It Could Be Said #28 Do Nothing Boris? That Might Just Survive
Lame Ducks May Not Be Able To Fly, But They Can Survive
Well, it was Happy Monday for him after all – one cannot imagine the work event that they had in Downing Street last night to celebrate Boris Johnson winning the coveted Vote of Confidence from his parliamentary party.
It says something about how badly Monday seemed to be going for the Prime Minister that when the announcement came, him securing the confidence of just shy of 59% of the parliamentary seemed somewhat anticlimactic. Ultimately the one competent decision his operation made was to go for a snap vote, so reducing the time he and they had to alienate his colleagues. It also denied any wavering Cabinet ministers the chance to sleep on whether they really couldn’t do any better than a man who had been beset by scandals about his personal conduct since February 2021.
Mysteriously Johnson chose to celebrate his victory in a short pool clip where he was barracked with questions, rather than a dignified statement. The mistake did nothing to add lustre to his attempt to spin his victory margin as something impressive. It’s worth just outlining how unimpressive it was:
The proportion that voted for Johnson is closer to a Margaret Thatcher who resigned two days later, than Theresa May who fought on for another six months. Of course, as we explained previously, Thatcher had just fallen short of the crucial 15ppt winning threshold to avoid a second round, which people really should remember before claiming that Johnson should follow her high-minded example of quitting after a lacklustre showing.
Johnson also flagged that he had increased the number of MPs that supported him far beyond what he had received in the leadership election. That sounded like a meaningless talking, but having looked at the figures, now I’m not so sure.
Johnson wasn’t lying but that was to be expected given that back in 2019 the Brexiter vote was split between him and Gove on the final round, and the parliamentary party was 42 members smaller. What is striking is how badly Theresa May did – the parliamentary party was only slightly smaller than it had been when she was elected, and she only barely improved on her performance in the leadership election despite now possessing all the patronage powers of the premiership. And you must place that into the broader context where both John Major and Iain Duncan Smith secured double-digit increases in the number of MPs who supported them when their leadership was challenged from the number who voted them leader, despite the parliamentary having either significantly shrunk or stayed the same size. That suggests absent the boost the pre-Hague/Norman rules gave MPs, May was uniquely vulnerable to MPs deciding to have a second go at removing her rather than we should all assume the same happens to Boris Johnson.
Crucially the MPs that withheld their confidence in 2018 were most likely the same MPs who voted for other candidates in 2017; hardcore brexiters. This was the true reason why May’s premiership imploded whereas similarly beleaguered Prime Ministers managed to limp towards the General Election. The invoking of Article 50 imposed a ticking clock on her premiership and compelled her to proposed measures that were difficult, complicated, and unpopular. Ignore those who blame the Tories horrific performance in the European Elections for her decision to go; she had already promised to go beforehand. What forced her to quit was the Cabinet’s horror at the negotiations with Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, and the signs that some of her closest advisors were willing to consider continued Customs Union membership or some form of Second Referendum. Likewise, Thatcher forced the reconsideration of her own leadership through refusing to u-turn on the question of the poll-tax, and once again, raising the spectre that she would again use her position to stand athwart further European integration. Meanwhile it was being too keen on war in the Middle East that provoked the Cabinet convulsions which fatally undermined both Tony Blair and David Lloyd George’s positions.
Yesterday I said that the option of masterful inactivity that John Major pursued was not open to Boris Johnson. And that is still the case; it’s hard to see how anyone could produce a budget this November that marries small tax cuts and spending rises as Ken Clarke did in 1995. Back then the occupants of Downing Street could begin to harvest the rewards of difficult decisions taken the years before, for today’s occupants the hard decisions are still to take.
Or are they? Because there is of course a third way. Which is that at every turn you do the minimum possible to keep the show on the road, and hope that everyone else in the parliamentary party prefers thin gruel to a hefty course of something they dislike. Better yet there’s a genuine excuse for why the Government can achieve so little; no Government in the Western World is achieving much of anything right now as they are all buffeted by unpicking the consequences of the novel pandemic and lockdown, the war in Ukraine, and the return of high inflation. And if you stress that all you’re doing is firefighting, then those members of the Cabinet who may fancy to be Prime Minister one day, start to imagine getting burnt rather than standing in the limelight. This is of course the model that Gordon Brown pursued as he forced marched his party to losing the 2010 General Election.
Whilst it’s not in Johnson’s nature to admit that his government is buffeted by global forces, he really should look to Brown as his model for survival. Whilst he should give up any hope of a significantly reimagining of his team, he should do whatever it takes to bring back his own version of Peter Mandleson back to the centre of Government, as things only started to go badly wrong when Michael Gove stopped being his work ethic. But beyond that the general pattern the Government has sketched out these past few months seems sustainable unless the Cabinet discovers either a brain, heart, or spine. That is Johnson appease the left by bullying Sunak to loosen the purse strings, Truss appeases hard brexiters with sabre rattling over Northern Ireland and new free trade deals, and his various outriders throw the ugliest culture war red meat to the base in the party and press.
It's no way to run the country, but just as Gordon Brown and John Major discovered, that won’t be Boris Johnson nor his Cabinet’s problem after the next election, will it?