Britain’s struggling PM is uniquely suited to lead his country’s anti-woke movement — and recover his standing in the process.
Britain’s struggling PM is uniquely suited to lead his country’s anti-woke movement — and recover his standing in the process.
S eventeen days before 2021 ended, Boris Johnson embarked on a nightmarish week of political disasters. On Tuesday December 14, almost 100 Tory MPs rebelled against his government’s taking powers to mandate masks and vaccine passports for entry into night clubs, restaurants, and other public spaces.
These powers were passed into law anyway because the Labour party supported them in the vote — and would have imposed the restrictions themselves at once. But no prime minister can afford to rely on the opposition parties to get his policies through Parliament too often (i.e., often). Nor, for that matter, could he afford to be complacent about media headlines on the 15th shrieking “Boris’s Biggest Defeat Yet.”
That’s especially true when “yet” turns out to mean the next day.
On that day, a by-election (special election in U.S. terms) was held in the safe Tory district of Shropshire North and the conservative candidate lost in spades. Boris learned early the next morning that the voters had turned a Tory vote of 22,949 (62.7 percent) in the 2019 general election into one of 12,063 (31.6 percent), handing the seat to the Liberal Democrat candidate who had placed a low third in the 2019 election.
Headlines competed to exaggerate the “historic” nature of the Tory loss. But they really needn’t have bothered. Shropshire North was the second Tory seat to suffer a massive swing (37 percent) from Tory to Lib Dem in the five months since the Chesham and Amersham by-election (25 percent) had started the trend. Most Tory MPs would know that their own seats were far less safe than either.
But troubles hadn’t stopped arriving that week. According to most election commentaries, one reason for the collapse of the Tory vote was the widespread suspicion that while government ministers and civil servants were imposing tough anti-Covid restrictions on the British public, they were privately (in journalese “secretly”) holding wild parties, unmasked, with alcohol available and not much social distancing.
To quell this suspicion, the prime minister had appointed Simon Case — no less a Whitehall pooh-bah than the Cabinet secretary and head of the Home Civil Service combined — to head an official inquiry into these disgraceful rumors. On the day after the Shropshire by-election, while Boris was still groaning over the voting figures, the media reported that Case had attended just such a party in his office. He resigned from the inquiry the next day.
Down, but Not OutEven if Boris had been a popular figure with the mainstream media, this succession of reverses would have guaranteed dreadful headlines and hostile analyses. He is, however, nothing of the sort. At the best of times there is an almost unbalanced contempt for Boris Johnson across all media outlets, including in newspapers usually regarded as conservative. But his defeats now gave reporters and commentators really damaging material to work with while liberating them from any obligation of fairness to him.
Almost all, together with every political player outside the Tory Party (and some in it), interpreted his political situation that weekend as utterly dire — a terminal crisis, Covid on stilts, from which he might stumble on ever-weaker for a while but never recover until another by-election defeat finished him off.
Those predictions are much exaggerated. Boris is in serious trouble, but he’s also in possession of a Parliamentary majority of (almost) 80, with three years to go before he has to hold an election, and no possibility of an opposition coalition that could evict him.
If Boris is to go, he will have to be thrown out by the Tory Party.
How likely is that? Not only has the Tory Party deliberately made it difficult for their MPs to dismiss a sitting Tory leader, other party rules give the final choice of a new leader to its rank and file in the constituencies. Boris is still their darling, if perhaps less so than in 2019. They might rebel if he were dismissed, vote for him in a write-in campaign, elect a candidate endorsed by him, drift away from Toryism to another insurgent populist party (with or without Nigel Farage), and in one way or another make the Tory leadership crisis a semi-permanent one. (Sound familiar?)
