After a particularly difficult few days for Boris Johnson and his government, a senior figure involved in decision making in Whitehall was tearing his hair out on Friday afternoon.
Johnson and transport secretary Grant Shapps had spent the previous day announcing almost £100bn of spending to improve rail links across the north of England. It was supposed to be great news for levelling up and for people behind the red wall. But despite the colossal expenditure, the announcement had gone down like a lead balloon, and the north was crying betrayal.
“The great train station robbery,” said Bradford’s Telegraph and Argus front page. “Second class ticket for the north,” declared the Manchester Evening News, while the Doncaster Free Press described the axing of the eastern section of the HS2 high-speed line to Leeds as a “slap in the face”. Many of its readers, it said, had been forced out of their homes to make way for the line’s construction, only to be told, too late, that it would never be built.
Back in Westminster, this PR disaster from a government committed to levelling up was being blamed in part on a Treasury cutting up rough on costs, but mainly on a prime minister who had broken rule number one in the manual of expectation management. His cardinal error was to have overpromised, only to have to scale back after chancellor Rishi Sunak spelled out the brutal post-Covid financial realities.
“It was all the hyperbole, all spoiled by over-egging it early on,” said the Whitehall official. “We should have come off the full-fat version far earlier. What we ended up with is still a good plan. What really angers me, though, is that it really is pretty hard to fuck up £100bn of spending on a great announcement like this, so that people who will get the benefits get annoyed about it. That takes some bloody talent, it really does.”
The damage had been done. Northern Tory MPs who won their seats in 2019 thanks to Johnson’s promises of improved infrastructure were angry, and getting it in the neck from constituents. The red wall was up in arms.
Those MPs had already had to explain a recent manifesto-busting rise in national insurance that will hit their constituents’ pockets next April. Then came the Owen Paterson affair and a torrent of sleaze allegations that had led Labour to label Johnson’s party as corrupt. And then this – the great rail betrayal, as it was being called.
In the parliamentary Conservative party at Westminster, the rail announcement had sharpened feelings between red wallers and southern Tory MPs, many of whom had opposed HS2 on cost grounds. The talk in the Commons bars was more and more of Tory factions, divides, and tensions in the tribe. “I have seen it and felt it. The red wall MPs are not just angry with Boris – they’re angry with the rest of us,” said one veteran southern Tory.
A young southern Conservative MP from the 2019 intake tried at first to downplay the seriousness of it all, saying things were not yet at crisis point for the party or for Johnson. But he was clear that relations between backbenchers on the one hand, and No 10 and the whips on the other, were strained in a way he had never known.
“Many of us used to think Boris was a guy who just won everything with the exception of Chesham and Amersham [the byelection won by the Lib Dems last year]. There was tremendous faith in the idea that while he might do a few things that cause difficulties for us, overall he was an election-winning machine. It was a case of ‘in Boris we trust’. Now we think, hang on, was it Boris who has done this thing that has caused us so much shit?”
All last week, Johnson was struggling in a way that has given Labour new hope. As with the Paterson saga – during which he tried to please a few old Brexiter friends of Paterson like Iain Duncan Smith and John Redwood only for his endeavours to backfire – the northern rail plans had ended up pleasing almost no one. The Tory party appeared more fractured and fractious than at any time since Johnson became leader.
Last week, an announcement on social care further infuriated Tory MPs from less well-off areas, as it meant poorer pensioners paying the same as wealthier people. The idea that a government led by Johnson would be progressive had fallen victim again to lack of money and the Treasury’s wariness of further tax rises. Senior backbenchers such as Damian Green and former health secretary Jeremy Hunt criticised the plan as unprogressive. A Commons rebellion is brewing ahead of a vote on the issue early this week.
Many of the Tory party’s recent problems can be put down to poor judgments and poor presentation. But as Johnson struggles to keep a grip, it is also becoming clearer that a core problem is that of how to govern for a new, post-2019 coalition of Tory voters that is so wide and disparate, and includes Tory conquests behind the red wall.
As one former minister put it: “What we are seeing is that the very nature of the coalition of voters we put together in 2019 to win an 80-strong majority may be what causes us the greatest problem. Our apparent strength could turn out to be our biggest weakness.”
New analysis by Robert Ford, published today in the Observer, divides Conservative seats into groups, and notes both how different they are socially and economically, and how difficult it will be for the prime minister to please any one batch without seriously alienating others. Ford’s message is that because the Tory seats are so varied, as recent events are beginning to show, Johnson’s majority may not be as impregnable as it once seemed.
