Boris once told me there’s a part of every MP’s brain always thinking about how to be PM. Today’s Tories need to get that bit lobotomised!
WHEN we were in No10 together, my old boss Boris Johnson was typically very forgiving of disloyalty among his ministers. Every morning we would go through the newspapers together and I would highlight that day’s anonymous briefings, unhelpful leaks and noises off from disgruntled ministers. Barely a day passed when I didn’t have something to point to. To my mind, as his close ally, this group of ministers were undermining the Government and his premiership and failing to display the loyalty and discipline we needed to succeed.
They were putting themselves first, second and third – and the rest of the Government far down their list of priorities. If it even was a priority for them.
That great political tactician Lyndon Baines Johnson once said of FBI boss J Edgar Hoover that he’d rather have him inside the tent ‘ p****** out’ than outside p****** in. For long periods of time when we were in Downing Street, it felt like we had a great many ministers inside the tent just p****** everywhere.
But although Boris was occasionally annoyed by these noises off, he was mostly sanguine. He seemed to regard them as simply part of the great game of politics, and think that there was little, if anything, that could be done about them.
‘There’s a part of every politician’s brain,’ he once said to me, ‘that is always thinking about how to become Prime Minister.’ He seemed to see their ambition, their desire for prominence and general peacocking as an immutable law of political nature.
(Thinking back, his comment may also have been a tacit acknowledgment that he hadn’t always been, to put it mildly, the most loyal of lieutenants to Theresa May as her foreign secretary.)
With the greatest of respect for my old boss, I disagree with his assessment. Loyalty is a matter of choice.
And it is the single biggest factor that will determine the future of the new Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak. As Rishi rightly put it after taking the leadership of the party, the Conservatives need to decide whether to ‘unite or die’. To his enormous credit, Boris has acknowledged that point and done exactly the right thing by putting aside personal ambition and standing aside from the leadership contest.
He did this despite, as the 1922 Committee has confirmed, having the numbers to run for leader and knowing he stood a more-than-decent chance of winning with the membership, legions of whom wish he had never left No10.
He also acknowledged that right now he is not capable of uniting the warring tribes inside the parliamentary party – and he was right. Whether Rishi Sunak can do so will be in many ways the defining test of his premiership. We had our fair share of disagreements with Rishi and his team when we were
in government together – the normal tensions that have always characterised the relationship between No10 and No11.
But I never had any doubt about Rishi’s capability. He was impressively smart, articulate and personable.
If anything, there were days when I’d have taken a less capable, more pliable chancellor. When he and Boris worked together – such as on the furlough scheme – they were unstoppable.
Rishi was principled, always insisting that we needed to worry about borrowing and to manage the public finances responsibly.
No, we shouldn’t borrow to pay for social care, we had to put up National Insurance to pay for it, he insisted. On this Thatcherite principle he has, of course, been proven profoundly right in recent weeks.
As he warned, Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng risked undermining confidence in the economy with their debt-funded spending spree.
Rishi also has a compelling personal story – this son of a GP and pharmacist who came to the UK from East Africa is far from the silver spoon millionaire the Left would like to portray him as.
And like all effective ministers, he has built a highly capable team around him. His chief of staff Liam Booth-Smith and communications chief Nerissa Chesterfield are young but experienced and, critically, united around serving their boss rather than jostling for position with each other. (They have also been brilliant at finding new locations where they can put their boss at the top of a flight of steps, to disguise his shortness).
As he began his reshuffle yesterday, there were clear signs that Rishi acknowledges the need to balance different wings of the party as well as prioritising competence in ministerial posts.
But however adept he is at putting the right pieces in the right places on the board, there will inevitably be a rump of disgruntled former ministers sent to the backbenches – the inevitable consequence of a party that has been in government for more than a decade and cycled through four prime ministers. Indeed, there have never been more of these former ‘ministers-for- something- or- other’ sitting several rows behind the PM at PMQs while grinding their teeth at their unacknowledged brilliance.
At one point under Boris, more than one in four of all Tory backbenchers had previously held a ministerial job – and given the number of reshuffles since, that number is undoubtedly higher today.
WHAT this creates is an inherent volatility in Parliament, which goes some way to explaining why, despite having an 80- odd seat majority when we were in government, it never really felt like it.
These legions of malcontents, if they decide to, can cause merry hell in blocking government Bills.
After all the time lost to Covid, there is a great raft of legislation that needs to get done to fulfil the promises of the 2019 manifesto, the document that Rishi rightly pointed to for his democratic mandate yesterday.
If it isn’t delivered, the party will remain 30-plus points behind in the polls. Take this path, the path of continued internecine warfare, and the consequence is undoubtedly electoral death, and in all likelihood a scale of political reckoning not seen since 1997.
Hobble Rishi and the Tories lose in 2024 – there is no option of another change of leader. So I urge my fellow Followers of Boris to get behind the new PM.
And as for those disaffected former ministers, they need to undergo the voluntary self-lobotomisation of the part of their brains Boris correctly identified, which puts personal ambition before the party, the country and the public.