Even if the eviction were to succeed and install an acceptable new leader — two unlikely outcomes, not one — remember that the eviction of Margaret Thatcher in 1990 ensured that the Tory Party entered two decades of internal guilt and faction-fighting. John Major was not only unable to establish party harmony, he made matters worse by doubling down on the Tory Party’s commitment to the EU which had been an important factor in the defenestration of Mrs. Thatcher in the first place. Tory instability continued for the better part of a decade, producing five party leaders in succession. The end result was the massive 1997 electoral defeat that reduced the Conservatives to fewer than a third of MPS and left both “Europe” and Thatcher’s standing in Tory history unsettled and unsettling until the Brexit referendum.
As Melanie Phillips argues, the Tory future and Boris’s future are all mixed up together. For most of our lifetimes various Tory leaderships managed to keep the Euro-sceptic majority of their party outside Parliament quiescent in the face of the EU’s persistent drift to Euro-federalism. That ended formally in 2016 when the Tory Party accepted the verdict of the Brexit referendum, but it only became a firm commitment when Boris led the party to victory in 2019 on a strong pro-Brexit ticket. Since then, the issue has sunk out of sight beneath a characteristically Tory façade of agreement, but it rumbles on below the surface. Many Tories — especially those recently converted from Labour — see Boris as a guarantee that Brexit really is settled as the foundation of a grand strategy for Britain.
That in itself is one important foundation of Boris’s useful reputation as an election-winner. The other is that he’s seen as having broadened the Tory party’s appeal to the North and the Midlands of England and to blue-collar workers nationally. That gives him clout within the party. As Ms. Phillips has argued plausibly, however, Boris is as much the beneficiary as the cause of this gradual re-alignment of politics. Boris’s new coalition, moreover, isn’t entirely new; it’s the revival of that multi-faceted Toryism that held power for two-thirds of the 20th century and before. From Disraeli onwards, the Tories regularly won one third of the working-class vote – and that third gave them fully half of their national vote. Nonetheless, even if it’s less novel than the commentariat realizes, it’s still a real achievement, more in tune with the sentiments of British society than the Left’s myth of a natural socialist majority.
It’s worth preserving, and as with Brexit, Boris symbolizes it.
Reactive and RudderlessWhy then is he in trouble? The odd truth is that although he helped to put together an election-winning coalition, he is now alienating all the major Tory factions one by one with his various policies: Thatcherites by his reckless overspending and abandonment of tax cuts; patriotic Tories by failing to counter the deracinated ideas of wokeness conquering so many British institutions; younger and less affluent Tories by not tackling the unavailability of affordable housing effectively; small savers and investors by allowing inflation to revive; cautious pragmatic Tories by embracing “big government” projects on an almost Napoleonic scale such as Net Zero; even Brexiteers by the long-drawn-out negotiations over the Northern Ireland border question; and much else.
All these policies, together with Covid 19, have costs which are adding up prodigiously. They seem to be either concessions to pressure (mainly from “the Blob” of civil servants and bien pensant establishment opinion as Charles Moore argues) or a succession of ill-thought-out careless gestures designed solely to get through the next minor crisis or to respond to the last focus group. The general impression, therefore, is one of drift and confusion. And the sense that this is the reality of Boris’s politics is spreading both at the top of politics and down to constituencies like Shropshire North.
That was why the worst blow that Boris suffered — on the Saturday evening of “Black Week” — was the resignation of his closest political ally, Lord (David) Frost, to whom he had given a Cabinet position and responsibility for conducting Britain’s exit from the EU and who is generally considered to have done a good job. Frost was emerging, moreover, as a more substantial political figure (and therefore a more useful ally for Boris) as he moved from Brexit onto other policy areas. A month before Shropshire North he had delivered a major speech to the Margaret Thatcher conference on trade, organized by the Centre for Policy Studies, in which he outlined a post-Brexit trade policy for the U.K. built around this ringing Thatcherite declaration:
We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the European Union from Britain with Brexit, only to import that European model after all this time. So we need to reform fast, and those reforms are going to involve doing things differently from the EU. If we stick to EU models, but behind our own tariff wall and with a smaller market, we obviously won’t succeed.
