As political turmoil envelops Downing Street and the White House, this week’s edition of the Guardian Weekly features two covers, as Donald Trump and Boris Johnson faced two of their worst weeks ever.
Minutes before the previous issue of the Guardian Weekly went to press, something unusual happened in Britain. Hundreds of thousands of people listened, enraptured, to Baroness Hale, president of the UK’s supreme court, as she read out the ruling that declared Boris Johnson’s suspension of parliament illegal. The move, a fairly transparent attempt to block scrutiny ahead of the UK’s scheduled 31 October departure from the EU, had shocked lawmakers and the public alike.
The unanimous decision that the prime minister had given the Queen unlawful advice shocked the government even more. Johnson, who has lost his majority and every vote in the House of Commons since he became PM, is also trying to face down a scandal involving payments to an American businesswoman when he was mayor of London and the accusation from a Sunday Times journalist that she was groped by Johnson in 1999. He was also accused in parliament of raising the risk of violence to MPs with his inflammatory rhetoric. All in all, it wasn’t a great seven days … In this week’s big story Toby Helm and Peter Walker look back at Johnson’s worst week (yet) and ask what he can do to get his Brexit plans back on track.
Johnson’s buddy across the Atlantic had just as torrid a few days, with Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi confirming an official impeachment inquiry related to Trump’s pressuring of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy to investigate Joe Biden. With the White House’s own summation of the call confirming that Trump had acted improperly, the scandal isn’t going away – no matter how much Trump tweets. On Monday, the president’s problems multiplied as US news outlets outlined the role of secretary of state Mike Pompeo and attorney general William Barr in Trump’s pressuring of foreign leaders and of his asking Australian PM Scott Morrison to help discredit the inquiry into Russian election interference. It’s going to be a wild ride. Our DC bureau chief David Smith looks at how Ukraine-gate could be one scandal that Trump can’t ride out.
On Tuesday the People’s Republic of China celebrated its 70th anniversary with a grand parade at Tiananmen Square. It was a spectacle of military and civilian might and at the centre of the celebrations was president Xi Jinping, who watched from the spot at which Mao Zedong announced the establishment of the state in 1949. In this week’s opinion pages, Hans van de Ven, a professor of modern Chinese history at Cambridge, looks at the superpower’s potential for progress and argues that change won’t follow a western blueprint.
