Boris Johnson versus Jeremy Corbyn for Number 10: the battle of the unfittest
For all the many differences that will be on display in the mouth-to-mouth TV combat and other election events of the next few weeks, Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn have at least one thing in common – a lot of people think each is unfit to be prime minister and many of those believing this belong to their own tribe.
This is not usual. It is to be expected that each will accuse the other of not being suitable candidates for the most powerful office in the land. It is natural that Jo Swinson, wishing a plague on both their houses, should say that they are so equally awful that she won’t choose between them and neither should you.
What makes this election highly peculiar is that the two largest parties are fielding candidates for Number 10 who have characters, attitudes, policies and inner circles that are deeply alarming not just to very many voters, but to very many people on their own sides.
A few Tories will say openly that Mr Johnson is not a fit person to be prime minister. One of that select band is Dominic Grieve, the former attorney general, chair of the intelligence and security committee and Conservative MP for Beaconsfield for more than two decades. He will fight the seat as an independent, but he is a Tory to the marrow of his bones and declares Boris Johnson unfit to be Britain’s leader on several grounds, one being that he threatens to do “things to our country which will be uniquely damaging” and another being “the use of Number 10 as a propaganda machine spewing out lies”. That’s strong stuff and the more pungent for our knowledge that Mr Grieve is saying out loud what a significant minority of his former colleagues are furtively thinking even as they urge a vote for the party.
There are also a few Labour people who will say candidly that Mr Corbyn and his entourage of hard leftists should never be allowed over the threshold of Number 10. Ian Austin and John Woodcock, two men who have spent nearly all of their adult lives working for the Labour party, call Mr Corbyn “completely unfit to be prime minister”. Mr Austin says the party has become “poisoned by extremism and racism”. Mr Woodcock says the Labour leader is so dangerous that he has to be prevented from “getting his hands on the levers of national security and defence”.
Their interventions would not have carried so much force if they could be simply dismissed as two angry exLabour MPs who speak only for themselves. Their condemnation comes with added heft because we know that many of their former colleagues agree with these starkly damning assessments of the Labour leader.
Others tell us what they think of the candidates for the premiership by choosing to walk away. The announcement of the election was accompanied by a substantial exodus of more moderate Conservatives, including several former cabinet ministers and one serving one, Nicky Morgan. These refuseniks even include another Johnson. Jo was swollen with such filial pride and confidence that he spent less than six weeks attending his brother’s cabinet before terminating his own promising career by resigning as a minister and declaring that he was standing down from parliament.
A stream of Labour moderates have defected to other parties or are retreating from the fray to do something less spiritually desiccating with their lives than advocate a vote for a man they don’t believe in. The most remarkable of the walkaways is Tom Watson. He chose the first evening of the campaign to announce that he was quitting both the deputy leadership and parliament. His resignation will go down as one of the most bizarre in history. Explaining
his decision with some stuff about wanting to do other things, he said that he was training to be a Level 2 fitness instructor. That’s a first. No one has previously quit a frontline political role on the grounds that he wanted to spend more time with his spinning class. Though he said nothing critical about the Labour leader in his odd resignation statement, anyone who has spent any time with Mr Watson knows that he believes Mr Corbyn should not be prime minister. Perhaps he really does fancy an alternative career as a gym trimmer. Perhaps he could no longer bear the cognitive dislocation of having to campaign to put into Number 10 a man he doesn’t think should ever sit there.
His departure has distressed and angered many of the Labour moderates, especially those he persuaded to stay within the party only now to abandon them. There is at least a degree of integrity in refusing to carry on with a dishonest game with the electorate. Those who have quit the field, on both the Labour and Tory sides, will no longer have to lie to the voters when asked what they really think of their leaders. That will not be the case for those Johnson-distrusting Tories who plan to spend the next few weeks gritting their teeth until their molars ache as they recommend that he be returned to Number 10. Nor for the Corbyn-repulsed Labour candidates who will promote him for the premiership while fervently crossing their fingers that it will somehow not happen even if enough voters take their advice to grant Labour a majority.
In Mr Johnson, we have a man whom his Tory predecessor as prime minister regards as “morally unfit” to occupy Number 10. Anthony Seldon says this in his absorbing new book about Theresa May’s premiership and I believe it to be true because I’ve previously heard the same from my sources. Tory leaders have often had their differences with their successors, but as much as Ted Heath loathed Margaret Thatcher, I don’t recall him ever suggesting that she was too depraved to hold the office of prime minister.
Mrs May is running for parliament again in Maidenhead. So she will spend the time between now and election day advocating a Tory vote to sustain in Number 10 a man she thinks “morally unfit” to occupy the address. She will not be the only Tory doing this. I suppose she and other Conservative candidates in a similar position are saying to themselves that they are compelled to do this because the alternative is even more ghastly.
The levels of dissimulation are even more elevated on the Labour side where many, quite possibly a majority, of the party’s candidates in winnable seats do not regard Mr Corbyn and his cabal as people who ought to be allowed near the machinery of power. Three years ago, Labour MPs held a confidence vote in which just 40 of them declared him fit to be their leader against 172 who argued for his removal. None of the reasons that the 172 cited then have changed in the time since and some of the objections to the Labour leader have become more compelling. That confidence vote happened before it was fully apparent how toxically antisemitism in the party has spread on his watch. I have a huge collection of quotes from Labour MPs about why their leader would be a calamitous prime minister and a government led by him would have frightening consequences for security and the economy. The very same people are now pinning on their red rosettes and urging a vote to put Mr Corbyn into Number 10 even while believing he is utterly unsuitable for the office.
I guess they will rationalise this behaviour by telling themselves that trying to stop Brexit trumps every other consideration or that the Tories are even more hateful or that Labour can’t win anyway, so what’s the harm? A lot of them deployed that latter excuse during the 2017 campaign. Confronted on the doorstep by the Corbyn-wary or the Corbyn-averse, many of Labour’s candidates told these voters that it was safe to pick Labour because the party couldn’t possibly win and once it had been defeated they’d get rid of him. Labour didn’t win, but they then didn’t get rid of him. This time around, it won’t be possible for Labour candidates to offer honest guarantees that a Labour vote won’t put Mr Corbyn into Number 10, because it possibly might.
For the voter, and there are many of them, who regards both men as terrible candidates for the premiership this election is a struggle of the unfittest. It poses the nation with a hideous choice. Our electoral system doesn’t offer the opportunity to cross a box marked Labour (but not Corbyn) or Conservative (but not Johnson).
The best hope for all who shudder at the thought of either man at Number 10 is another hung parliament. That will at least place some constraints on the havoc that either can inflict.
• Andrew Rawnsley is Chief Political Commentator of the Observer
In Mr Johnson, we have a man whom his Tory predecessor as prime minister regards as “morally unfit” to occupy Number 10