BORIS JOHNSON has finally resigned as Prime Minister – after his government fell apart and his party turned against him – abandoning his threat to stay on regardless.

Johnson has long been unpopular in black communities after his past racist articles emerged as he was first running for London Mayor, and he attracted fewer votes from the capital’s black voters than previous mayors even though he won two terms at City Hall.

The Prime Minister was eventually forced out just before lunchtime today, after 59 of his ministers resigned, many cabinet ministers publicly and privately told him to go, and his MPs refused to be appointed to fill vacancies.

The stench of racism has hung around Johnson before his political career even began after his back catalogue of journalism emerged, including calling for a return of colonialism in Africa, calling black children ‘piccaninnies’, and saying Africans had ‘watermelon smiles.’

Labour MP Clive Lewis welcomed Johnson’s fall but was pessimistic that a new Tory prime minister would bring about much change.

He told The Voice: “He should have gone a long time ago. He’s only been able to cling on as long as he has our sham democracy with its’ voting system and no constitution can keep a liar in Boris Johnson there as long as it has.

“I don’t see anything changing; we’re still going to have policies which benefit only the super rich. 10 million people are expected to be forced into poverty through inflation this year and the government will do absolutely nothing for them.

“I can’t see 70 years of immigration policy changing because Boris Johnson has gone. Until the infrastructure of systemic racism is dismantled I have a pessimistic outlook. Look at the Rwanda policy, which is straight out of the colonial playbook. The MPs who supported that are choosing the next prime minister.”

In his resignation statement, Johnson called his party “a herd” that had moved to depose him, saying: “At Westminster, the herd instinct is powerful and when the herd moves, it moves.” He expressed sadness at leaving Number 10, adding: “But them’s the breaks.”

“Karma keeps receipts”, was the reaction of campaigner Lee Jasper, whose life was almost ruined by a Johnson-inspired four-month campaign by the London Evening Standard to discredit Jasper, and by extension his boss, the then Mayor Ken Livingstone.

Unethical

Two and a half years and seven investigations later – which cost the taxpayer £12 million – Jasper was cleared of every single allegation made against him.

Jasper said: “I am amazed that Boris Johnson lasted so long in occupying the office of Prime Minister. As somebody who’s got personal experience of the man, I know him to be deeply unethical, a pathological liar, a serial cheater, corrupt, and on top of all that has a propensity for incompetence.”

Almost exactly a year ago, Brent MP Dawn Butler was thrown out of the House of Commons for “speaking truth to power” in calling Johnson a liar, yet today it is Johnson getting expelled for lying about whether he knew that his deputy chief whip Chris Pincher had been investigated for sexual misconduct.

As the top champion of Brexit, Johnson headed a campaign whose anti-immigration narrative saw a spike in racist hate crime, and through his Home Secretary Priti Patel has ramped up deportations to Jamaica, west Africa, and is now accused of attempting to start a ‘new British colony’ in Rwanda.

He set up the Sewell Report which sought to deny the concept of institutional racism, and allowed his ministers to denegrate Black Lives Matter.

Johnson once said “you can’t out-ethnic me” with reference to his alleged Turkish ancestry, but election data shows that his second win as London mayor in 2012 saw him pick up the lowest winning share of the vote since the post was created.

He performed worse in wards with the most black, Bangladeshi and Pakistani residents when he won than Zac Goldsmith did in 2016 when he lost. Runnymede Trust research indicated that Johnson took less than 20% of the black, Asian and racialised minority vote in that election.

Many believe if Britain as a whole had listened to black Britain, Boris Johnson would never have held any public office let alone Prime Minister.

Senior Liberal Democrat Roderick Lynch called for a general election, adding: “Good riddance to bad rubbish.” Referring to the fact that black people were three times more likely to die in the Covid-19 pandemic. and the partygate scandal, Lynch added: “He wants to party and dance on peoples’ graves when they’re losing their loved ones.”

