A
pyrrhic victory? Boris Johnson wakes up to the costs of Brexit
Vote
Leave’s poster boy should have been crowing, so why was his
post-referendum press conference so subdued?
Gaby Hinsliff
Friday 24 June 2016
18.24 BST
“If we are
victorious in one more battle … we shall be utterly ruined.”
Like the good
intellectual that he’s vigorously pretended not to be of late,
Boris Johnson will probably know that line. It’s from the Greek
historian Plutarch’s account of the battle that gave us the phrase
“pyrrhic victory”, the kind of victory won at such cost that you
almost wish you’d lost.
In theory, Johnson
woke up on Friday morning having won the war. After David Cameron’s
announcement that he would step down come October, Johnson is now the
heir presumptive – albeit at this stage very presumptive – to the
Tory leadership, perhaps only four months away from running the
country.
He has everything he
ever wanted. It’s just that somehow, as he fought his way through
booing crowds on his Islington doorstep before holding an
uncharacteristically subdued press conference on Friday morning, it
didn’t really look that way.
One group of Tory
remainers watching the speech on TV jeered out loud when a rather
pale Johnson said leaving Europe needn’t mean pulling up the
drawbridge; that this epic victory for Nigel Farage could somehow
“take the wind out of the sails” of anyone playing politics with
immigration. Too late for all that now, one said.
The scariest
possibility, however, is that he actually meant it. That like most of
Westminster, Johnson always imagined we’d grudgingly vote to stay
in the end. That he too missed the anger bubbling beneath the
surface, and is now as shocked as anyone else by what has happened.
“People talk about
reluctant remainers, but I think there have been a lot of reluctant
Brexiters around, people who voted leave thinking it wouldn’t
happen but they’d be able to vent and to tell all their friends at
dinner parties they’d done it,” said one Tory minister.
“He thought what
all those reluctant Brexiters thought: it would be a vote for remain,
he would be seen as having stood up for a principle.” After which
leave’s newest martyr could simply have bided his time for a year
or so before being triumphantly installed in Downing Street.
It’s perfectly
possible, of course, that the Tories on both sides who suspect
Johnson was never an outer in his bones are plain wrong, that the
anonymous Labour MP who hotly accused him on Friday of jeopardising
thousands of ordinary people’s jobs just to secure one for himself
was doing him a terrible injustice.
Perhaps Johnson
really did have a last-minute epiphany, declaring for leave in the
sober realisation that this was always how it might end – Scotland
demanding independence, Northern Ireland’s fragile political
settlement at risk, Marine Le Pen jubilant, the Bank of England
stumping up £250bn to stabilise the market. Perhaps he’s still
convinced all will be fine eventually.
And let’s hope to
God he’s right. Any remainer who doesn’t pray to be proved wrong
about Brexit is callous, wishing disaster on people who are unable to
afford it. But right now, what scorched earth Johnson stands to
inherit – a nation febrile and divided, teetering on the brink of
economic and constitutional crisis. It’s all over for David Cameron
now. But it feels, too, like the end of a broader modernising
movement to which both he and Johnson belonged.
The deeper fear
among Tory remainers now isn’t just of a recession. It’s about
the rise of something new in British politics, unleashed when
politicians with scant respect for truth meet desperate voters; and
for the backlash to come, when it sinks in that Brexit hasn’t ended
immigration overnight or magically given depressed communities their
futures back. Already, one wonders what those who voted desperately
for change make of being told there’s no rush to invoke article 50.
No wonder Tory
leavers wanted Cameron to stay for a bit while they scratched
together a plan for dismounting safely from the tiger they’ve been
riding. But control is what the Brexiters said they wanted. Now
they’ve got it, and they’re about to find out how it feels.
It’s not over yet,
of course. There are plenty of Tory MPs grimly determined to make
them pay for whatever dark furies they have helped unleash; to lie
down in front of the Boris bulldozer.
The obvious name
flying around the “anyone but Boris for leader” camp on Friday
morning was that of Theresa May. Some of those who backed George
Osborne before the chancellor knowingly burned what remained of his
ambitions by publishing that fantasy Brexit punishment budget will
now back her, as will some Tory women worried that female voters
distrust the philandering Johnson.
The women’s
minister Nicky Morgan is also testing the water, but May probably has
a headstart. The home secretary’s mysterious absence from the
airwaves during the referendum campaign disguised a fair bit of
local-level campaigning for remain, reaching activists likely to
support her.
There is also the
glimmer of an alternative emerging in Stephen Crabb, the work and
pensions secretary endorsed by his good friend the Scottish Tory
leader Ruth Davidson, who leads a small but interesting group of
working class Tories keen to tackle the economic insecurity exposed
by the Brexit vote.
But he’s a
relatively unknown quantity even inside Westminster, let alone
outside. The blunt truth is that nobody else in Conservative politics
gets begged for selfies as Johnson did on every walkabout; none has
his charisma or his reach. If his name is on a shortlist of two put
forward to Tory members, few doubt he would be the runaway winner.
And if MPs conspire
to keep him off that list during the preliminary stages of the
contest? Well, imagine the consequences for those who have already
outraged constituents by voting remain. Imagine the rage, the mass
defections to Ukip, were Johnson to be seen to be blocked by yet
another elite afraid of ordinary people getting it wrong.
So don’t imagine
his colleagues haven’t noticed Johnson’s casualness with the
facts during this campaign, or the unsavoury company he sometimes
kept. Don’t think they don’t resent an old Etonian journalist on
£250,000 a year playing the anti-establishment hero, or hope for
something else to turn up. But don’t imagine either that some
aren’t wearily wondering if this couldn’t be made to work.
Johnson is far from
a buffoon. He’s an agile thinker, gifted communicator and natural
opportunist who made a reasonable fist of governing London after
recruiting some reliable deputies (enter Michael Gove). He’s smart
enough to have learned from the recent Labour leadership campaign –
in which managerially competent candidates were slaughtered for being
on the wrong side of a visceral grassroots argument – that elites
only survive in this febrile climate by pleasing the masses. Perhaps
somehow it will all come together.
It’s just that on
Friday morning Johnson didn’t look like a man with a plan that’s
all working perfectly. He looked more like a king unable to take more
such victories.
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