It is hard to know how to take the news that Boris Johnson is demanding £5bn to save Boris Johnson.
Sorry, Freudian slip; the money is of course for the NHS, not the foreign secretary. It is doubtless just a happy coincidence that being seen to come good on that reckless leave campaign promise, and spend more money on public services at home, might help to restore his battered credibility and redeem any personal Brexit guilt.
And even if it isn’t, we still arguably can’t afford to look a gift horse in the mouth. Already, sick people are spending hours marooned on trolleys, while waiting times grow and staff creak under the strain. The social care problem that the Tories tried to solve in their manifesto, only for older voters to recoil in horror, hasn’t gone away and a serious spike in flu cases could precipitate a dire emergency. Johnson is right that the NHS needs more money, even if by trumpeting his intentions in advance of today’s cabinet meeting he has actively made it harder for Theresa May to agree.
For even if she’s already minded to accept the more discreet (but no less fervent) lobbying for cash by the health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, she’ll hate watching Johnson take the credit. The self-aggrandising way he has gone about it may also raise colleagues’ hackles, not least because the ultimate solution may look more like the NHS tax advocated by the former minister Nick Boles than some as yet theoretical Brexit bonus.
Yet by calling for the money to be spent after Britain leaves the EU, Johnson has spotted an opportunity to blur the lines, and portray this as a government delivering for leavers. And while the shamelessness of it is breathtaking, he is right about one thing. Brexiters do have a moral obligation to the 52%. They promised voters bountiful trade deals, an end to immigration and oodles of cash for the NHS. If it doesn’t happen, then the rage of those for whom voting leave was a last throw of the electoral dice will be unconfined and much like the rage triggered by the expenses scandal, it won’t be limited to those who deserve it. Trust in politics more generally would collapse. Johnson has basically pulled off the maddening trick of being right for all the wrong reasons.
But in doing so, he has also acknowledged a formidable space opening up for Labour. Ambitious Tories used to signal leadership intentions by promising tax cuts and a war on waste. Now they compete to spend money (witness the defence secretary, Gavin Williamson, unleashing the chiefs of defence staff to do his lobbying for him). They sense the public mood shifting, approaching the tipping point that historically propels Labour into power; an emerging consensus even among voters not directly affected by austerity that it’s gone too far now, that public services need a break.
All the stars are aligned, in other words, for a lifesaving injection except one; thanks partly to Johnson’s undoubtedly brilliant campaigning skills, the economy may be headed for a brick wall. Even if Brexit miraculously turns out to cost nothing – if a perfect deal materialises from nowhere, if GDP doesn’t miss a beat, if we spend virtually nothing on replicating what the EU used to do and thus free up the £350m a week we never actually sent to Brussels because some of it came home in a rebate – that money still won’t be available until the transition period ends in 2021. The NHS needs help now, which means it realistically must come from the same place it always comes: voters’ pockets, or fellow cabinet ministers’ budgets. We’re about to see how keen they are to save Boris Johnson from himself.