But he also connected this approach with a series of other policies — notably, a ringing defense of free speech and support for low taxes — to present what was in effect a broad national strategy for the U.K. — the very thing that Boris’s supporters were starting to believe he lacked.
Frost’s resignation at the end of “Black Week” was therefore a particularly telling blow. What made it still more damaging was that in his otherwise friendly resignation letter, Frost gave as a reason for his departure “the direction of travel” recently taken by the government. He has since said he was referring specifically to the restoration of anti-Covid restrictions that he felt were both needless and damaging — the very matter on which the Tory MPs had rebelled in droves and which, at the time of writing at least, the government has not used its powers to impose. Despite this disclaimer, Frost’s words remain too accurate a description of the spasmodic directionlessness of government policy in general for comfort’s sake. His departure weakens the government and Boris further by removing an important influence for greater clarity in its overall political approach.
Conscript a Consigliere If things are to improve overall, therefore, Boris himself must improve his general game — and not only Boris. There are two connected ways of doing that — one concerned with the condition of Downing Street, the other about the real nature of Boris’s politics.
Veterans of previous Tory government tell me that Downing Street has simply grown too full of people with loosely defined responsibilities who make mischief by trying to help the prime minister. That’s especially the case in government communications. How can we resolve those problems without making matters worse? One obvious answer is that the PM and the entire Cabinet must harness the Civil Service machine, including its press operation, more often and more as a matter of course. It knows the ropes (and the traps), and if ministers doubt its loyalty, the best response is to engage with it and demonstrate that there are sound reasons behind government policy. If ministers can’t manage that, why are they there?
Another way for the current government to recover is one that’s tailored to Boris personally but was first formulated by Margaret Thatcher. “Every prime minister needs a Willie,” she said with blithe unconcern for the double entendre since she was talking of Deputy Prime Minister Willie Whitelaw. In this context, Thatcher meant an adviser who could offer her reliably prudent advice from a position that combined independence, loyalty, satisfied ambition, and the respect of all party factions. My nominees would include Frost (though I think he may return to a different position in the Cabinet), former chancellor Norman Lamont, who served in both Thatcher’s and Major’s cabinets, and former Brexit secretary David Davis, who was allied to Boris on the issue that carried him into Downing Street. (As it happens I ran into Norman Lamont in London that week and suggested he should accept such a role if one were offered. He demurred politely.)
Such a counselor is especially needed for a PM like Boris, who has flown by the seat of his pants so often and so successfully that he now assumes it’s an easy party trick. He has, after all, shown both in Brexit and in the recent AUKUS treaty with Australia and the U.S. a political boldness, a willingness to take the long view of Britain’s national interests, and the ability to conduct a difficult policy to a successful conclusion even when he’s starting from a weak position, all of which are important qualities of political leadership. In short, we shouldn’t forget that Boris is first-class political horse-flesh when he sets his mind to something. Now, however, he needs to reflect on what his own deepest political instincts are and which of them he must prioritize to deal with the massive political challenges facing him. That won’t be an easy task because some of his instincts are at war with others, and some with what political necessity seems to command.
For instance, his instinctive liberal preference for easy immigration rules is in direct conflict with the political necessity of keeping former Labour voters (and many other Tories tempted by Nigel Farage) in his new “national party” coalition. Some commentators — notably Melanie Phillips and Matthew Goodwin — believe that Boris must make a choice between the kind of classical liberal economic policy of low taxes and free trade advocated by Frost and the more “communitarian” cultural and economically interventionist policies they believe essential to sustaining post-Brexit Toryism. My view is that the history of the Tory Party from Disraeli to Thatcher (yes, Thatcher!) demonstrates that it’s possible to keep both sets of ideas and interests in fruitful balance. As Denis Healey said in a different context: “If you can’t ride two horses at once, you shouldn’t be in the bloody circus.”