Ford, who is professor of politics at the University of Manchester, says there are around 70 “red wall” seats, which he defines as “newly competitive seats with Labour as the local opponent in leave-voting areas” in England and Wales. Then there are at least 50 “traditional swing seats”, which he categorises as “market towns and swingy suburbs whose mixed demographics reflect the nation and where party control has shifted over many cycles”.
Next are seats affected by post-Brexit realignments. These include around two dozen Tory-held seats in remain areas where the threat is from Labour and another 30 where the danger to the Conservatives is posed by the Liberal Democrats. His analysis identifies two broad new groups that the Tories will have to defend at the next election: the “red wall” and the “remain wall” seats.
All this poses serious challenges for Johnson. “Seat losses in the traditional swing areas are a certainty if the government’s popularity falls,” writes Ford. “But if these are combined with substantial losses on either of the new fronts, the Tory majority is immediately at risk.
“The government therefore cannot afford to alienate either the ‘red wall’ or the ‘remain wall’. But these seats are poles apart. The red wall seats cluster in the Midlands and north; the remain wall in the south. Red wall seats are working-class and graduate-light. Remain wall seats are middle-class and graduate-heavy. Red wall seats have low house prices and more council housing; remain wall seats have sky-high house prices and high rates of home ownership. This divide in outlook and priorities stretches beyond the electoral battleground: many of the 200 or so (currently) safe Tory seats resemble one of the new battlegrounds, and their MPs will often align with less secure colleagues.”
Ford adds: “The two new fronts … are different worlds, at odds over the government’s domestic policy agenda. Ambitious ‘levelling-up’ investment is what red wall voters want to see; remain wall voters fear higher tax bills will follow.”
Last week, the strains of recent political setbacks appeared to be taking their toll on Johnson’s authority and his confidence. Nowhere was the prime minister’s reduced hold over his MPs more evident than at prime minister’s questions on Wednesday, when the Tory benches were conspicuously empty.
Later that day, at a meeting of the backbench 1922 committee, Johnson was hoarse with a cold as he apologised for the Paterson affair. One senior MP who was there said that after the mea culpa he tried to revert to type but couldn’t pull it off. “He was not on form, and the audience was not up for being boostered. He started by apologising and said he had crashed the car over the Paterson business. But then he tried to go on to the usual stuff, saying, ‘But let’s remember we got Brexit done!’ … You could hear people thinking ‘oh come on, Boris’. It was not time for that kind of speech.”
There is as yet no serious talk of a leadership challenge. As one young backbencher put it: “No one is saying, ‘It would all be great if only we had Rishi or if only we had Liz [Truss]’. He is not in that kind of trouble.”
But there are seeds of serious discontent. Many younger MPs are angry at the way they have been disregarded since entering parliament. One from the 2019 intake said: “What unites us is that neither the whips nor No 10 is in tune with the parliamentary party. They don’t seem to listen to us or see things coming. They don’t seem to listen when we warn because a lot of us had conversations with them saying it was appalling to even think about getting Paterson off.
“They are only worried about what Iain Duncan Smith and David Davis think. With the Paterson thing, they were reading those two as a guide, while there were 300 of us saying, ‘What are we doing? This is madness’.”
Some of Johnson’s old party enemies also appear to sense a new weakness. Yesterday, George Osborne accused the prime minister of timidity over the axing of the eastern leg of HS2. “It’s not often you can say this about Boris Johnson but he lacks ambition,” Osborne told the Financial Times. “Levelling up, at the moment, feels more like a slogan than a plan. You can talk about big infrastructure but unless you actually deliver it, it’s going to sound a bit hollow.”
Increasingly over recent days there have been signs that Johnson will back away from triggering Article 16 of the Northern Ireland protocol and avoid a potential trade war with the EU and all the damaging economic consequences that could have in the run-up to Christmas and beyond.
Some Tories have also seen the decision by former Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre to withdraw from the contest to be chair of broadcasting regulator Ofcom as a sign that No 10 is no longer quite as confident and is curbing its appetite for conflict.
A former cabinet minister said: “I think the period of Boris thinking he can do as he pleases when he pleases may be over. Something has changed in his demeanour in recent days, which suggests he knows he is not as invincible as he thought he was only a few weeks ago.”
