Partygate’s over... Tory MPs must help PM deliver for Britain
THIS weekend was supposed to mark the start of the downfall of Boris Johnson after a popular insurrection against the Conservatives in the local elections, caused by the “Partygate” controversy.
Broadcasters were primed to invite in senior Tory MPs ready to declare that Johnson must stand down after losing the trust of the British people.
Despite all the TV footage of Keir Starmer and Labour celebrating their gains in London, let us be clear: it just didn’t happen. Far from switching to Starmer’s party in droves, more voters in provincial England deserted Labour than rallied to its banner.
While the Conservatives did far from brilliantly, that is only to be expected of a party that has been in government for 12 years, in a mid-term set of local elections held during a living standards crunch.
In most of the places where the Tories suffered their worst setbacks, it was at the hands of the Liberal Democrats, rather than Labour.This in turn is reassuring for the Conservatives as the Lib Dems are a classic midterm protest party with a long history of surging in council contests and parliamentary byelections, only to fall back at general election time.
BELLWETHER councils such as Swindon and Redditch, covering parliamentary constituencies that Labour won under Tony Blair, stayed solidly Conservative.
While metropolitan media commentators yesterday concentrated on Labour’s London wins – as if the capital was at all representative of the wider country – it would take a heart of stone not to laugh at their overall embarrassment.
Seldom have so many TV news bulletins and so many column inches been sacrificed in vain. The campaign to oust Johnson has flopped because the British public clearly has a far more mature sense of proportion than does the political and media class.
What we have seen at these local elections amounts to no more than a case of bog standard, mid-term blues of the kind Margaret Thatcher used to suffer in office before roaring back to chalk up another dominant general election win. This is not to say that Johnson and the Tories are a shoo-in at the next election, just that it is clearly still theirs to win or lose.
Which of those paths they take will depend in large measure on whether Tory MPs realise that rallying behind Johnson and presenting a united front, rather than continuing to snipe and plot against him, is the correct response.
There is no doubt voters are unimpressed with the PM’s breaches of his own lockdown laws, just as they are unimpressed by revelations about holier-than-thou Starmer’s own beer-and-curry gathering in Durham. But the idea that this will be any kind of clincher in a general election not due until 2024 is beyond far-fetched. What does risk decimating the
Tories is a continued focus among their MPs on a Partygate row that has become an obsession for the chattering classes who would never vote for them anyway.
WHAT the wider electorate wishes to see is the Government getting on with delivering on key priorities: help navigating the cost-of-living crisis; visible progress on the “levelling-up” agenda; investment in the NHS leading to improvements in access to GPs and a reduction in waiting lists; a return of order and control to the immigration system.
People have clocked that much of the London establishment has not forgiven the Prime Minister for Brexit. They will also have noted that this week’s World Health Organisation analysis of excess deaths during the pandemic actually shows the UK performed relatively well and was nowhere near bottom of the table, as had been claimed. Perhaps they will even have wondered why, having spent so long stoking hysteria over Britain’s Covid outcomes, the TV news bulletins accorded so little attention to an authoritative report that revealed a very different picture.
As well as getting Brexit done and presiding over a UK vaccine triumph that saved many thousands of lives, Johnson has been ahead of the game on the Ukraine crisis, spotting before other western leaders that getting extra military hardware to the Ukrainians ahead of Putin’s invasion was absolutely crucial.
He now needs to take the bold leadership that led to these successes into his approach in other policy areas currently beset by problems. Whether he can do that is yet to be seen. But after delivering the Tories their first stable parliamentary majority since the days of Thatcher and getting the country through Covid, he has earned the right to try.
‘The local elections amount to no more than mid-term blues’