Conservative backbenchers are out of touch with the public — and fully removed from reality
The Conservative government won the Commons vote; but it was so badly wounded by the revolt that it could not continue without change at the top. Boris Johnson will be aware that this is precisely the situation in which his hero, Winston Churchill, waded to power in May 1940. Neville Chamberlain’s government had managed to win a crucial vote on the conduct of the war, but Tory rebellions and abstentions meant a new leader became inevitable. Johnson always craves comparison to Churchill, but the shoes in which he finds himself today are snugly those of Chamberlain.
Britain is not at war in 2021, but it faces a continuing emergency because of Covid. Further restrictions against the Omicron variant may be needed soon as cases continue to multiply, and Johnson has now promised another vote if they are. After Tuesday, when 100 Tories rebelled and at least 16 deliberately abstained, Johnson cannot now win another victory like this week’s without triggering far more acrimony and humiliation for himself and his party. That possibility really could be terminal, especially if the Tories lose the Shropshire North byelection.
Tuesday’s revolt was not just a protest by the usual backbench suspects. It was an explosive fusion of several different forms of Conservative opposition against their leader at a particularly volatile time. The list of rebels was a rainbow coalition of Tories: it contained some new MPs and a lot of veterans, some remainers as well as many leavers, several centrists alongside a larger number on the party right. Very little else unites a Tory MP like Damian Green with one like Esther McVey, or Chris Chope with Tracey Crouch. But out-and-out exasperation with Johnson and his recent record certainly does. As one rebel MP, Charles Walker, put it, the vote was a “cry of pain”.
The Tory crisis is partly the consequence of Johnson’s off-the-cuff way of governing. In the turbulent and messy wake of Owen Paterson, the Peppa Pig speech, the lockdown Christmas parties and an opinion poll slide, Johnson went on TV on Sunday to announce ambitious vaccine targets and controls. There was no detail about how they were to be delivered, and parliament and the press were bypassed, presidential-style, not for the first time in Johnson’s career. Many on the backbenches and in government were furious.
Another part of the seriousness comes from this week’s spectacular reminder that the Conservative party is now practically ungovernable – something of which Johnson himself is both a symptom and cause. Backbench revolts have become more embedded in the culture, embodied by the regular presence, including again this week, of the 1922 Committee chairman Graham Brady among the rebels. Some of Tuesday’s rebels, such as Iain Duncan Smith and Edward Leigh, are serial offenders from the John Major era. Others acquired the habit under the coalition with the Liberal Democrats; Philip Hollobone (a teller on Tuesday) was the most rebellious MP of the 2010 parliament, and even voted against his own government’s Queen’s speech in 2013. Another MP of the same vintage, Steve Baker, is the most focused of the Tory backbench organisers. The 2019 intake, supposedly Johnson backers when they were elected, is itself now well represented in the rebel ranks by MPs such as Lee Anderson and Dehenna Davison.
Yet this week’s revolt also highlights the growing importance of rightwing libertarianism in the modern Tory party. In some ways the driving force of this week’s revolt, this libertarianism represents a striking break with the party’s origins and past. Historically, the Tory party stood for order and authority, rather than the sovereign individual beloved by today’s libertarians. Even Margaret Thatcher, who is often still seen as the modern Tory party’s guiding light because of her economic individualism, argued that the party stood for what she called “ordered liberty”. Unlike today’s libertarians, Thatcher was never afraid to tell people how they should live their lives.
In today’s libertarianism, Thatcher’s economic individualism has spilled over into every other form of life. In this view of the world, every power given to every public official is a step towards tyranny, all departments of the state are malign empire builders whose existence threatens fundamental liberty, and all the checks and balances of liberal democracy, such as parliament and the law, are attempts to disarm the sovereign individual. It is a view that is both paranoid, massively overstating the threat from government action while largely ignoring the benefits, and politically self-destructive, since it is almost wholly at odds with the more balanced and pragmatic way that the public sees the same issues.
Nevertheless, this new ideological variant is proving highly transmissible on the backbenches. It is extremely infectious, and there have been several recent disturbing outbreaks. Graham Brady himself has described the UK government’s earlier lockdown measures as going “full eastern bloc”, and warned against being “pinged into the gulag”. Backbench rebel Marcus Fysh told a BBC interviewer that he opposes the requirement to wear a mask and show a Covid pass because “this is not Nazi Germany” and Britain is not “a ‘papers, please’ society”. And another rebel, Desmond Swayne, said the government’s proposals were the work of an Orwellian Ministry of Fear and claimed that the Health Protection Agency was the creation of “Stalinist minds”.
Where does this all come from? Paranoia over Covid regulations should perhaps be seen as first cousin to the intemperate exaggerations about British victimhood – made in some cases by the same people – that were part of the Brexit arguments. Leavers claimed that membership of the European Union destroyed all national sovereignty, and reduced a free people to vassal status from which Brexit would liberate and then empower us. The reality has been more modest. Today’s claim that to show evidence of a negative lateral flow test somehow makes Britain a police state is equally removed from reality.
The big difference between the politics of the two issues is in the mood of the public. The leavers won the referendum in 2016 and won the general election in 2019 on the back of it. In 2021, however, the public is consistently supportive of the more cautious approach to the pandemic that the rebels dislike. The more the rebels succeed in capturing the Tory party, therefore, the more dangerous the situation becomes for both Johnson and the party. If the rebels manage to block Johnson from taking future measures that have public support, or if they oust him in favour of someone who will toe their line on Covid regulations, the public may take its votes elsewhere.