma steam iron guns does Ukraine have in storage?

They've got vast numbers in storage from the old Soviet days. When they did an audit, they found there was something like 35,000 of them, but very few of them have actually gone out into service. It's not an official part of equipment that gets issued. It only gets issued to territorial defence units for very specific requests. Basically, it's places where you've got a fixed defensive position or bunkers or fortifications somewhere where you can put a big piece of kit like this and it can do a good job in a stationary role. It's obviously not a weapon for the infantry squad.

I mean, it seems remarkable to me that a weapon that had been in storage for 70 years can be taken out and loaded up and fired. Is that common or are these weapons unusually hardy and reliable?

They are very hardy and reliable weapons. And that's one of the things that the Ukrainians like about them the fact that they are very solid and reliable. Having said that, though, any piece of military kit that's fairly simple and that's kept stored under good conditions should last for decades. This isn't quite the oldest weapon that's out there in service. There are also a handful of Mosin Nagant rifles and British Lee Enfield rifles from the same sort of era that are still knocking about in various armies of the world and still doing good service. The Ukrainians do have a larger number of other more modern machine guns, but those are overwhelmingly Russian made. They have a rather unsatisfactory record with producing hardware of their own, but they're importing a lot of machine guns from other foreign allies at the moment.

If they are importing all these weapons from other allies, do you expect the M1910 to go back into mothballs or do you think they'll keep using it?

As long as it's a defensive war where you've got people who are sitting in bunkers or trenches who are shooting at people who are approaching, I think it will certainly have plenty of use. It's not very useful in an attacking role because you can't move it forward very quickly. But for defensive operations, I think it still does very much what it says on the team.

All right, David, always a pleasure. Thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you.

Cheers.

That's all for this episode episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple podcasts and you can subscribe to the economist@examiner.com intelligenceoffer See you back here tomorrow.