Johnson Is Acting Like A Winner. But Reality May Have Other Ideas

By Martin Kettle

When a football team loses its first four games of the season, the manager’s job is on the line. Could the same thing happen with Boris Johnson’s prime ministership? It seems unlikely, so soon after the ousting of Theresa May. And yet politics, like football, is a results-driven game.

This week, Johnson lost four big votes in the Commons. Last week he lost Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson too. On Tuesday he threw 21 MPs out of his party. On Thursday he even drove his own brother out as well. The damage that Johnson is willing to inflict on politics appears limitless. But it may also extend to Tory prospects in the general election he is so keen to hold.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Most Tories backed Johnson because they think he is a winner. This was always a foolish triumph of hope over reality. They wanted the Johnson style to magically allow the party to spring the trap in which Theresa May had got caught over Brexit. But the reality – as true under Johnson as it was under May – is that the Conservative party is still divided, still lacks a parliamentary majority, and is still pursuing policies that are opposed by too many voters.

The referendum struck at the heart of the parliamentary system in multiple ways. But it did nothing to change Lyndon Johnson’s iron law of politics: that successful politicians must learn how to count. For the first few weeks, the numbers did not matter. Now parliament is back, the numbers matter all the time. There is nothing that Johnson can do about this unless, like his brother Jo on Thursday, he just walks away. Maybe that is in fact what this prime minister will do too. It has begun to seem possible.

Johnson has thrown the playbook aside. He acts as if he has a majority, even though he does not. He has tried to pursue a radical Brexit agenda in a parliament that has never supported it. He has put his fingers in his ears rather than listen to a nation that is deeply divided. And in doing so he seems absolutely content, as does Dominic Cummings, to destroy the Conservative party as a broad-based party of government.

Nothing illustrates this better than the removal of the whip from the 21 Tories who backed the effort to block a no-deal Brexit. In a different Tory party, these 21 could plausibly have filled most cabinet seats. It is not just the loss of talent that is destructive. It is also the contrast with the actual cabinet of overpromoted fanatics, snobs and halfwits that Johnson has assembled.

The real message of this week’s purge is that the liberal, middling, pragmatic Tory party with which Johnson once identified is now regarded as dispensable. Such is the pressure of the Brexit deadline and the Brexit party, that nothing can be allowed to stand in the way of the project to remodel the Tories and win an election from the English nationalist right against divided opposition. The rage against Johnson from centrist Tories at the 1922 committee this week was the rage of MPs who have realised too late that they could soon be thrown overboard too.

This centrally directed radicalisation of the Tory party lies behind everything. It is invoked to justify the prioritisation of no deal, the refusal to negotiate seriously about economic links with the EU, the utter indifference to Scotland and Ireland and the growing election drumbeat. In this view of the party’s priorities, the pushing out of Ken Clarke, Dominic Grieve and Davidson might be a powerful, purifying message that the fainthearts have been defeated.

All of this is predicated on the belief that around 35% of the electorate crave this approach and that, with the opposition divided, they will reward Johnson with a working majority. Yet the evidence for this theory – on which everything else Johnson is doing ultimately rests – is very thin. The 318 Tory MPs elected under May in 2017 are down to 289 now. Not all of those 29 lost Tory seats will be reclaimed at the election. Further Tory losses are likely in Scotland and to the resurgent Liberal Democrats. The Brexit party, although diminished, has not gone away and its votes could still cost the Tories some marginals. And Labour cannot be written off in a campaign, in spite of Jeremy Corbyn’s poor current ratings.

The issue of timing adds volatility. Although he desperately wants to frame the contest as a populist battle of people versus parliament, any outcome is likely to be politically suboptimal for Johnson. An election before 31 October helps Nigel Farage because the Brexit outcome remains uncertain. An election afterwards depends on whether Johnson can say he has delivered Brexit. But any deadline extension like the one written into this week’s anti-no-deal bill is a double whammy for Johnson, since he will have failed to deliver and the future would also remain uncertain. Logically, therefore, he has a huge motive to secure a deal of the kind that Labour MP Stephen Kinnock succeeded in writing into the new bill. But logic went out of the window long ago.

Whenever someone mentions Johnson’s absurd self-identification with Winston Churchill, recall what Stanley Baldwin, himself also a pretty successful Tory leader, said about Churchill in the 1930s. “One of these days I’ll make a few casual remarks about Winston,” Baldwin told Thomas Jones. “I’ve got it all ready. I’m going to say that when Winston was born lots of fairies swooped down on his cradle [with] gifts – imagination, eloquence, industry, ability. And then came a fairy who said ‘No one person has a right to so many gifts’ picked him up and gave him such a shake and twist that, with all these gifts, he was denied judgment and wisdom. And that is why while we delight to listen to him in this House we do not take his advice.”

Judgment and wisdom are precisely the qualities that Johnson lacks too. This week, most MPs decided they do not trust his advice either. They were absolutely right. If and when an election finally comes, there is no good reason to suppose that the voters will react as differently as Johnson hopes.