UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has explained his unwillingness to step down following the Partygate scandal by arguing that he just cannot “abandon” the nation as it faces economic hardships and the conflict in Ukraine. Speaking to the founder of the Mumsnet website, Justine Roberts, on Wednesday, the prime minister insisted he still has “a massive agenda” that he “was elected to deliver.”
Johnson was answering questions from readers of the website amid mounting pressure from the opposition and fellow Tory MPs to step down over a report that blamed “failures of leadership and judgement” in Johnson’s office for the series of lockdown-breaching parties in 2020 and early 2021.
“I have thought about all these questions a lot as you could imagine and I just cannot see how actually it would be responsible right now given everything that is going on simply to abandon … the project on which I embarked to level up,” Johnson told Roberts.