The Tories would be mugwumps if they elected Boris leader
BEWARE the pose you strike as a student, because you may become a caricature of it in later life. I confess that, unlike many of my middle-aged peers with whom I share thinning hairlines and thickening waists, I don’t remember many gigs, guitar riffs or spliffs of my youth – mainly because I didn’t share any.
I do remember football results, team line-ups and the odd church sermon.
This one was delivered by Father Jeffrey John in Magdalen College Chapel 30 years ago.
He argued to the assembled students that the hard drinker among us would often return to a college reunion 30 years later an alcoholic. The ladies’ man a sleazy womanising divorcee. The Rightwing poseur an unpleasant bigot. Beware the pose you strike.
Although he was at Oxford at the time, I don’t remember Boris Johnson occupying any part of a pew on that Sunday morning and if he did there is little evidence he was listening.
Our Foreign Secretary has become a caricature of himself.
As a young man he honed his act as a bumbling fool. As outrageous as he was charismatic, he said things that others wouldn’t, usually to guffaws of laughter.
Underneath the carefully arranged chaotic thatch there had to be a brain as brilliant as his personality was barnstorming.
THIRTY years on the act has not changed much, but with little evidence of intellectual brilliance there is the whiff of a tired bitterness. And yet this man would be our Prime Minister. He believes he can be the saviour of the Tory Party. He thinks he can win ‘the game’.
Beyond the bluster, there are few achievements in his half-century on the planet that suggest he is remotely capable of such a job or that he even understands what it entails.
This is, after all, a man who was outsmarted by Michael Gove in his last attempt at leadership. Regarded as a joke abroad – a problem for our most senior diplomat – his history at home is a little sinister.
Sacked from a newspaper for making up quotes, sacked from the Tory front bench by Michael Howard for lying about an affair and complicit in a conspiracy to have a journalist assaulted on behalf of a convicted criminal, to some he is ‘a nasty piece of work’.
Yet he still queues to succeed our embalmed Prime Minister Theresa May.
In a sense Mr Johnson and the other pretenders to the throne such as Jacob Rees-Mogg and David Davis are the Corbynistas of the Tory Party, throwbacks to an age that didn’t actually ever exist.
Leaning on the Government despatch box in the House of Commons like it was the counter top of his local pub, dispensing insults at the expense of ‘Johnny Foreigner’, Mr Johnson tries to give the impression that he harks back to the ‘good old days’ when the country sought to be led by privileged Etonians.
Those days never happened, as the Tory Party’s own history tells us. Ted Heath was a grammar school boy who was known as ‘the Grocer’.
Margaret Thatcher was, and revelled in being, a grocer’s daughter. John Major was the son of a trapeze artist from Brixton.
The Tory party succeeds when its leader can convince enough of the country that they are grounded in the experiences of the common man.
It was even true of Harold Macmillan. At his country estate in Sussex his son once asked him why, since he was Prime Minister, couldn’t he have flights to the nearby Gatwick Airport redirected so the sound of them didn’t disturb their Sunday afternoons.
Macmillan said he liked the noise because it was the sound of working-class families going on foreign holidays they couldn’t afford if he wasn’t Prime Minister.
Boris has nothing in common with those Tory leaders of the past let alone the voters of today. He should remember that his old school chum, David Cameron, didn’t fail because he wasn’t ‘Etonian enough’ but because he misread the public mood.
YET as the realities of Brexit begin to dawn, Mr Johnson and his colleagues seem to want to warm themselves in a nostalgia that is more of a hallucination. Liam Fox’s vision of the trading relationships of a post-Brexit Britain owe less to Adam Smith and Milton Friedman and more to Gilbert and Sullivan.
The truth is that all contenders to succeed Theresa May know the chalice is poisoned and that they poisoned it themselves.
David Davis must be aware that whoever negotiates the Brexit deal is politically finished, as there is no deal that can unite his party.
Even if there are benefits from leaving the European Union they will only be long-term and the next Tory leader will go into an election after a fractious and divisive negotiation and with the economy feeling the immediate aftershocks of exit.
The Tory Party’s only chance is to ditch the false nostalgia and skip to the next generation who are more connected to real life.
Those like Johnson, Gove and Fox, who use love of their country to give them depth have a shallowness that doesn’t meet the national purpose.
If they make Boris Prime Minister, the Tories will truly be mugwumps.