Could the Johnson premiership prove to be the shortest ever? A leaf through the history books

When you’ve waited for a job your whole life, you’d hope to have the time to give it a proper go. But today, as the boy who grew up wanting to be “world king” stands on the threshold of Downing Street, his many detractors are chattering about whether Boris Johnson could just prove to be one of shortest-serving prime ministers in history.

So what are the benchmarks, and is there really reason to think that the blond bombshell could blow itself up in record time?

Overall, British prime ministers have not fared too badly in job security terms—there have been 54 of them since the inception of the office 298 years ago, which makes the average tenure about five and a half years. But for several of them this was split up with gaps across different administrations. And so the average term is shorter, coming in at a shade under four years.

With three years to go until the next scheduled general election, which is nowadays supposed to be fixed by law, for the summer of 2022, and now with a two-to-one mandate under his belt, Johnson could, in ordinary times, hope to get pretty close to that benchmark without doing anything special at all.

The times are, however, the opposite of ordinary, and not only because the referendum upended over 40 years of trade and foreign policy. Now, it could just be that Johnson, a chaotic character, will thrive in chaotic times. But the old parties are splintering, both in the Commons (where there are currently 16 independents on top of the five deserters in the endlessly-shape shifting Independent Group for Change) and in the country, where the polls reveal the steady two-party politics at the start of the year has suddenly and dramatically morphed since the spring into an even four-way tussle. Rather than looking only to British history for guidance on how long a prime minister could last, should we also look to other parts of the world in eras of tumult? Like, for example, the French Fourth Republic, which in just under 12 years got through 21 premierships, some of them for tenures that were counted in days.

Today—as in post-war France—the very ground rules of politics are in contention in a way we’ve not seen in modern Britain. In the leadership campaign, we had serious talk about proroguing parliament in order to bypass its will. Johnson’s is the first since the short-lived ministry of Alec Douglas-Home (which lasted three days short of a year in 1963-64) to have triggered pre-emptive resignations, remarkably including that of the outgoing chancellor Philip Hammond. He is also the first PM of the democratic age to have been chosen neither by the public in an election or their representatives in parliament, but rather by a self-selecting cadre of party members. And, of course, this is a hung parliament in which the government’s vanishingly thin effective majority of three (likely to drop to two in the pending Brecon by-election) is achieved only in combination with the ruthlessly self-serving Democratic Unionists.

Putting that arithmetic together with all the whispers about potential desertions from Tories resolutely opposed to Johnson’s dalliance with a no-deal Brexit, the first question is whether Johnson is absolutely certain to get a proper go at being PM at all. Could he like Lord Bath—the Lady Jane Grey of prime ministers, who was arguably PM for 48 hours in 1746—find himself out of office before he has even assembled an administration?

The first question I asked the Institute for Government’s Catherine Haddon, the greatest guru on such questions, was whether the Queen is in fact actually obliged to call on Johnson at all. “It is not,” she told me, “completely unambiguous.” While dusty precedent suggests that the advice of the outgoing PM is important, even—Haddon says—the experts are “divided” on exactly how much sway this advice holds. But for senior British politicians it is quite simply understood that you do what you can to avoid putting the monarch in a tight spot. And a buttoned-up traditionalist like Theresa May, whatever dark private fantasies she might entertain about poisoning the regal ear against Johnson, is certainly not going to do that.

The specific thing that it falls to May to advise Elizabeth on is who is “best placed” to command a majority in the Commons. And Haddon says it “seems pretty obvious” that, for all his looming problems, that person in the first instance is Johnson. He starts, after all, as the recognised leader of the biggest party, and inherits an accommodation with the Democratic Unionists which gives him a very small but real majority, which has to be assumed to be there until it has shown not to be. But with one former ministerial colleague turned foe—Alan Duncan—already this week attempting to test the confidence of the Commons in the coming Johnson premiership, we must assume that a way will be found to establish whether or not the majority holds before long.

Regardless of whether or not distaste for Johnson drives MPs to take the ultimate step of deserting their party and voting his government down, they might very well find ways to thwart what he has made his defining mission—delivering a fairly hard Brexit by 31^stOctober—and in a manner which could make it impossible for him to muddle through.

If it became clear that the EU27 were not going to give him the “improved deal” he seeks, and that MPs were hell-bent on blocking his fall-back of a no deal, he would have only a limited range of options, any one of which could severely limit his time in No 10. He could: chance his arm with reviving May’s deal (trashing his stock with much of his party); eat all his past words and go for a new referendum (ditto); or, he could attempt to suspend parliament to force no deal through (which really would put the Queen in a bind, as some would advise her to shunt Johnson out, and install a more consensual PM who could have a go at forming a government of national unity).

Because all of these options look so dire, the chances are rising on the one remaining alternative—rolling the dice on an early general election. And there is a chance—perhaps a good chance—this one could work very well for him. But should it go as wrong as May’s snap poll in 2017 and the Tories again lose seats without picking up new allies, then he would be out of No 10 within about 90 days of arriving.

This would indeed make his ministry amongst the very shortest lived in British history. To find briefer spells in No 10, one needs to go back not one century but two, to pre-Victorian times—an era in which Britain was frequently isolated on the continent, when its American entanglements were extremely charged, and when political parties were fluid and unstable. These were years which sometimes crunched through prime ministers like pringles. The last ministry headed by the Duke of Wellington, for example, collapsed after less than a month in 1834.

The Tories were splintering over Catholic Emancipation and other things, by some accounts into as many as four factions, when—in 1827—George Canning finally reached the top of the greasy poll. And his government was already in jeopardy when he snuffed it after just four months. Amid bitter arguments about how many Whigs could serve in a Tory government, the man who followed him, Viscount Goderich, lasted only 11 days longer than his late predecessor.

A generation or two earlier, with the American War of Independence overshadowing everything, the Marquess of Rockingham lasted only a tad under three months, equivalent to Johnson’s quotient in the event of an early October election gone wrong.

But a slightly more heartening precedent for Johnson, perhaps, is the Duke of Portland. Although his first administration lasted only a few months in 1783, he got a second go in 1807.

And this was a war administration where War Secretary Viscount Castlereagh and Foreign Secretary George Canning literally drew pistols at one another, when political infighting bubbled over into a duel. However bad today’s Tory infighting, Johnson can comfort himself that his colleagues are unlikely to take literal shots at one another. And this second Portland premiership lasted a fairly respectable two-and-a-half years.