Boris Johnson, mulls one of the few figures to have served in every Tory cabinet since David Cameron’s to the present one, is like a “seafaring voyager from the ancient world” – adventurous, reckless, dominant and storm-tossed. Now, like a stranded mariner, he depends on external forces to bring the Conservatives’ ship of state back to safe electoral harbour.
The omens for his odyssey look bleaker by the hour. A shock resignation last night from Lord Frost, the PM’s trusted Brexit negotiator who looked poised to pull off a peace treaty with the EU over the Northern Ireland protocol over the “political direction” of the government. For all the ritual courtesies about his departure being agreed earlier this month and inconveniently leaked to Sunday newspapers, Frost’s key gripe is clear. He disagrees with the leader he served as negotiator and later Cabinet member about “the current direction of travel” on Covid restrictions and believes that Johnson has fallen prey to a nexus of over-zealous advisers advising greater restrictions as Omicron spreads.
This may well turn out to be the equivalent of Geoffrey Howe’s attack on Margaret Thatcher – in that case from the pro-European position, the arguments count less than the impact and timing – and Frost has demonstrated Omicron’s potential to determine how dependent Johnson’s survival now is on a mutant virus (insert your own punchline here).
Last night, the line from Boris loyalists remained that if the new variant turns out to be milder than feared in its impact on the NHS, this febrile few days will pass and Johnson will emerge as the man who saw the country through a new emergency, balancing warring interests and views as well as any leader reasonably could.
If, however, a new test ends up with images of the health service in dire straits and Johnson fails to shake off the opinion among colleagues that he is the main source of the political contagion in his party, the verdict is unsentimental – “the game will be up pretty fast”. Character, control and competence are the focus of concerns that have spilled over into a 99-strong rebellion over Covid prevention measures, driven by an uprising over vaccine passports to enter crowded venues and tightening of mask requirements. The North Shropshire byelection rout was driven, however, not by a spasm of libertarian impulses but by a range of frustrations, requiring different – and often contradictory – remedies. The damage of mass abstentions by Tory voters who have amassed two centuries of local practice in ticking the Conservative box on the ballot brought unsparing clarity to Johnson’s vulnerability. A PM who has thrived on charisma has lost his lustre. It is not the usual Johnson-haters in or outside the party who sound like his nemeses but, most vocally, former allies and champions.
The scrappy defence Johnson offered after the knockout blow was not a stellar example of resilience under pressure. We got first-name ingratiation with his Sky News interviewer, while sliding out of a clear admission that he might be part of the problem. (We should have some understanding of baggy eyes for anyone with a newborn, but even the arrival of a baby girl has failed to penetrate the Downing Street gloom.)
The toll of the pandemic and a slew of unforced errors have dented his greatest asset – the self-confidence and ability to sound conversational while honing a message that resonates with a range of voters. Ascribing a rout to too much focus on “politics and politicians” reminded me of Communist bosses in 1989 instructing furious citizens not to focus on their miseries and frustrations, but on the excellent grain harvest and factory outputs. The core message seemed to be that Johnson was in charge – “I’m going to have to fix it of course”, but not of anything particular. This is the David Brent school of management.
Today backbenchers divide less often on 2016 Brexit lines than they do on fears that Johnson is a swing-in-the-wind chancer – deemed illiberal by those who fret about sweeping changes to citizenship rights and a shrill tone on migrant boats in the Channel, while equally distrusted at the “dry” end of the Conservative spectrum, where they’re fretting about Covid rules restricting individual choices. Brand Boris is being ground down by competing demands. Both sides (unhappily for him) unite in concern about incompetence, drift and high handedness with MPs. One usually loyal female minister confides that the revelations of revels inside No 10 and the leaked video of his press team’s levity about these “opened the floodgates of anger” to the extent that she felt sorry for her constituency staff having to read the insults.
