Humiliated and unable to govern, Boris Johnson is close to the point of no return
The history books will show that Boris Johnson’s government was hit by two shattering humiliations in December 2021, two years after it was elected. The first was the record-setting revolt of 101 Conservative backbenchers against Covid passport regulations. The second, two days later, was the loss of the North Shropshire byelection to the Liberal Democrats.
But, as we approach the start of 2022, the combined consequences of those reverses now matter more than the actual events themselves. That is because, between them, the two defeats have rewritten the script for the remainder of this government’s term.
We saw this in the lasting significance of what Johnson did on Monday. The prime minister emerged from an emergency cabinet meeting on the Omicron surge to announce – nothing. While other governments across Europe scrambled to save their health systems from being overwhelmed, Johnson’s decided it was undecided whether to do anything about it at all. If things changed, however, Johnson insisted: “We won’t hesitate to take that action.”
Monday’s outcome negated that claim. The truth was the exact opposite. This was hesitation incarnate, a decision not to take action of the sort that the emergency cabinet meeting had presumably been called to approve in the first place. It was not the result of a considered consensus. The cabinet, it turns out, was split right down the middle, and still is. The result was that Britain now has a government unable to govern.
This is the umbilical result of the fact that Johnson is now the hostage of his backbenchers and their cabinet allies, who are in turn emboldened by the voters’ damning verdict in Shropshire. So it is also important to see what happened this week as a harbinger of the Johnson government’s new – and potentially terminal – phase, in which it is no longer able to take necessary decisions and is abandoned by the electorate as a result.
All failing governments eventually reach a similar point, after which it turns out to be downhill all the way. The question for British politics today is whether Johnson’s government has now reached that point. The evidence suggests it has done so, in its own distinctive way, and that consequently British voters are now open to something new.
More than 40 years ago, during the 1979 election that brought Margaret Thatcher to power, the Labour prime minister, Jim Callaghan, made a famous observation about this kind of moment. “There are times,” Callaghan told his advisers, “perhaps once every 30 years, when there is a sea change in politics. It then does not matter what you say or what you do. There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves of. I suspect there is now such a sea change – and it is for Mrs Thatcher.”
Callaghan’s view can actually be disputed in some important respects. There was certainly a big sea change in political economy after 1979 that contrasted with the post-1945 world in which Callaghan rose to power. But the
public never embraced Thatcherism to the wholehearted degree that Thatcher’s run of electoral success through the 1980s may have implied.
Where he was right, however, is that the Labour governments of the 1970s had lost the public’s confidence in important ways, and that Thatcher was always likely to win in 1979. And he was right that, once a government reaches such a point, it has relatively little chance of clawing the old advantage back.
There is no iron law about precisely how this works. Circumstances differ widely. Theresa May’s government began to fail near its start, when she threw away her majority in the 2017 election. David Cameron’s government, by contrast, became doomed only at the very end, when Cameron lost the Brexit vote. Had he won, Cameron might still be prime minister.
With other governments, the crossing of the watershed is more gradual. Even John Major’s, which seems doomed in retrospect after Black Wednesday in 1992, might have survived if Labour had not focused so ruthlessly on ending its own run of four election defeats. And it wasn’t quite as obvious at the time as it seems now that Tony Blair’s authority was destroyed by Iraq; he went on to win another election, after all.
Gordon Brown’s trajectory felt more predictable when, shortly after arriving in Downing Street, he flirted humiliatingly with calling an early election. In 2009, I was sitting next to the great lawyer Tom Bingham at a dinner when he turned and said: “I think the country decided two years ago that it will need a new government when the time comes.” On that, as on so much else, he was right.
December 2021 feels like such a moment for Johnson. It is hard to recover from the reputation-shredding stories – with more to come – that produced North Shropshire. A prime minister being mocked by football and darts fans is not a good sign. Bad election results next year will undoubtedly trigger the leadership speculation that is never far below the surface in the party.
Perhaps Bingham’s law applies today too, just as it did after 2007. The country feels as though it it is in the process of deciding that it will need a new government when the time comes. If that is right, then it may not matter too much who leads the Tory party next time. The crucial question will be whether the country has enough confidence in the Labour alternative.
Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist