Without Johnson, the Tories face the electoral wilderness
At first glance, the clash between good and evil that defines superhero movies might seem to offer little insight into contemporary politics. But in the Spider-Man multiverse, supervillains are often the product of a grand, well-intentioned experiment that goes badly wrong. While watching No Way Home, the latest film in the franchise, I found myself mulling the parallels with the Conservative Party after weeks of “partygate” revelations.
The Tories are halfway through a bold, transformational experiment to reset both their electoral coalition and their animating political philosophy. Much work has been invested in this, and it was paying off. The 2019 election result vindicated figures such as former Theresa May adviser Nick Timothy, who believed that the combination of Brexit and an active economic strategy could reap rich rewards.
But the Conservative rebirth is only partial. And as Boris Johnson, its public face, implodes, the danger is that the experiment will be halted or reversed before it is complete. The supervillain that would emerge from such an interruption could, as in the comic books, be somewhat deranged and ultimately doomed to failure. This would be a bad outcome for the Conservative Party, its 2019 voters—and our democracy.
For all Johnson’s faults—and there are many—he is gifted with genuine insight into public attitudes which, combined with an instinct for the “cakeism” of telling people they can have it all and a horror of austerity, has led the Conservative Party to its most interesting and popular position in more than a generation. But this realignment has its enemies, and Johnson’s imminent fall threatens to hand them power.
The least helpful thing about modern British political parties is their members. People who pay to participate in party politics are highly atypical in the views that they hold and how strongly they hold them.
In an age where fewer voters identify with a political party, many people adopt an eclectic approach to politics—basing their preferences on some mixture of their experiences, mood, hopes and fears and how they feel about individual politicians. Members of political parties may also be swayed by these factors but— crucially—they also have “beliefs.” These beliefs animate them and inform their priorities, making it harder for them to change their minds when confronted with new evidence. Of course, members matter—they knock on doors and donate money and clap along to stump speeches. But they also skew their parties away from normal politics and towards ideology.
A huge problem for the renewal project helmed by Johnson is that the membership of the Conservative Party has not evolved in lockstep with the party’s changing electoral coalition and political outlook. MPs and their members have held the prime minister hostage on Covid interventions. Public attitudes may now be starting to shift, but the position of the anti-intervention Covid Recovery Group has been starkly at odds with the
opinion of voters in general, as well as voters in the Red Wall seats that Conservatives won from Labour in 2019 in particular. What is true of attitudes to masks and vaccine passports is doubly so for attitudes to economic policy, public services and the need for investment in critical infrastructure.
Herein lies the problem for the Conservative Party. The people who will decide who replaces Johnson are not those who made him prime minister. The membership has not caught up with the electorate and the decision that they make risks redirecting the Conservative Party to its safe— rather than its winning—place. This will doom it to failure: the British people did not elect Margaret Thatcher in 2019. There is no reason to believe that they will relish the prospect of being ruled by her ghost in 2022.
And what of those new supporters in Red Wall seats who had voted Labour, or not voted at all, until 2019? It is to Johnson’s credit that he has always recognised that Brexit might buy their vote once, but
Rishi Sunak has maintained his popularity with members by doing one thing and saying another
would not lock these voters into the Tory brand. Hence “levelling up”: a slogan that explicitly speaks to rolling back the assumptions of Thatcherism and laissez-faire economics. Combined with the extraordinarily successful interventions to keep Britain afloat as Covid ravaged the country, levelling up was to be the final ingredient to complete the experiment. But can it survive a Tory leadership election where all of the candidates are incentivised to speak not to their new, northern voters, but to Conservative MPs and members?
Levelling up is a policy aimed at normal people, but it is the atypical people in the Tory membership who will select Johnson’s replacement. And their beliefs run contrary to the interests of the voters.
All of this comes at a time when the country can ill-afford the Thatcherite reboot that leadership contenders will be encouraged to offer. As the cost of living mounts, activism is needed to shore up family finances. It may feel warm and cosy for Tory MPs and members to talk to each other of a fresh bout of privatisation to unleash British commerce, but the problem with Thatcherism is that you eventually run out of shared assets to sell off. Whatever the merits that agenda may have once had, it is no more relevant to the here and now than the Bennite retrenchment of Labour under Corbyn. It is nostalgia, not policy. And it cannot answer the problems that the Red Wall elected Johnson to fix.
Rishi Sunak has maintained his popularity with members— recent polls give him a dizzying lead—by doing one thing and saying another, all the while blaming Johnson for the disconnect. Perhaps if elected leader he would continue to talk of tax cuts and slashed regulation while doing the opposite. But he will no longer have a prime minister to hide behind and will have written a lot of small-state cheques that members and MPs will surely expect to be cashed. His closest competition—Liz Truss—is building her entire political brand as a tribute act to the Iron Lady. The Tory left simply does not have a viable candidate as things stand.
And that leads us to the democratic deficit created by the coming regime change. Johnson forged a deal with a set of voters who felt abandoned by the political class. He bought their votes with the promise of renewed attention to their lives and their values. Now his party overtly threatens the bargain. The voters are not to be consulted. If Brexit was the reaction of ordinary people against elite power, then what are they supposed to make of the replacement not just of a prime minister but also his programme? Brexiteers once made great hay of the fact that when the EU disliked the outcome of referendums it would make the voters vote again. But the Conservative Party doesn’t even propose to give the voters another go. They are gearing up to unilaterally re-impose a discredited settlement.
Meanwhile, the Labour Party is rediscovering an instinct for winning. Keir Starmer may not be inspiring enthusiasm on the scale that Tony Blair once did. But nor is he turning the country off like Jeremy Corbyn. Those newly elected Tories in former Labour seats sit on small majorities. They are on permanent notice. A bonfire of the social contract is almost as much of a gift to their Labour opponents as the dipsomaniacal behaviour in Downing Street. In the long term, it would be worse.
The Conservative Party is the natural party of government because it is capable of audacious change. The experiment that it began in 2017 delivered a stunning majority two years later and a party much more in tune with the British people. But now the party risks throwing all of that away and becoming not the tribune of the new centre ground, but a monomaniacal supervillain obsessed with the past. The voters will not reward such a betrayal. ♦