Aurelia Butler

LONDON (Reuters) – Britain’s Boris Johnson defiantly vowed on Wednesday to fight on against growing calls for him to resign as prime minister, but his pledge to keep going was met with scornful laughter at a parliamentary appearance. Badly wounded by the resignations of a stream of senior colleagues and junior ministers who said he was not fit to govern, Johnson sought to come out fighting at parliament’s weekly prime minister’s questions session.”The job of a prime minister in difficult circumstances,” is to keep going.” Johnson said. “And that’s what I’m going to do.” Earlier, he tried to reassert his authority by quickly appointing Nadhim Zahawi, a rising star in the Conservative Party widely credited for the successful rollout of COVID-19 vaccines, as finance minister. But Johnson’s performance encountered a brutal response. Underlining the tenous position he is in, some colleagues in his cabinet team of top ministers struggled to contain their laughter as the opposition Labour leader poked fun at his cabinet for being in the “charge of the lightweight brigade”.Three members of Johnson’s own party asked whether he would resign.To one, he replied: “There is a very simple reason why they want me out and that is they know otherwise we are going to get on and deliver our mandate and win another general election.””Clearly, if there were circumstances in which I felt it was impossible for the government to go on and discharge the mandate that we’ve been given, or if I felt, for instance, that we were being frustrated in our desire to support the Ukrainian people … then I would,” Johnson said.Overall, it was a muted performance for a prime minister who has seen his political fortunes tumble from a landslide election victory in 2019 to now, when the resignation of his finance and health ministers opened the floodgates for more junior ministers to quit.Shortly afterwards, his former health minister, Sajid Javid, detailed the scandals, missteps and gaffes that have marked Johnson’s tenure so far.”Treading the tightrope between loyalty and integrity has become impossible in recent months,” Javid told a silent parliament, with Johnson listening stony faced.KICKING AND SCREAMINGThe prime minister is later due to appear before the chairs of select committees for a scheduled two-hour grilling later on Wednesday.”I suspect we will have to drag him kicking and screaming from Downing Streetz,” one Conservative lawmaker told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity. “But if we have to do it that way then we will.” A former journalist and London mayor who became the face of Britain’s departure from the European Union, his landslide 2019 election win soon gave way to a combative and often chaotic approach to governing. His leadership has been mired in scandals and missteps over the last few months, with the prime minister fined by police for breaking COVID-19 lockdown laws and a damning report published about the behaviour of officials at his Downing Street office who breached their own lockdown rules.There have also been policy U-turns, an ill-fated defence of a lawmaker who broke lobbying rules, and criticism he has not done enough to tackle a cost-of-living crisis, with many Britons struggling to cope with rising fuel and food prices. The latest bout of drama at the heart of British power comes as the economy deteriorates rapidly, with some economists warning the country could tip into recession. The latest scandal saw Johnson apologising for appointing a lawmaker to a role involved in party welfare and discipline, even after being briefed that the politician had been the subject of complaints about sexual misconduct.Downing Street’s narrative changed several times over what the prime minister knew of the past behaviour of the politician, who was forced to resign, and when he knew it. His spokesman blamed a lapse in Johnson’s memory.That prompted Rishi Sunak to quit as chancellor of the exchequer – the finance minister – and Javid to resign as health secretary, while others left their junior ministerial or envoy roles.”It is clear to me that this situation will not change under your leadership – and you have therefore lost my confidence too,” Javid said in his resignation letter.Several of the ministers cited Johnson’s lack of judgment, standards, and inability to tell the truth.A snap YouGov poll found 69% of Britons thought Johnson should step down as prime minister but for the time being the remainder of his top ministerial team offered their backing.A month ago, Johnson survived a confidence vote of Conservative lawmakers, and party rules mean he cannot face another such challenge for a year. However, some lawmakers are seeking to change those rules, while he is also under investigation by a parliamentary committee over whether he lied to parliament about COVID-19 lockdown breaches. Those changes could come as soon as later on Wednesday at a meeting of the so-called 1922 Committee that sets the rules for leadership confidence votes.Were Johnson to go, the process to replace him could take a couple of months. More

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – The Mexican central bank’s battle with inflation has underscored its autonomy as board members defy pressure from President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador to keep interest rates lower to help the economy, officials, lawmakers and analysts say.Concerns over the autonomy of Banxico, as the Bank of Mexico is known, spiked in March after Lopez Obrador revealed the central bank’s 50-basis-point rate hike hours before it became official.The leftist president subsequently apologized, saying he thought the decision was already public.Nevertheless, the gaffe fed concerns about the central bank’s independence that surfaced in late 2021 when Lopez Obrador tapped Victoria Rodriguez, an unheralded finance official, to head Banxico after unexpectedly ditching his previous candidate, former Finance Minister Arturo Herrera.Still, as Lopez Obrador has begun warning of risks to Mexico’s economy from higher borrowing costs, the central bank has presented an increasingly united front in raising rates despite a deteriorating growth outlook.On June 23, Banxico unanimously approved its biggest rate hike in recent history – a 75-basis-point increase that mirrored the U.S. Federal Reserve’s move a week earlier – following 50-basis-point increases in each of its four previous meetings.The next day Lopez Obrador urged Banxico and other central banks to find ways of taming inflation other than raising rates to spare the economy.But the central bank, four of whose five board members were appointed by Lopez Obrador’s administration, is not likely to be swayed by such remarks, two senior government officials told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity.Government critics agree.”The bank’s acting as an independent authority,” said Ildefonso Guajardo, a congressman from the centrist opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and former Mexican economy minister. “It’s not trying to please the president.”The central bank did not respond to a request for comment on whether it would be influenced by the president’s suggestions.Guajardo said he believed Lopez Obrador was unlikely to interfere seriously with Banxico’s independence because the president had come to understand that Mexico’s poor, his main base of popular support, would suffer the most from financial instability.Instead, Lopez Obrador’s recommendations to Banxico were intended to communicate to his supporters that the pain from higher interest rates was not his doing, said Raul Feliz, an economist at the CIDE think tank in Mexico City.The central bank tends not to respond to Lopez Obrador’s remarks, though even Gerardo Esquivel, arguably the most dovish board member picked by the president, has clashed with him publicly.PUNCHY PESODuring his administration Lopez Obrador has repeatedly talked up the stability of the Mexican peso, which Banxico’s rate hikes have helped support.With inflation largely imported and near a 21-year high of almost 8%, a stronger peso mitigates price pressures, Feliz said. Lopez Obrador will be wary of endangering that situation as the 2024 presidential election approaches, he added.”Imagine we got to the election with an exchange rate that was out of control and inflation out of control,” Feliz said.Lopez Obrador has so dominated government that a traditional counterweight to the central bank, the finance ministry, has been undermined, arguably giving Banxico more autonomy, said Patricia Terrazas, an opposition lawmaker and former head of the finance committee in Mexico’s lower house of Congress.Clashes over policy led Lopez Obrador’s first finance minister to quit barely seven months into office. Two years later, his replacement, Herrera, was moved aside to head the central bank before the president dropped him for Rodriguez.Though she had no prior central bank experience, Rodriguez has applied herself professionally, and Banxico’s independence has passed “many tests,” said Guajardo, the PRI lawmaker.Indeed, the votes of Banxico’s board have become more unanimous as it ramps up efforts to tackle surging inflation.When Banxico embarked on its current tightening cycle last summer, it announced six split rate decisions in a row. But its decisions have been unanimous in two of the last three rate hikes even as the president pushed for more dovish policy.”They understand the responsibility that comes with the central bank,” said Terrazas of the center-right National Action Party. “So far, the bank is doing its job.” More