The “surge” effect she and others have witnessed was the handling of accusations about illicit or ill-considered parties and a now settled view that Johnson is being dishonest about his knowledge of them or so lax about discipline on his team when the country was in the grip of Covid that he did not care. News that Simon Case, the cabinet secretary, had recused himself from heading the investigation into the vinous Christmas gatherings in Downing Street after taking part in a quiz event compounds the impression that neither Johnson nor his inner team have their disaster-avoidance antennae honed. The investigation should have gone to a civil servant outside the PM’s immediate contacts.
Byelections are snapshots that meld local concerns: in this case, poor infrastructure investment and belief that the spending spoils are heading to the “red wall” rather than the Welsh borders. Yet they are also vectors of more potent national mood swings. The young Winston Churchill remembered losing Oldham in 1899 to the Liberals as leaving him “with feelings of deflation which a bottle of champagne represents when it has been half-emptied and left uncorked for a night (a calamitous matter in Winston’s eyes)”. A swing in Christchurch to the Lib Dems presaged the demise of John Major, while Orpington in the 1960s became the “blue wall” bellwether seat for narrow Conservative-Liberal races after a Liberal triumph in 1962. Ruth Davidson’s cover version of the “last chance saloon” metaphor (Ken Clarke’s mordant description of Major’s terminal phase) echoes that outcome. What to do about this is a fraught business, even for an ideological Houdini of Johnson’s calibre.
As one Johnson ally in the Lords put it: “As far as the Tories are concerned, the boss is doing a load of un-Tory things in the name of the pandemic they don’t like or understand.” HMS Johnson, they suspect, is sailing under a false flag, having promised a buccaneering rebirth of Britain and delivering instead “high taxes, high inflation, no Brexit dividend and a lot of faff about Covid passports”.
The unseemly attack by a Tory backbencher singling out Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, as the proponent of a “public health socialist state” is a further sign of how quickly disagreements over Omicron control can turn to something much more visceral and divisive. Given that the ruffled Tory helmsman looks more Kryptonite than a purveyor of superpowers, the mood among pretenders to the crown is remarkably subdued.
But that might also provide the narrow window for a Johnson reboot. For all the agitation over his many failings, the question many backbenchers will ask is what could a newcomer offer that would provide a clearer recipe for success. Rishi Sunak, the chancellor for the Technocrat Tendency, arrived back at Heathrow on Friday in jogging pants, having badly mistimed a trip to Silicon Valley that felt less than essential and featured foolishly casual optics for a figure in charge of the economy at a time of distress. No such slouchy sportswear is tolerated by Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, whose Christmas card was a dead ringer for a portrait of Elizabeth I exuding Gloriana vibes, with a globe prominently beside her – and a ready stump speech about “confident, outward-looking, patriotic and positive” Blighty.
For all the fizzing around a possible challenge, Johnson’s most ambitious would-be successors are more about positioning than a power grab now. Sunak will hope that confronting the cost of living squeeze will allow him to show off his skill in balancing tax and spend, while funnelling money to strategic areas to quell red wall dissatisfactions. Truss is a tensile figure, a survivor in the bear-pit of shifting cabinets and quirky (former Lib Dem, after all) yet ambitious enough to let me know she only pulled out of the leadership contest in 2019 in order not to prolong the May-era misery. Her bumper-sticker pitch of freedom-loving, proto-Thatcherite, however, is a marketing campaign and not yet a proposal for power with the cutting edge it would take to oust an incumbent.
Risks of the “Johnson contagion” need to be balanced against the upheaval of changing a leader mid-term. That invariably produces accusations of governing with no mandate or being hustled into an early election on a gamble that might benefit Keir Starmer. So Johnson probably has a short period of respite in which to refocus his premiership before the next wave of economic woes hits home and local elections in May offer the next punishing political health check. The chances of full recovery look slim and, dramatically, the figure he chose to “get Brexit done ” has dealt a blow which will embolden critics on the Tory right.
For a prognosis, I would refer to the joke about how many psychotherapists it takes to change a lightbulb. The old answer is just one: but the lightbulb really has to want to change. The new one is that his party may now decide that the great source of heat and light is fading to black.
Anne McElvoy is senior editor at the Economist
