It's worth noting that Gavin Newsom essentially got away with something that pretty much ruined Boris Johnson's government (though didn't ultimately end it; that was for something else). I'll vote for Newsom's reelection this November for policy reasons of course, but that was some BS right there.
I had trouble understanding Johnson’s downfall because many US politicians also violated COVID precautions and did not pay much of a price. Seems extreme for it to topple his government.
It badly wounded him because the government implemented some pretty strict lockdown protocols, and he and his staff repeatedly broke their own rules, even getting fined for it. The image of the Queen
sitting completely alone at the funeral of her husband of 70 years while folks at Number 10 were getting wasted at a party just the night before was a pretty brutal one. A trickle of Conservative MPs calling for him to resign over the constant drip-drip of new revelations of rule-breaking became a small flood, but he eventually won the vote of confidence in early June albeit by a very underwhelming margin.
Only a few short weeks after that vote, one of the government's senior whips resigned after a drunken sexual assault. It emerged that he had kind of a habit of it over several years, but more seriously, Johnson knew about this reputation when he hired him as a whip. Already weakened by scandal after scandal for the entire first half of this year, a huge number of government ministers resigned within about two days, and that was essentially game over.
