The split over Boris Johnson’s future is just the
start of a massive Tory identity crisis
Rafael Behr
The Conservative party remade itself in the image of a
leader without conscience, integrity or values. So now what?
‘Tory MPs know Boris Johnson is a problem, but also
that removing him will expose how much deeper the problem goes.
Wed 8 Jun
2022 08.00 BST
In the
thinned ranks of Conservative MPs who still support Boris Johnson, few consider
him a man of honour. Perhaps none. Their loyalty can’t be composed of moral
inspiration or shared principle, since the prime minister believes only in his
entitlement to live in Downing Street. Mostly it is fear of losing current
privileges and hope of gaining new ones.
Some MPs
have been promised promotion; others cling to ministerial jobs that would never
have been available if competence had been the recruitment criterion.
Policy is
not absent from the transaction. A wounded prime minister without convictions
and desperate for friends is attractive to ideologues whose conditional backing
can be wielded as a veto over the government’s agenda. That is why there was a
U-turn last month over an anti-obesity plan that would have banned some junk
food advertising and supermarket deals. MPs who hated the infringement of
market freedoms threatened Johnson with letters of no confidence. He yielded.
This
explains also why 22 Conservative donors, responsible for more than £18m in
past contributions to party coffers, signed a letter offering “unwavering
support” to the incumbent leader. A man fully on the hook to his political
creditors is reliably biddable.
And then
there is Europe, ever present in Tory feuds. It is the old infidelity,
unmentioned in the bickering stage of a marital tiff, that gets blurted out
when tempers flare. In the hours before Monday’s confidence vote, Nadine
Dorries, the culture secretary, declared that Johnson’s critics were
disgruntled remainers. Jacob Rees-Mogg, the cabinet’s official groomer of
Eurosceptic hobby horses, denounced the ballot as a plot “to undermine the
Brexit referendum”.
That is
nonsense as a description of Tories who oppose the prime minister. Their number
includes plenty of hardline leavers. But as a premonition of the trauma that
Johnson’s departure will one day inflict on the Conservative party, it is right
to invoke Brexit. Sacking prime ministers calls their legacies into question.
That doesn’t mean that Tories will suddenly start pining for lost intimacies
with Brussels, but new leadership will reopen the possibility of a relationship
based on diplomacy instead of threats, facts instead of fictions.
In Tory
mythology, Johnson brought the party back from the brink of annihilation in
2019 by getting a Brexit deal. He succeeded where Theresa May had failed and
was rewarded with a landslide election victory. What actually happened is that
Johnson hit the same negotiating impasse as May – the issue of the Northern
Ireland border – but resolved it differently. While May had struggled to find
compromises that would operate in reality, her successor dispensed with that
onerous obligation, freeing himself to do a deal in the realm of Brexit
fantasy. He signed things without intending to implement them, then lied about
their contents.
The current
threat to enact a law that would override the Northern Ireland protocol amounts
to an admission that the original deal was a bad one after all. Fixing it
requires a return to the quagmire from which Johnson’s election was supposed to
be the release. The monument where Tory MPs pay tribute to their leader’s
record – Boris rampant over Brussels – will one day have to come down.
It is
hardly surprising that Rees-Mogg and friends want to defer that moment, and not
just because a replacement will probably end up looking more like May’s deal.
To contemplate the succession at all is to ask what direction the Conservative
party should take next, which is an uncomfortable question after years in
deviation from economic, diplomatic and strategic rationality.
Johnson
loyalists complain that the rebels cannot agree on an alternative leader; that
none of the potential successors has celebrity heft to rival the incumbent.
What they mean is that no one can repeat the trick of winning over traditional
Labour supporters in those fabled “red wall” seats in northern England and the
Midlands, while also holding the affections of a conventional Conservative base
in the south.
The flaw in
that defence is that Johnson himself shows little prospect of repeating the trick,
which was as much a function of Jeremy Corbyn repelling voters as it was proof
of a magnetic “Boris effect”. Opinion polls, council ballots and byelections
suggest there are plenty of demagnetised seats available to a less toxic Labour
leader.
The appeal
to electoral alchemy that only Johnson can perform is born of fear that Britain
doesn’t really want to buy what the Conservative party is selling, except when
it has a talented fraudster at the sales counter. It is a recognition that the
Tory majority is brittle, not least because it is glued together with votes
that might have gone to Nigel Farage’s Brexit party if he hadn’t withdrawn
candidates from 317 Conservative-held seats. Farage had tormented the Tories
for at least a decade prior to that ceasefire.
Brexit
merged two antithetical forces: a Conservative party that traditionally
convenes around pillars of the British establishment and a demagogic
insurrection that defines itself as a scourge of the establishment. Johnson’s
campaigning talent was to represent both things at once. But it was an
illusion, a spell that can’t be recast once broken. No wonder so many Tory MPs
are disoriented and alarmed. They know Johnson is a problem, but also that
removing him will expose how much deeper the problem goes. They remade their
party in the image of a leader without conscience, integrity or values beyond
the desperate pursuit of power. So they don’t like this disreputable “Boris”
character that they now see in front of them? They are looking in the mirror.
Rafael Behr
is a Guardian columnist
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