With Boris Johnson having now pulled out of the contest to succeed his successor, should he be regarded as a lost champion of the Right? Not so much.
Niall Gooch, writing recently in the Spectator:
After the compromises and frustrations of the coalition, and then the chaotic and Brexit-dominated May era, many of conservatives had high hopes at the start of 2020. Here we had a popular government with a clear mandate, ready to put the Brexit squabbles behind and get on with the job. Get housing built by reforming the planning system, invest in infrastructure, grow the economy, reduce immigration. There was a golden opportunity to begin disarming the Blob, by repealing or reforming legislation like the Malicious Communications Act — which gives the police power to arrest you for tweeting incorrect thoughts — or the Equality Act, which is the ultimate cause of most of the ‘wokery gone mad’ stories that Tory MPs love to rant about.
And yet almost nothing has been done on any of these fronts. . . .
Boris loyalists will point to Covid as the fly in the ointment. The pandemic knocked everything off course, they argue, by taking up so much political bandwidth that it was impossible to get other things done. The overdone pseudo-scandal of partygate, whipped up by a dishonest media, prevented the real Johnson agenda from being carried out.
There is some truth to this. It is easy to forget now how serious things were for much of 2020 and in the early part of 2021. But equally, as a matter of desperate and urgent political concern, Covid was over by the late spring of 2021, some 18 months ago. And even during the Covid year, there is no reason at all why non-health ministers working from home could not have been working on legislative proposals to address some of the pressing matters noted above. Some of the steps needed — like removing section 127 of the Malicious Communications Act, or requiring the College of Policing to stop recording ‘non-crime hate incidents’ — are extremely simple. In the same way, the highly important task of replacing the Blairite guerrillas who still dominate the quangocracy is not difficult from an administrative perspective, but requires a certain amount of political and social nerve.
When it comes down to it, the essential requirements for getting things in done in politics are a thorough understanding of the levers available, and courage. To put it another way, you need to know the real causes of the problems you face, and the tools available to fix them, and you need to be willing to carry through the fix in the face of harsh and personal hostility.
There is very little evidence that the Johnson government had either of these requirements. We saw a good deal of government as punditry, with MPs and ministers delivering furious denunciations in the media of people smugglers, or authoritarian policing, or attacks on free speech, or the violence of BLM protests. But there was very little understanding of why problems persisted and what an elected government with a large majority could do to stop them.
Boris didn’t fail because of Covid or because of the media. He failed because neither he nor his government had sufficient grip, clarity and ruthlessness to achieve conservative goals.
If anything, Gooch is too kind. He makes only an indirect reference to Johnson’s enthusiastic embrace of Theresa May’s “uncosted” (to use a fashionable term) commitment to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, a futile and expensive exercise in central planning (but I repeat myself) and a policy that should have no part in any Conservative agenda. If this target is retained in its current form, it will doom the country to a future of constrained and expensive energy and to yet more of the lifestyle policing of which Britain already has too much. It was under Johnson that the ban on the sale of new internal combustion energy (ICE) vehicles was advanced from 2035 to 2030, an even more restrictive approach than that adopted by those bastions of common sense, the EU, California, and New York.
The Spectator’s Fraser Nelson:
He refused to accept a choice between high spending and low taxes, leaving us with massive debt and high taxes.
His sheer disorganisation meant he was pushed around by others and shouted down by illiberal voices: hence the high spending and those lockdowns. A social and economic calamity, one from which the country will never properly recover. And yes, almost every country locked down — to an extent. But how many countries locked down longer or harder than Britain? And how many countries sustained more economic damage? That explains the mess we’re in: under a mountain of debt, suffering low growth with a workforce that never recovered to its former size. The moneyprinting used to finance lockdown left us with inflation, as Mervyn King explained this morning. Johnson took a “see no evil” approach during lockdown, refusing to commission a cost-benefit analysis. The benefits are hard to find but the costs confront us daily. Johnson has a lot of apologising to do. His vaccine procurement success was, in the end, squandered because he kept Britain locked down anyway.
All too true, sadly.