One of the reasons why, against the grain, I think Boris Johnson will survive for a while longer is that he alone unites the disparate and increasingly warring factions in the post-Brexit Tory coalition. This isn’t surprising, since he himself put the coalition together—red wall/blue wall, north/south, wet/dry, hard Brexit/soft Brexit. He also created a populist/elitist celebrity brand which no one else could conceivably carry off. Borisism ain’t dead yet.
“Ism?” I hear you say. “Surely that clown isn’t an ‘ism.’ He doesn’t believe in anything besides himself!” Indeed that last sentence is essentially my argument about Johnson—“the Prime Etonian”—in my new book on political leadership, launched last week in a fascinating Prospect discussion with Michael Heseltine about his life and achievements, which you can watch here.
However, our narcissistic prime minister came to power—and holds power—by projecting a vision of national renewal which, however flawed in my view, has so far been more electorally convincing than anything on offer from any other leader since Tony Blair.
He even has a label for it. “I’m a Brexity Hezza,” he told some members of his first Cabinet. “I can see the Brexity; I can’t see the Hezza,” the great man responded with magisterial disdain. But most Tory-inclined voters and politicians continue to buy into their leader’s idiosyncratic brand of energetic, nationalistic liberal-statism-in-one-country which, whether Boris himself actually believes in it or not, is the compound of Borisism.
If the Lib Dems win the North Shropshire by-election on Thursday, that doesn’t really change this position. Only when Labour starts winning by-elections directly from the Tories will there be evidence of emerging public support for a new and different government, rather than a protest vote against the present one. The Lib Dem by-election victory followed by Tory re-election over Labour in the following general election is a pattern we saw throughout the Thatcherite 1980s and early 1990s until Blair.
Leaving aside yet more tawdry Borisist behaviour with regard to Downing Street parties which aren’t parties, not to mention the Tory violation of electoral law over donations for the makeover of No 10, this week shows Borisism at work. His fanatical right-wing base, energised by Brexit, has moved its caravan on to attacking vaccine passports, new controls to contain the Omicron variant and the latest wave of higher taxes aimed at doing a bit of levelling-up and funding the pandemic measures.
The increasingly wild Steve Baker, organiser of the European Research Group which “did” hard Brexit, is to be found organising most of these new campaigns, plus a bit of climate-scepticism. Where is Boris? Arguing, or at least indulging, both sides on all these issues, but in actual policy acting as a Brexity Hezza: just about holding a coalition together which still extends well into the political centre, with its populist riffs on levelling up and France-bashing, plus just-about-enough support for the NHS, the measures announced at COP26 and the social state.
Ultimately there are three reasons why I think Boris will fall and fail. He is simply too incompetent. The amorality in his administration is simply too flagrant. And Brexit itself is simply too unviable to make the Hezza bit work. But until an alternative leader is able to expose all three, he will probably continue to fill the void. On Brexit, there still isn’t another leader prepared even to talk about it, as Hezza himself decried at the end of our conversation.
The key point is that Johnson won’t fall soon just because what he is doing is so different from what went before, even though Borisism ultimately fails as a project of national renewal. The timelines of failure and falling are often different in politics, unless there is a deep crisis in real time.
In particular, it is a great mistake to think that political ideologies have to conform to previously established patterns, or be projected in what used to be a conventional way. Most successful leaders in democracies, good and bad, create novel and broad coalitions of interests and supporters and reconcile them in new and surprising ways. They are also innovative and arresting in the way they project. Think Thatcher, far more unconventional than Boris in her day by the very fact of being a woman—indeed the only woman MP in her own Cabinet for her entire 11-year premiership.
When Tony Blair was pioneering his successful “Third Way,” with its themes of “beyond old left and new right,” “enterprise and social justice,” “competence and compassion” and “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime,” it was fashionable on the left to say that this was an unprincipled hotchpotch which would never work. Roy Hattersley, an unsuccessful contestant for the leadership of the unsuccessful Labour party of the 1980s, devoted a Guardian column over many years to deriding Blair as bound to fail because the Labour leader didn’t believe in, well, Hattersley’s own unelectable brand—itself a hotchpotch of Marxist state control and more liberal economics and social policy, sketched out in a book by Tony Crosland published back in 1956.
But Blair didn’t fail. He animated a broad social coalition for more than a decade, won three elections, and delivered his promised Third Way combination of a thriving private enterprise economy, greater social justice and transformed public services.
Ironically the Third Way harked back—consciously—to a book suggesting a similar combination of centre-left and centre-right activism behind a “one-nation” mission of national renewal, published in 1938, two decades before Crosland’s. It was called The Middle Way—and the author was Harold Macmillan, whom Heseltine rated in our conversation as the most successful Tory post-war modernising prime minister of his lifetime.
What is the book presaging Borisism? I can only come up with one: Jeeves and Wooster. Which isn’t really a plan for national renewal.
