From New York Times, I'm Michael Bavaro. This is a day.

Today, the Prime Minister of Britain is engulfed in a groaning scandal over boozy parties and more hypocrisy.

I spoke with my colleague, London Bureau Chief Mark Lammer, about why this of all modes might be the end of Boris Johnson.

It's Tuesday, January 25th.

Mark, the last time that we took a hard look at Boris Johnson, it was not long after he had won office on the promise that he would be the one to get Brexit done, to pull off this delicate and gnarly process of removing Britain from the European Union.

The question, then, was, is this guy a serious enough and capable enough leader to do that? This man who our colleague Sarah Lyle, memorably described on the show as a political chameleon who would pretty much say whatever he needed to say to get through a moment, and as this shambolic figure, late to meetings, rumpled, bumbling, never bothering to comb his hair, was this the guy who was going to meet that historic moment, get Brexit and everything it entails done.

And I'm curious what you think the answer has been.

Well, in a very simple way, he did, and he did so really quite quickly. I mean, remember, Britain formally left the European Union just six weeks after he won this landslide election.

So in a very narrow sense, he got Brexit done and got it done fairly quickly, but even beyond that, he negotiated a very complicated and difficult trade agreement between Britain and the European Union.

Many people said it couldn't be done. He did it and hence delivered not just on the symbolism of leaving the EU, but on the substance of it as well.

And meanwhile, it was 2020. So like every other world leader, Boris Johnson was also dealing with the calamity of coronavirus.

So by the end of that first year in office, Boris Johnson looked like a fairly consequential leader. I mean, say what you will about his shambling personal style or his lack of organization.

He had actually taken Britain through the most important transition it had made politically since the war and had seen Britain through the first part of the pandemic, which is a record really that in terms of the gravity of the issues he was dealing with, the very few of his predecessors had faced really going back to wartime history.

So safe to say at this point, he has defied many of his doubters and generally exceeded expectations. Yeah, that's right. In fact, by the end of his first year, a lot of the commentary in Britain is whether we're at the beginning of a 10 year stretch of a Boris Johnson era as a conservative prime minister.

He's looming as a fairly consequential. You might even say a giant figure on the British political landscape, but then comes this very weird and murky scandal that engulfs his government and might even force him out of his job over of all things garden parties.

Okay, so tell us the whole of the garden parties story because it is difficult to reconcile the idea that Boris Johnson might be one of the most consequential prime ministers in the post war era and that he could go down over garden parties. So what is that story?

Well, you're right. There is something kind of trivial about the whole thing at first glance and indeed the way it leaked out almost seemed like it was not going to be that big a deal. So at the end of November, the daily mirror, which is a London tabloid carried a story saying there had been parties at 10 Downing Street, which is the complex where the prime minister lives and works and where his staff also works.

These are parties that happened a year earlier at a time when the country was in a strict coronavirus lockdown parties either in his back garden in the basement of Downing Street, Boris Johnson denies it immediately. He says all coronavirus restrictions were followed.

So for someone in my position, this just doesn't seem like that big a deal. And the story just kind of dribbles on like that until this video emerges. And this is what really blew up this story and turned what it been kind of at the risk of a bad metaphor, a garden variety Boris Johnson scandal into a mega Boris Johnson scandal.

What's about this video? What the video was in essence was a leaked video of a mock press conference.

And just to sort of set the stage for a second, Boris Johnson had planned for a long time to institute White House style briefings in Downing Street where the press would come into a very nice room and a press secretary would brief much as Jen Socky briefs in the Biden White House.

He hired a very good political journalist, Allegra Stratton to play that role. And she was being trained by Downing Street staff about how to take questions from the press in a press conference setting.

...