Is Boris Johnson's Party Almost Over?
Is Boris Johnson's Party Almost Over?
The Downing Street parties have removed Boris Johnson's teflon coating. What will stick now?
This edition of the Hat Tip looks at Boris Johnson’s troubles.
A Charmed Life
I’ve never been a fan of Boris Johnson.
Well, that’s not really true. I quite enjoyed him as the guest host of comedy quiz Have I Got News For You, where he was good for a laugh. But I’ve never rated his qualities as a leader.
Johnson has led a charmed political life, in the old-fashioned sense: it seems like he’s been under some sort of magical protection, exempt from the normal rules of politics and consequences.
For example, in 1990, Johnson gave criminal Darius Guppy the private details of a fellow journalist, Stuart Collier, who Guppy was planning to have beaten to scare him off a story.
Guppy: I am telling you something, Boris. This guy has got my blood up, alright? And there is nothing which I won’t do to get my revenge. It’s as simple as that.
Johnson: How badly are you going to hurt this guy?
Guppy: Not badly at all.
Johnson: I really, I want to know …
Guppy: Look, let me explain to you…
Johnson: If this guy sues me I will be fucking furious.
Guppy: I guarantee you he will not be seriously hurt.
Johnson: How badly will he …
Guppy: He will not have a broken limb or broken arm, he will not be put into intensive care or anything like that. He will probably get a couple of black eyes and a… a cracked rib or something.
Johnson: Cracked rib?
Guppy: Nothing which you didn’t suffer at rugby, OK? But he’ll get scared and that’s what I want … I want him to get scared, I want him to have no idea who’s behind it, OK?
Johnson: If I get trouble, if I get…
Guppy: You will not, Boris. I swear to you. If you…
Johnson: I got this bloody number for you. OK, Darrie. I said I’d do it. I’ll do it. Don’t worry.
Despite an actual audio recording of this conversation being published, Boris survived. He survived two divorces, and multiple affairs that resulted in an unknown number of children (probably at least eight, but he refuses to confirm a total).
When the leading Conservative candidate for Mayor of London, Nick Boles, was diagnosed with cancer and withdrew, Johnson’s name was suggested as an alternative, but he didn’t confirm he was running until just a few hours before the deadline. His two terms as mayor gave him an international platform.
He also kept quiet about the biggest issue of the day, the upcoming referendum on the UK leaving the European Union, eventually revealing his position in a paid column in the Telegraph newspaper. Reportedly, he wrote two articles — one in favour of leaving the EU, and one against — and only decided which to use at the last minute. But that was all it took for him to become one of the leaders of the Vote Leave campaign.
Sure, there were occasional upsets, like his shock withdrawal from the Conservative leadership election in 2016, but his charmed life continued. Theresa May made him Foreign Secretary, a position he had no right to expect or receive under her leadership. Later, he resigned from that job in order to challenge her Brexit deal, eventually replacing her as prime minister, negotiating a worse deal and quickly heading to an election in which he won a huge majority.
And then the Covid-19 pandemic hit, causing a crisis that also obscured any economic fallout from Brexit as well as killing more than 153,000 Britons. Despite some pretty bad mistakes, like delaying a Spring 2020 lockdown (on scientific advice) and delaying winter 2020 restrictions (against the scientists’ recommendations). But the Johnson government remained overall popular.
The last few weeks have changed all that. Labour is ahead in the polls and support for Boris Johnson’s Conservative party is plunging.
Parties
When the UK did eventually go into a lockdown in spring 2020, it was extremely strict. Mixing between households was banned for months, even outdoors. But there was at least a sense that everyone was in it together.
The various revelations about different work parties and drinks gatherings held in Downing Street over the last two years, emerging steadily over the last few weeks, have left the public feeling betrayed.
Heartbreaking stories of parents who were banned from seeing dying children in their last days, people fined thousands of pounds for talking to a friend in a park, people who missed out on life milestones — the anger that the people running the country were able to drink wine and congregate in the garden of Ten Downing Street during the strictest lockdowns.
Downing Street isn’t like the White House. Most of the staff in Number Ten aren’t political appointees; they’re independent civil servants, working for whatever government is in power. The people relaxing after work had been trying to manage the whole country through a once-in-a-generation pandemic. I have some sympathy for them. But the contrast with how the rest of the country struggled is stark.
Boris Johnson wasn’t at all of these parties, though he attended at least one (he claims he “didn’t know it was a party"), but they happened under his leadership in his office/residence. He repeatedly denied ever attending a party, announced investigations, denied some more and eventually apologised when photographs of the evening reception were leaked. But even this has led to absurdities, like Johnson unable to answer basic questions about what he said and did, saying instead that the inquiry will determine it.
Things have gotten so bad so fast that parts of the Conservative Party are considering ousting Johnson altogether, replacing him with a fresh, more popular leader.
