Anne McElvoy He’s back. And this time it’s serious. Now we’ll see if Boris is box office or a flop
WELL, he is almost where he has striven to be since I first clapped eyes on his artfully dishevelled form in the mid-Eighties. It was my first outing to the Oxford Union, an establishment which in those days felt like it was fuelled by a pipeline from the upper echelons of public schools. Boris Johnson’s cod Churchillian tone was already in full swing, the verbal pirouettes dazzling, the Roman oratory flattering the audience to the benefit of the speaker — “my friends,” a favourite Boris-ism, is of course a way of asserting benign superiority.
It was an early prototype of the Boris communications machine, which has propelled him — via the longest ever audition for the job, including two stints as London Mayor — most likely to the leadership of the Tory Party and No 10. A lot has changed since the great blond foghorn could be heard around the quads and balls, arousing a mixture of admiration and hackles in us state school ingénues. But Boris was a oneman event people like to watch — and still is, which is why many arrows continue to bounce off him.
Covering the launch of his slate of speakers as Union President for the university newspaper, I blurted out: “Is that all you’ve got?” It has taken him about 30 years to forgive this slight, an indication of his tendency to expect admiration and get a bit testy when it is not forthcoming. But the question will arise again: what has Johnson got in his locker to offset the threats of Tory civil war and help calibrate the risks of a lastminute barter with the EU on a deal — and of the more dramatic consequences of no deal.
Not coincidentally, a similar question applies to the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, Jo Swinson. Her rather Delphic announcement on the role of her party as the main home of anti-Brexiters is that “there may well be a majority of MPs from different parties for a People’s Vote”. Thrills! That, of course, may well have been true for some time, without the idea of Vote 2 acquiring lift-off velocity. Anyway, that scenario can only arise if no-deal is stopped in its tracks.
Johnson and Swinson’s probable fates are linked, and will be influenced further according to who plays the cannier hand in the next crucial few weeks.
It’s a risk, however, to see the choices and outcomes in the manner of a flow chart with inevitable progressions. Personalities matter, and so does the change of light when a new leader arrives with patronage to wield. Being Boris, this arrival will be with fireworks, not a small glass of prosecco and a policy seminar.
The dividing line between success and failure is precarious and depends on him mustering his political strengths, which are, fo r a l l the opprobrium heaped on him, considerable — and avoiding the trap of sloppiness and indiscipline that have marked his worst
moments. Reading Tony Blair’s column in The Times yesterday — a finger-wag about why Johnson really needs a second referendum (not a view shared on team Boris) — it struck me that the similarities between Johnson and Blair are greater than either might acknowledge. The incarnation of Blair as a lofty creature of the international institutional order was a later accretion — it was not what carried him to victory in 1997 and to re-election.
He, like Johnson, had extraordinary self-belief — a belief that reality would bend to his will — was at ease with audiences across the country, and added stardust to dry politics. He also had an ability to make up quite a lot as he went
Many Conservatives fear the arrival of Mr Toad, careering the Tory sports car into the nearest roadkill
along. In his article, Blair hit home with one point, namely that “the most astonishing thing about Johnson’s position on Brexit is his apparent failure to understand why Theresa May failed” — in sum, because the objectives of frictionless trade at the Northern Irish border, not remaining in the Customs Union, and leaving the EU are incompatible. This is true. But the flow chart of probabilities must change, because we are likely to have a PM who unlike his predecessor would deliver a no-deal outcome.
That provides the next great test for Johnson, which is to move from a mode of campaigning for high office (for about three decades) to being the person who can perform the role of PM through the fog of internal Tory war which will descend upon him. Certainly his time in City Hall did suggest an ability to juggle forces and deploy teams to make the machine work in his favour. Number 10 is different: more draining and infinitely more complex with the pressure of more intense deadlines from day one.
So it is far trickier than just “getting the band back together again” (the very Boris words of invitation he issued to old City Hall supporters, including Sir Eddie Lister, who would oversee the transition to No 10 as chief of staff, Will Walden as his communications chief, and his savvy former arts adviser Munira Mirza, also tipped for a return to the fold.
The ability to attract and retain loyalties is a useful glue in the fractious world of politics. The major decisions, however, will land back at the door of No 10 and the new PM will have to choose a direction — between a Cabinet containing Remainers prepared to serve under a Leave leader (Amber Rudd, Matthew Hancock) and one which is driven by the need, as one ERG member puts it, “to do to the Remainers what was done to us — shove us to the margins”. All the signs are that this would produce an equal and opposite force of internal opposition from those who are determined to thwart no-deal and will exploit the Government’s paper-thin Commons majority to prevent it.
Inevitably then, the Boris era, whether measured in days, months or years, starts in uncertainty. It’s a great deal easier to predict how it could fail than how it can succeed, which leaves many Conservatives fearing the arrival of Mr Toad, careering the Tory sports car into the nearest roadkill. There has always been a “Boris factor”, propelling a career aimed at No 10. It’s been fun. This time, it’s serious. What more has Boris got? We’re about to find out.
⬤ Anne McElvoy is senior editor at
The Economist