Win against Wokeness
Riding two horses at once is Boris’s forte, but it’s not enough in present circumstances. What he needs is to seize on a powerful idea that provides a unifying theme for everything else, appeals to all the Tory factions, and deals with a world-historical issue. Does that sound a tall order? If you feel so, my advice is to get out more. Britain, the United States, other English-speaking countries, even continental Europe (including, especially and ironically, France) are all experiencing a major social and political revolution which goes by the name of “wokeness.” In the U.S. it has full control of one of the three branches of government, shaky control of another, and a significant representation throughout the third. In all the countries above, the revolutionaries have a commanding position in all the great cultural institutions as well as in federal and state bureaucracies, corporations, the public-private quangos, and even in the military.
Every country is at a slightly different stage of the revolution. In general, however, the revolutionaries use their powers in these bodies to dismiss those who dissent from their policies (or even merely fail to celebrate them), to blacklist them from other positions, to deny them free speech in forums supposed to guarantee it. They also work to censor books already published by removing them from libraries, to prevent the performance of plays, films, and even operas that conflict with their views of what is legitimate speech or art, and above all to insist that all thought, speech, and inquiry from scientific research to children’s education must be grounded in race-and-gender-consciousness (or racism and sexism re-defined) which, though unconstitutional on the face of things, is very rarely challenged in the courts and almost never challenged by public authorities.
That’s a revolution, if an uncompleted one. It is resisted, moreover — and increasingly resisted — from two directions. The first comes as most of the political tendencies in intellectual life — conservatives, moderate liberals, socialists, even some progressives — are gradually realizing the despotic and totalitarian reality hidden inside what the revolutionaries themselves claim to be an urgent progressivism on race and gender. Intellectuals and writers can now see from the abominable persecution of J. K. Rowling that no one is safe from woke attacks. The second source of resistance is that from ordinary people — notably, parents of children at schools run by “woke” teachers who discovered during the pandemic from “virtual teaching” that their children were being taught to hate their country, their parents, and themselves, not necessarily in that order. Both rebellions are important signs that the revolution has not won — and might never win — if the resistance to it becomes the principal driving force of conservative politics. A powerful anti-wokeness coalition everywhere exists in embryo waiting to be summoned into existence by political leadership. What’s lacking is the leader.
Emmanuel Macron has partially glimpsed this prospect and denounced wokeness as an American import. But that’s too parochial a response, and he is likely to be outbid by Eric Zemmour, whose critique goes deeper. The situation in the U.S. is far worse, since Joe Biden is the wokes’ Mirabeau or even Kerensky. Conservatives, meanwhile, are divided between Donald Trump, who is poison to half of the anti-woke coalition, and Governor Ron DeSantis, who is still imprisoned in Florida politics.
What’s remarkable in Britain is that no first-order politician has emerged to lead those resisting wokeness. That’s largely because most Brits have been slow grasping what the phenomenon means and the threat it poses to their liberties. Boris has made largely ineffectual rhetorical jabs at it but shrunk from clear, decisive repudiation of its claims and actions that would mean practical attacks on woke-controlled institutions and the making of enemies. That’s a mistake — one perhaps deriving from his wish to be liked — and a massive one. By virtue of his intellectual and rhetorical abilities, Boris has an almost unique ability to wage a conservative culture war on wokeness with intellectual depth sanitized by good-humored wit. He has little to lose since he’s already hated by the people who would most hate such a politics. And it offers him a prophetic reputation since he would be anticipating the hostility to wokeness that is at present in its early stages but bound to grow.
When Burke published his Reflections on the Revolution in France in November 1790, his attacks on the French revolutionaries were seen by many of his closest friends as extreme and hysterical. When the Terror occurred a few years later, he was revered as a prophet and his utterances given greater weight. Wokeness offers Boris the same possibility — being the intellectual leader of the West’s resistance to its revolution across the globe.
Boris has always wanted to be a world-historical figure. So what’s stopping him?