Ousting Boris was a huge mistake

Everything has gone wrong for the Tories since they toppled Boris Johnson. When ministers mutinied en masse in July 2022, Labour’s lead was hovering at around seven per cent, not a bad position for a governing party two years into a parliament. Now that lead is 20 per cent and growing.

Johnson was a matchless communicator, combining verbal aeronautics with extraordinary message discipline. His unrehearsed, scatty style meant that few were conscious of it at the time, but almost all his interviews dropped in the facts that he aimed to broadcast: 50,000 more nurses, 20,000 more police and so on.

Through sheer force of personality, he brought together the 2019 electoral coalition of southern Tories and northern ex-Labour Eurosceptics. It is far from certain that even he could have pulled off the trick a second time, absent the unique conditions of Corbyn and Brexit. What is certain is that no one else could.

Labour knew it. They had watched the blond beast take his party in less than seven months from 8.8 per cent at the 2019 European election to 42.4 per cent at the general election.

So they aimed their attacks almost exclusively at him personally, punching at the bruise of partygate and scarcely bothering to criticise Tory policy. Incredibly, their tactic worked.

A number of Conservative MPs, panicked by poll figures they would now give their eye teeth for, and intimidated by email campaigns, concluded that their leader was weighing them down. To Labour’s delight, they sacked their most effective salesman and, in doing so, sundered his coalition.

The Conservatives have lost more than half of their 2019 voters, and are now behind Reform among people who identify as workingclass. A YouGov survey published on Friday had them on 21 per cent with Reform on 16.

A Techne UK poll on the same day was mildly less dire, with the Tories on 23 per cent and Reform on 12, but it calculated that these numbers would translate into fewer than 100 Conservatives in the House of Commons. Such polls are

"These are harder to excuse, since vindictiveness, quite apart from being ugly and debilitating, is pointless. Also hard to excuse are those who jumped on the bandwagon, spotting an opportunity for themselves. But the single largest group were those who blockheadedly thought that

switching horses mid-race would increase their popularity."

the product of many factors, some of which are wholly beyond the Tories’ influence.

A consequence of being in office for 14 years is that voters blame you for every inconvenience and irritation, whether the energy spike caused by the Ukraine war or the wokeness of government agencies that are outside ministerial control.

Sometimes, human nature being what it is, you even get blamed for what the opposition is doing. There is justified anger about the scarcity of housing, but an attempt to scrap a pointless EU rule that was holding up the construction of 100,000 homes was blocked by Labour in the House of Lords.

There is anger, too, at the government’s failure to get on top of illegal immigration, but every attempt to do so has been held up by Labour and LibDem peers. Such setbacks are inescapable in politics. They help explain why no party has won a fifth consecutive election since the Duke of Wellington was prime minister.

The putsch against Boris, by contrast, was an unforced error. Not all the putschists had dishonourable motives. Some MPs always regarded my former Telegraph colleague as unfit for office. Although I disagreed with them, I didn’t for a moment question their sincerity.

Others fell out with him on policy grounds, most significantly, the National Insurance rise. Again, I can’t fault their motives, though I think they blundered. Still others never forgave him for Brexit.

These are harder to excuse, since vindictiveness, quite apart from being ugly and debilitating, is pointless. Also hard to excuse are those who jumped on the bandwagon, spotting an opportunity for themselves.

But the single largest group were those who blockheadedly thought that switching horses midrace would increase their popularity.

Does this really need spelling out? When a party sacks a sitting PM, voters feel taken-for-granted. MPs might think that Boodle is so obviously superior to Coodle that their constituents will thank them for making the change. But voters are likelier to see a Westminster cabal presenting them with someone they never asked for.

Which, of course, brings us to the putsch three months later, the October Revolution against Liz Truss. Again, the putschists had a variety of motives, some honourable and some less so.