No Johnsonites
Thatcher had the Thatcherites, Blair the Blairites, Brown the Brownites and Cameron the Cameroonies; hardcore ideological allies who are loyal to their leader and support their political project.
There aren’t really any Johnsonites. Not in the same way.
I used to go to the annual political party conferences in the late 2000s. At the Tory Party conference, the biggest single event by far was Boris Johnson’s speech. Bigger than leader David Cameron, there’d be queues round the block to get into the auditorium as Johnson delivered a vaguely political 45-minute stand-up comedy routine. Some Latin, a digression into the history of table tennis, and one or two sexual innuendos were enough to bring the house down. Boris was a superstar. The party base loved him.
That popularity didn’t extend to his colleagues. In City Hall, Johnson ended up recruiting a cadre partly of hard-working technocrats and partly from former members of the Revolutionary Communist Party, which had rebranded itself as the contrarianist Right-Libertarian Spiked Magazine. When he entered Downing Street, he borrowed the leadership of Vote Leave, the Brexit campaign group, to run his operation.
Everyone had their own idea of what Boris Johnson stood for. The hardcore Brexiters supported him as leader because they thought he was their best hope at securing the most dramatic breaks possible with the European Union. The moderate Brexiters backed him because they believed the opposite: that Johnson would secure a more palatable compromise than other potential leaders. Traditionalists saw a traditionalist. Reformers saw a reformer. And they all saw a figure who could be moulded, could be convinced and could gain masses of seats at a general election
In 2019, he proved that last point true, turning a minority government into a solid 80-seat majority and winning a lot of traditional Labour seats in northern England. The election, which he fought on Brexit and opposition to Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, should have left him in an unassailable position, with the first durable Conservative majority since Thatcher’s 1987 re-election. As recently as this September, headlines promised “another decade in power”.
But now he’s become a political liability, his allies have mostly vanished. His support was very broad but never deep. The different factions see a future in which another leader will be better at getting them what they want.
To an extent, the same was true of his predecessor, Theresa May. She was also massively popular, ahead in the polls, supported by a coalition of internal party interests who each thought she was the lesser evil. When she crashed and burned during the 2017 election campaign, her popularity evaporated and her allies with it.
The Dam Bursts
The party stories have broken the Boris spell. Suddenly, things that would have been minor inconveniences just a few weeks ago are becoming full crises. Here are a few from just the last month or so:
The recent resignation of key Brexit advisor Lord Frost. Frost cited a laundry list of grievances with the government: Covid restrictions, economic policy etc, but it was widely understood that he quit because he wasn’t allowed to pursue his strategy of threatening the European Union.
The saga of who paid to refurbish Boris Johnson’s flat ended in a report that didn’t exactly clear or condemn him, but there has since been new evidence that undermines his story.
Accusations that Conservative whips threatened to cut public funding to projects in MPs’ constituencies unless they voted the right way.
A claim by former minister Nusrat Ghani that she was told her sacking from the government was partly because her Muslim religion made other ministers uncomfortable
A defection by Bury South MP Christian Wakeford from the Conservative Party to Labour, the first defection from one major party to another since 2007.
Any day now, the internal investigation into the Downing Street parties could put Johnson in a position where more of his own side will be demanding his resignation.
Will Boris survive?
In times of crisis, parties retreat to their comfort zones. For Labour, this is usually the National Health Service. For today’s Tories, it’s become the culture war. Immigration, loony judges, Europe, human rights legislation, trans issues, ‘anti-wokeness’, defending old statues and the other firm favorites of the global Right. Already the government is making noises that it’s going to push these issues which they see as wedge issues, dividing public opinion in their favour.
The Conservative Party isn’t the Republican Party. The median Tory MP believes in climate change and supports Covid vaccinations, two of the biggest touchstone issues of conservative populism, There will always be room for a Nigel Farage-type party to their right, sucking up populist votes while becoming culture warriors alienates middle-class suburban voters.
And, from the Tories’ point of view, there’s no great rush. The upcoming May 2022 elections are for local roles only. Their parliamentary majority isn’t going anywhere. Waiting until 2023 to reassess the leadership question is a perfectly viable strategy for the Tories. The pandemic will probably be largely over, and the oncoming economic tsunami will probably have hit and maybe be receding.
The party’s had a lot of success replacing an old leader with a fresh face and then claiming they’re a brand new government, from Cameron to May to Johnson. No reason the trick can’t work again.
But if Boris Johnson’s Teflon coating has finally chipped off, then more and more scandal, mismanagement and internal party discontent is going to start to stick to him. The two leading contenders to replace him, Chancellor Rishi Sunak and Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, risk being tainted themselves the longer they stay as senior members of his team. A vacancy now would suit them just fine.
The next week or two, when Sue Gray’s report into the parties is published, will be the time of maximum danger for Johnson.
He really might be forced out, whether via a confidence vote of his own MPs or a resignation under pressure. Or he might dig in, win a confidence challenge and pivot to a messy culture war.
Either way, British politics is interesting again.