UK Trade Envoy to Morocco quits over Johnson cabinet crisis, urges PM to resign

The United Kingdom’s Trade Envoy to Morocco, Andrew Murrison, has resigned from his position over Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s current government crisis.

In a letter published on his official Twitter account, the Casablanca-based envoy wrote that his resignation would take effect immediately.

Murrison’s resignation comes after two senior cabinet members, Health Secretary Sajid Javid and Chancellor Rishi Sunak both resigned, in addition to other MPs in the UK government.

In the strongly worded letter, Murrison said Boris Johnson’s position had become “unrecoverable,” after having backed Johnson’s leadership bid in 2016 and in 2019.

“The last straw in the roiling chaos of the past six months has been the unavoidable implication of Lord McDonald’s letter to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards this morning,” said the envoy, and “strongly urging“ Johnson to resign.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson vowed this Wednesday to remain in his role, despite the successive resignations protesting his leadership.

“The job of a prime minister in difficult circumstances when you have been handed a colossal mandate is to keep going and that’s what I’m going to do,” Johnson told MPs in parliament today.

The immediate cause of the crisis was the fallout from the resignation last Thursday of Deputy Chief Whip Chris Pincher, amid allegations he had groped two guests at a private dinner the night before.

Johnson has since faced severe criticism both inside and outside his cabinet, after Downing Street press officers tried to justify Pincher’s apparent sexual assault.

Initially, Downing Street denied the Prime Minister knew anything about allegations receding the most recent assault during his time as a Foreign Office minister.

Johnson’s team later admitted that the PM had known about the historical allegations, but that they had been “resolved.”

Yesterday, Simon McDonald, the former top civil servant at the Foreign Office, revealed that Johnson had been briefed in person about the outcome of an investigation into Pincher’s conduct, sparking a wave of resignations over the course of the day.