I’m no cheerleader for Rishi but will the new Johnson be all that different from the old one?
When Boris Johnson first ran to be Tory leader I had a long list of reasons why his critics were wrong, even deranged. Dig up his old columns if you must, I’d say, but judge him by his achievements. Twice elected mayor of a Labour city, delivering lower taxes and smoother government. This was due to a superpower: his ability to find and delegate to brilliant people, who ran things superbly. He did it when doing my job as an editor. He did in London. He’d do it in No10.
How wrong I was. He panicked and spent, running up a bill so big it may yet bankrupt the country. “He’s not the leader we thought he’d be,” one of his advisers told me, before quietly resigning. “I’ve stayed here hoping and hoping that the ‘real Boris’ would come back. But we have to accept that this is the real Boris.” His indecision was final. The column-writing spirit was willing but the governmental flesh was weak. A fundamental, persistent unfixable problem that could resurface on day one if he came back.
Johnson is back in the race because he has so many inimitable qualities. He exerts a gravitational pull with conversations reverting back to him: no one else has this force. He engages voters who tend to regard all other candidates (in all parties) with contempt. His optimism is not just contagious, but rational: he can see ways out of problems that elude others. Hence his electoral victories. Having won an historic landslide in 2019, he has a strong claim to complete the time millions of voters gave him.
But then we have to remember why he quit. He ran government so chaotically, prompting so many resignations that he couldn’t find enough MPs willing to serve. His No10 went through three iterations, none successful. There’s that still-unfinished partygate investigation, karma for his lockdowns. And his Toryism? He spoke of low taxes in the way that an alcoholic might talk about going sober: sincere, but judging by behaviour, not credible. He reached for the bottle of state spending at every stage.
His splurges – net zero, the HS2 project, the protected, unaffordable carehome pledge for pensioners – drove taxes to a 72-year high.
It could have been so different. He might have found a smart, confident team able to spot the flawed logic of lockdown. Had Britain followed Sweden in a voluntary (but still effective) system then he’d be in power now, ahead in the polls. Britain would not have sustained the worst economic damage in Europe. Partygate would never have happened, because he would have never sent the police after women going for a walk in the park. He’d have been able to translate his vaccine success into a fast reopening.
Instead, he was blown along in a wind of panic, succumbing to authoritarian forces inside the government machine.
In opposition, politicians are judged by what they say. In government, by what they do. Johnson’s optimistic vision of Merrie England conservatism bore no resemblance to what he ended up doing. When he left office, he had outlawed protest in a way that was democratically outrageous – yet still inept enough to leave us at the mercy of Just Stop Oil. Worse, he was all set to formalise a censorship regime with an Online Safety Bill. He would feign ignorance when asked about this, as if he hadn’t yet worked out what damage his censorship bill would do, or hadn’t read the relevant section.
It’s not good enough, not for a PM. Too much is at stake.
The public deserve a basic level of competence – especially as there’s so much work to be done repairing the social, economic and educational damage of the lockdowns he allowed to go on for far too long. He saw it
He outlawed protest in an outrageous way – yet still inept enough to leave us at the mercy of Just Stop Oil
differently: that average voters don’t care about this, and things will come right in the end. The Rwanda deportation plan was launched without the first idea of how to overcome the legal threats. The social care policy was promised without any idea how they’d implement or finance it. To bluff at this level means letting millions of people down. It was Micawberism, not Conservatism – and was, in the end, unwatchable.
This is not to say that I’m on Team Sunak. I was baffled by his low-octane leadership campaign and his decision to pose as an establishment candidate.
I saw him as someone far-better capable of delivering change – a minister who challenged lockdown, and the spending splurges, when others did not. But we heard very little of this when he ran in the summer.
So I won’t be waving pom-poms for any candidate in this campaign.
Towards the end of his time in No10, it had become possible to find an old Boris Johnson quote to attack almost everything that he was doing. The vaccine passports, the windfall taxes, the censorship bill, the NHS-worship: all of it he would have sent up brilliantly. If we could have that version of Boris in No10 then: great.
But that Boris, as we now know, was never really on offer. Instead he seemed on a perverse mission to become the kind of PM that, as a journalist, he’d warn us about.
Why did he abandon his principles? Did he conclude that the highspending UK government machine is now so big as to be uncontrollable? Did he come to see his old journalism as naive or outdated? Did he think his old hope of a smaller, less intrusive state was either undoable or anachronistic?
It’s possible – just – that he does manage a complete reboot. That he returns having learned the lessons from his No10 debacle and oozes mea culpas. But this is something he has not tended to specialise in.
In dispatching leaders so quickly, the Tories can claim to be Europe’s leaders in defenestration. Now they’re testing a new manoeuvre: refenestration. Finding the old guy, pulling him back in through the window and putting him back on the throne. It fits the new rule in British politics: don’t dismiss anything on the grounds of it sounding too crazy.
A Boris restoration would fit this pattern of scarcely believable madness. He may go for it. But if he does, it is hard even for his old supporters to see any reason why it should be any different this time.