For the Conservative Party, the whole point of Boris Johnson was that he was a winner. Tory MPs never really loved him, or saw him as one of their own, but they respected his electoral appeal. Johnson was the “Heineken politician,” who could reach out beyond the Conservative tribe, first as London mayor and then as prime minister. Lynton Crosby, the Australian political strategist who has worked closely with him, once told me he was a “multigrain politician in a white bread age,” who through the force of his personality was able to weave together a new political coalition.
That is no longer the case. The byelections in Wakefield and Tiverton & Honiton show that Johnson is now a loser from Yorkshire to Devon. Under him, the Conservatives are haemorrhaging support among their new supporters in the so-called “red wall” and their traditional voters in true blue Tory territory. For MPs who have an eye on their own political fortunes, the pincer effect that was dramatically demonstrated in the north and south of the country on Thursday night is a terrifying foreshadowing of the next general election. In Tiverton & Honiton, the Liberal Democrats overturned the biggest Conservative margin in a byelection, and in Wakefield Labour secured a 12.7 per cent swing which, if replicated across the country, would be enough to get Keir Starmer to No 10.
The two results are proof that the alliance between Boris and the Brexiteers is over. These were both Leave-voting seats but they gave the prime minister no credit for “Getting Brexit Done.” They also show the increasing willingness of Labour and Liberal Democrat supporters to vote tactically. Where once Johnson was able to unify disparate parts of the electorate to support his party, now he unites the same groups against the Conservatives. That these byelections were caused by the fact that one former Tory MP was convicted as a paedophile and another admitted watching porn in the House of Commons only adds to the sense of a party spiralling out of control under a leader without a moral compass who has lost not one but two ethics advisers.
The prime minister immediately tried to spin his party’s disastrous night as a wider verdict on the economic situation, telling reporters at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Rwanda: “we’ve got to recognise that voters are going through a tough time at the moment” and saying, defiantly: “we will keep going addressing the concerns of people until we get through this patch.” The contrast with Oliver Dowden, who resigned as party chairman, was stark. Dowden published a carefully crafted letter insisting that “we cannot carry on with business as usual. Somebody must take responsibility.” He must have known that the Tories’ routing at the polls was not really his fault.
There can be no doubt that the byelection results were a personal rejection of the prime minister after a succession of scandals including Partygate. Johnson’s success was based on his flair for tearing up the political rule book and he is now being tarnished by his failure to follow the rules he imposed on everyone else. As the veteran Tory MP Roger Gale told the Today Programme on Radio 4, the vote should be seen as a “message of no confidence” in Johnson. “We need to be clear this is not any longer about remain or leave, this is about the reputation of the Conservative Party for honesty, for decency and for compassion. It’s about the soul of our party.”
The prime minister has always believed that the ends justify the means but he has no idea what he wants to achieve with power. It is all about clinging onto office. One veteran of the Vote Leave campaign says “he’s adopting the tactics we used over Brexit but without any defining purpose or strategy.” The cynical briefing that Downing Street is considering ushering in a new generation of grammar schools—a cause close to the heart of Graham Brady, the chairman of the 1922 committee who just happens to be responsible for the rules governing leadership elections—is the latest example of the desperate measures Johnson is willing to use to protect his own position.
It will not work. Geoffrey Clifton Brown, the treasurer of the backbench committee, made clear that a rule-change was still very much on the cards. As he put it: “We will hear what the prime minister says and then we will have to make some difficult decisions.” Johnson is unlikely to have won over any waverers with his unapologetic performance in Kigali. The intervention by Michael Howard, the former Tory leader who declared the prime minister should resign, shows which way the wind is blowing. The Conservative Party and the country “would be better off under new leadership,” he said, and “members of the cabinet should very carefully consider their positions.” The explanation for his shift was damning: Johnson’s “biggest asset has always been his ability to win votes and I’m afraid yesterday’s results make clear that he no longer has that ability,” Howard said. “Yesterday the electorate delivered its verdict.”
A former Cabinet minister says “it’s a question of when not if” the prime minister is ousted, but warns that the longer he stays on as leader the more damage he will do to his party’s reputation. “It’s up to the cabinet now really, but for the most part they are such a bunch of spineless tossers.” Another senior Tory MP compares his party to the Branch Davidians, the religious sect led by a charismatic leader from a dysfunctional background called David Koresh. The cult ended up under siege in its Waco compound, culminating in a massacre. For their sake of personal survival, the Conservatives will surely conclude that they cannot go into the next general election with their current leader.
