Sherelle Jacobs:
The blond pretender needs his own daring, coherent philosophy to win over the public
For a comfortable win, it was pretty cringeworthy. To ensure Boris Johnson’s romp to victory this week, handlers largely kept their pedigree showman bound and gagged behind the scenes. When he did briefly poke his nose out for his campaign launch, the public was treated to a brilliant balletic dance on the borderland between clarity and vagueness. With romantic if slightly rushed energy, Theresa May’s likely successor leaped and pirouetted through a rendition of the crowdpleasing favourite “Delay Means Defeat”, without explaining exactly how he will be able to strike a better deal with the EU in just 12 weeks. This was followed by a metaphor-sodden masterclass in ducking the media (“The crouton I picked up in that minestrone of observations...” is to Boris what “I think you are asking...” is to his less inventive journalistdodging colleagues.)
Boris’s political acrobatics may win him the prime ministership. But such difficulty-deflecting derring-do would be calamitous as the main strategy in an election. Although the Bojo brand has powerful cut-through in an era of populism, it is not enough. The former darling of liberal London is now a toxic figure across Remainia. Labour’s victory in the Peterborough byelection, meanwhile, is a sobering lesson that, in marginals rattled by rising crime and depressed by 10 years of Conservative drift, Brexit is not the only vote-decider in town.
To make matters worse, obsolete Cameroonism is renewing itself within the Conservative Party. Rory Stewart is at the forefront of this hideous renaissance, with his social mediaready “radical centrism”. It is tempting to dismiss Mr Stewart as ridiculous: his enthusiasm for Theresa May’s deal
is unhinged. His campaign launch speech, confettied with references to the power of “listening” and held in a circus tent, was Blairism in drag. But his emphasis on “details” rather than “big abstract ideas” – even though the popular mood has moved in precisely the opposite direction – reflects a worldview stubbornly popular among blinkered Tory MPS.
To overcome these challenges, Boris badly needs to flesh out a basic philosophy. His zeal for big-tent politics and confident approach to delegation has risks as well as merits. Without intellectual glue, his premiership could quickly collapse into a chaotic free-for-all of bleedingheart liberalism, ham-fisted tax cuts and populist white elephants. Synthetic broad church politics is the last thing voters want; so while the Brexit maelstrom invites fatalistic premonitions about the new, platinum-blonde Mrs May, the politician that Boris is really in danger of emulating is Tony Blair.
Boris needs his own “ism”, in short – a philosophy that will help him to win back voters in the Tory heartlands and secure huge victories in workingclass marginals. Johnsonism (if Bojoism sounds too jocular) should be daring but coherent. Rather than his honourable but artless pledge of a £10billlion tax cut for those earning between £50,000 and £80,000 a year, Boris should steal Corbyn’s rhetoric and roll such a reform into a package of “tax cuts for the many not the few”, cutting every household’s supermarket bill by 10 per cent through slashing VAT, while raising the personal allowance, and scrapping tax on the casual work that millions partake in to supplement full-time jobs.
Johnsonism should also be all about the “big idea” politics spurned by the likes of Rory Stewart. Shaping, not merely “managing” globalisation, needs to be at its heart. Brexit – which is a trailblazing attempt to prove to the world that it is possible to reconcile internationalism with the sanctity of the nation state – is surely just one part of a bigger project.
The world is changing. China is challenging America’s role as the centre of the global economy by building a competing ecosystem, comprising everything from 5G to new international commercial courts. This is the kind of anti-western development that would have made Mr Blair, with his foreboding, corporatist approach to the outside world, shudder in office – but entrepreneurial Mr Johnson could take advantage of this diffusion of power and make Britain more integral to the global network that is now in flux.
That might entail establishing Britain as a world leader in broadband or positioning us at the cutting edge of research for the semiconductors that will be crucial to so many innovations of the future, from AI to robotics. Such an approach not only has the potential to create new industries in “left behind” marginals, but also tell the kind of electrifying story about the future that wins landslides.