The Sun is rooting for Prime Minister Boris Johnson as he tries to face down the mutiny within his own party. We like the way he put it when he told Parliament that the “job of the prime minister in difficult circumstances, when he’s been given a colossal mandate, is to keep going and that’s what I’m going to do.’’ His mandate — and it is colossal — is to secure for Britain the independence that voters asked for in June 2016 and December 2019.

That is the job. We understand that Brexit has many heroes. It was, though, the part of Mr. Johnson to lift the debate up to its highest plane — above the backlash over open borders, say, or the irksome European-style regulations — and put the focus on freedom in its fullest form. This is the part about the sunlit uplands of liberty, of which Mr. Johnson spoke so often and eloquently. This is what he has a mandate to complete.

We understand that the tow-headed titan has fallen short on some of this and that could yet lose this fight. So far more than 30 ministers and aides have turned tail. The housing minister, Michael Gove, who blocked Boris once before, midwifing the era of Prime Minister May, has reportedly urged the PM to resign and, the BBC reports, has been sacked instead. Mr. Johnson has few allies left, though he last month won a confidence vote.

The cause of this rebellion centers on, among other things, what ought to be minor matters. One involves the party’s deputy whip, Chris Pincher. Brought into government by Mr. Johnson, Mr. Pincher ran the operation that helped prevent last month’s vote of no confidence from becoming fatal. Yet it was soon disclosed that Mr. Johnson knew of allegations of misconduct, and welcomed Mr. Pincher back anyway. 

As a scandal, it strikes us as small beer. The resignations, though, have included two members of the cabinet, the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, and the secretary of health. No sooner was a new chancellor, Nadhim Zahawi, named than the BBC reports that he will join those demanding that Mr. Johnson resign. The opposition leader, Sir Keir Starmer of Labor, is asking, “isn’t this the first recorded case of the sinking ship fleeing the rats?”

Our own view is that Mr. Johnson is, for all the controversy and compromising early in his prime ministry, the best man to protect Brexit. To fail to carry on, moreover, would be to repeat Prime Minister Thatcher’s mistake in 1990, as a report from the BBC’s Nick Eardley notes today. Mr. Eardley quotes a Johnson ally as describing some of Mr. Johnson’s critics as “treacherous.” Mr. Eardley remarks on the “echoes” of the Iron Lady’s final crisis.

That crisis came to a head in 1990, when the oleaginous Lord Heseltine, whom she raised up but who eventually vied for her position, derided the Iron Lady as no longer “fit for purpose.” It had all the hallmarks of a coup. Yet “when several senior ministers told her that her time was up,” as Mr. Eardley describes it, “she did resign.” In retrospect, at least in the BBC’s telling, there was “nothing inevitable” about Thatcher’s resignation. 

Conservatives, moreover, quickly saw their mistake. “Tory activists wept, flooded their MPs’ switchboards and swore revenge,” the Guardian reports. In Parliament, Nicholas Ridley compared it to a “medieval betrayal” and warned that “if any of those who have used this device were to inherit the crown, uneasy would lie their head.” That’s one reason why, despite Lord Heseltine’s machinations, he never became premier.

Thatcher had warned of the danger of a European superstate that would infringe on British sovereignty. Her resignation condemned Britain to the feckless government of John Major, who in 1993 forced through Parliament the Maastricht Treaty that would lock Britain into an “ever closer union among the peoples of Europe.” This was a colossal error that, 23 years later, the British people voted to escape and that has led to Mr. Johnson’s “colossal mandate.”

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This editorial has been updated from the bulldog edition.