Boris Johnson came into office with a host of personal defects — many of which he was able to shine up and present, in the right light, as political assets. Now his government is facing a wave of high-profile resignations, and prognosticators are giving his premiership not years or even months but days. Here’s what my friend Ed West (subscribe to his Substack) writes about Johnson today:
However badly Boris Johnson’s career ends, it will surely be a better finale than that of his great-grandfather, the Turkish journalist, editor and liberal politician Ali Kemal. Almost exactly a century ago, following the trauma of defeat and the end of the Ottoman Empire, Kemal was attacked by a mob of soldiers, hanged from a tree, his head smashed in with cudgels before being beaten to death. I can’t imagine that the Tory backbenchers will go that far.
Well, then.
West focuses on the problem of Johnson’s “sleaze” and laziness, which is incompatible with the republican rectitude that democratic peoples demand of their leaders. Johnson is known to have run a loose ship at Downing Street — allowing his staff to party even as the country was locked down for Covid — a sin many find unforgivable. The unreported legends of his premiership — including debaucheries that would make the Medici family blush — also hurt him among the party faithful.
This has all tried the patience of his Tory party members. And West laments how little Tories have accomplished in their many years in power. The United Kingdom has a housing crisis more widespread and insidious than the one that plagues our major cities in the United States. It also needs terrific investment in its transportation. The closest that Johnson’s premiership ever came to addressing these was their plan to “level up” depressed and forgotten parts of England and Scotland — making them more attractive places to invest, work, and live. But this agenda has mostly been throwing cash around in a disorganized way. Johnson’s government has been in a rut. The scandals hit just as inflation did, and No. 10 got stuck in fighting to renegotiate the Northern Ireland Protocol — a U.K.–EU–Ireland arrangement that provokes the Unionist community — to which Johnson agreed in order to deliver Brexit.
So, yes, of course there are problems with Johnson’s government. But there were years ahead for course correction. Johnson called for and won a landslide election in December 2019. He had solved two great problems for the Tory party. Theresa May had chipped away at Labour’s red wall, and then her premiership floundered on a pitchfork — she was stuck with a Brexit mandate from the public and a Remain majority in Parliament. Johnson solved both, achieving a smashing victory in Labour heartlands, and delivering a Parliamentary majority for Brexit. The electoral cost was only one Tory seat in Putney.
I see zero evidence that another Tory figure can replicate or come close to rebuilding that coalition. The Thatcher-nostalgists will alienate both the traditional Labour voters and the Cameronized Tory party of the southeast of England. A successful Tory party in 2022 needs to campaign on completely different ideological terrain than what it conquered decades ago. The only man in the Tory squad with the creativity, ambition, and willingness to change so as to discover this territory is Boris Johnson. I’m with my other old friend, Freddy Gray:
Who says that Boris has to go? Almost all the media, that is certain — quite a lot of the exhausted public, too. Dominic Cummings won’t stop calling for a ‘regime change’ until he gets it. But Cummings, like Johnson, understands a key rule of Westminster thermodynamics: when the MP WhatsApp groups and the Twittersphere are all saying something, it is almost certainly wrong. When everybody pronounces that yesterday’s double resignation blow is surely ‘fatal’, it’s a good bet that there’s life in the big beast yet.
Of course, this article could be completely wrong. Boris may fall on his sword in the next few hours. It is increasingly hard to imagine how he staggers on with his dwindling band of gonzo loyalists, his wife apparently briefing unhelpfully against him, and a Conservative party in ‘open revolt’ — the headlines write themselves — against him.
Read Freddy at the Spectator.