Back catalogue

Writing in The Telegraph in 2002, Mr Johnson infamously referred to black people as “piccaninnies” as he weighed in on Tony Blair’s frequent trips abroad in his column.

“What a relief it must be for Blair to get out of England. It is said that the Queen has come to love the Commonwealth, partly because it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies,” he wrote before going on to liken their to “watermelon smiles”.

While as an editor for The Spectator in the same year, Mr Johnson said colonialism in Africa should never have ended and downplayed Britain’s brutal part in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

“Consider Uganda, pearl of Africa, as an example of the British record. Are we guilty of slavery? Pshaw. It was one of the first duties of Frederick Lugard, who colonised Buganda in the 1890s, to take on and defeat the Arab slavers,” he wrote.

“The best fate for Africa would be if the old colonial powers, or their citizens, scrambled once again in her direction; on the understanding that this time they will not be asked to feel guilty.”

The former shadow secretary of state for women and equalities, Marsha de Cordova, described his comments as an “insult”.

“Boris Johnson’s past comments are an example of why we need to educate people about the impact of colonialism, she said.

“The legacy of British colonialism and its role in the slave trade is a scar on our society. To infer this is something to be proud of, and that African countries are worse off because they are no longer ruled by the empire, is an insult to millions.”

In August 2018, in another article for The Telegraph, said full-face veils worn by some Muslim women should not be banned, but it was “absolutely ridiculous” they chose to “go around looking like letterboxes”. He then went on to compare them to bank robbers”.

Dog whistle

His comments were reported to have caused an increase in Islamaphobic crimes in the capital.

He went on to further target the Muslim community in an essay added to his 2006 book The Dream of Rome, arguing that the Islamic religion resulted in the Muslim world being “literally centuries behind”.

Other comments include how he accused the late Nelson Mandela of steering the “majority tyranny of black rule” after the atrocities of apartheid and reduced China to a country that existed as “an incubator of strange diseases” and a vast polluted landscape of Victorian factories,” before referring to former US president as “part-Kenyan” in what was labelled as “dog -whistle racism”.

In 1999 he wrote in the Independent: “All the young people I know – ie those under 30 – are just as avaricious as we flinty Thatcherite yuppies of the 1980s in fact, they have an almost Nigerian interest in money and gadgets of all kinds.”

Writing in The Guardian at the time of the inquiry into the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence, Johnson spoke of his fear of black men: “When I shamble round the park in my running gear late at night, and I come across that bunch of black kids, shrieking in the spooky corner by the disused gents, I would love to pretend that I don’t turn a hair… I cannot rule out that I have suffered from a tiny fit of prejudice.

“I have prejudged this group on the basis of press reports, possibly in right-wing newspapers, about the greater likelihood of being mugged by young black males than by any other group. And if that is racial prejudice, then I am guilty.”

In his novel, Seventy Two Virgins, Johnson made several numerous racist and misogynistic slurs.

Colonial

Near the beginning of the book Johnson uses an extended metaphor to depict a traffic warden working in Westminster as a “hunter-gatherer” because he is an African immigrant.

He wrote of the character: “He went down Horseferry Road, past the obelisks with their odd pineapple finials, past the bearded stone Victorians who had conquered the continent from which he came, and he, the colonial, became to hunt in the former imperial metropolis.”

In a separate section describing one mixed-race character’s thoughts about himself, Johnson wrote: “The interesting thing about his half-caste looks, he decided, was that he didn’t look Negroid.” On another occasion Johnson describes the same character as “the faintest coffee colour”. He also used the word ‘coon’ in the book.

The Prime Minister has frequently argued that some of his past remarks have been taken out of context and has yet to offer a formal apology for his historical comments.

Business and Energy Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng, who has himself been tipped as a future leader, tweeted today: “What a depressing state of affairs. So much needless damage caused. We now need a new Leader as soon as practicable. Someone who can rebuild trust, heal the country, and set out a new, sensible and consistent economic approach to help families.”