Tories...you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone!
pUGH, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble, Grubb. Readers of a certain vintage will recognise those names as a roll call of the Trumpton fire brigade. Even half a century later, I’d be prepared to bet that every one of them has higher name recognition among the British public than do most of the politicians at the top of the bookies’ odds to be next Tory leader.
Truss, Tugendhat, Hunt, Wallace, Mordaunt. Several of them would fall victim to the old joke about not even being household names in their own households.The idea that any of them, along with other contenders such as damaged-goods Rishi Sunak or Sajid Javid, has shown an ability to connect with the British public even a tenth as well as Boris Johnson has done is laughable.
This should tell Conservative MPs to think extremely carefully before ditching the charismatic superstar who led them to a landslide election victory less than three years ago and then “Got Brexit Done”.
Era-defining political communicators and campaigners of the calibre of Johnson come along very rarely. Such giant characters can be maddening to work for. If a certain capriciousness starts to characterise their conduct it can lead members of their tribe to think them more trouble than they are worth.
BUT IF they are harried out of office by their own MPs rather than the electorate, as happened to both Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, bad things tend to befall the parliamentary parties they leave behind and a leisurely repentance ensues.
It was 13 years in the wilderness for the Tories once John Major had mislaid half their seats, 12 years and counting for Labour since Gordon Brown lost more than 90 seats at the 2010 election. Thatcher could have been deposed earlier after the polls turned against her during the 1985-86 Westland crisis, when the Government she led stood accused of misleading Parliament. But she toughed it out and won another landslide majority in 1987, making campaign mincemeat of the Labour lightweight Neil Kinnock.
Given what Johnson has been through since becoming PM – the epic battle for Brexit, the Covid pandemic, the current cost-of-living crunch and the long-running Partygate saga – nobody should think a similar recovery beyond him. Even now, the Conservatives are only five or six points behind Labour in the polls and Johnson, in the eye of these various storms, barely trails Keir Starmer at all when voters are asked who would make a better premier.
Those Tory MPs who are actively plotting against him should not only stop to think about the lack of an obvious successor. They should also consider that it would be terrible timing to instal any replacement in Downing Street this year. Even those who are determined that Johnson will not lead them into the 2024 election should surely understand that leaving a new PM to preside over an acute living standards slump will almost certainly cause angry voters to consider that person a dud.
Better by far then to let Johnson soak up the punishment and make a move against him a year down the line, by which time the economic outlook is likely to be improving.
sUCH A pause would also give the PM time to show if he can turn things round. And given the personal nature of the mandate he secured for his party in 2019, that is surely the least he is due. Certainly that is the view most Tory voters in the country have come to, with a recent YouGov poll showing that only a quarter think he should quit.
If he can bring the standard of leadership he has demonstrated over Ukraine to bear on other major issues then his slapdash approach to following his own Covid lockdown rules in 2020 will not be regarded as a killer blow by the vast majority of sensible voters.
Already in recent weeks Johnson has launched encouraging political sorties on protecting women’s rights in the face of the militant trans movement and on combating the Channel migrant racket via the new agreement with Rwanda. He has been hit so hard by unforeseen events that even now he has not had a fair crack at implementing his “levellingup” vision.
In other words, Boris Johnson has it all still to play for. Labour has never been able to defeat him at the ballot box and despite Keir Starmer making some incremental progress over recent months, that is only to be expected of an opposition leader mid-term.
Like their Thatcher-era predecessors, today’s Tory parliamentarians are in severe danger of finding out that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.
‘Campaigners of Boris Johnson’s calibre come along very rarely’