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Michael
made an odd assassin – but then Boris was a strange Caesar
Gaby Hinsliff
Thursday 30 June
2016 19.11 BST
The
Conservative establishment always calculates how to hold on to power
– and swiftly neutralises its weakest link
“Et tu, Michael?”
So said Boris Johnson’s father Stanley, plaintively, shortly after
it emerged that his son was destined after all never to wear the
crown.
And it’s true
there is something about the ruthlessness of it all – Boris felled
by his trusted friend and deputy, just as he was within touching
distance of the thing he has wanted all his life – that takes the
breath away.
This was perhaps the
most vertiginous fall in modern political history. Seven days ago the
party was bracing itself for BoJo, trying to bury all those nagging
doubts about his suitability for high office. Now he is yesterday’s
man, seemingly undone like all good tragic heroes by his own fatal
flaws. What rich insights he now has to draw upon for his most
pressing current professional commitment, a forthcoming biography of
Shakespeare.
But if Michael Gove
makes for an odd assassin then Boris makes for an even stranger
Caesar. If anything he was always cast as the party’s Prince Hal,
ready to cast off rakish immaturity and assume his rightful place as
king when the moment demanded. It’s just that being king turns out
to have been a great deal harder than it looked.
Ever since it became
clear in the early hours of last Friday morning that Britain had
thought the supposedly unthinkable, Theresa May’s camp has been
successfully positioning her as the “serious person for serious
times”, a cool head in a crisis. She might not exactly be brimming
with charisma, they argue, but she’s proven over six years in a
tough cabinet job that she knows what she’s doing; not like that
slapdash, reckless Boris. Her promise to “just get on with the job
in front of me”, as she put it during Thursday’s launch, was
perfectly calibrated for an era when the job has never looked more
daunting.
But while she has
long tapped successfully into deep frustration about what the
business minister Anna Soubry calls “these boys messing about” –
a sense among Tory women that they’ve had enough of men playing
power games while others do the heavy lifting – it was Boris who
ended up making her case for her.
Thursday’s vote
created a powerful feeling at Westminster that if you broke it, you
own it; that having recklessly incited voters to shatter the
political consensus, it was for Brexiters to sweep up the mess. What
became painfully obvious very quickly was that Boris barely knew
where to find the dustpan.
A shellshocked
morning after a press conference during which he failed to reveal any
coherent plan for what came next was followed by a Saturday spent
playing cricket with Princess Diana’s brother rather than visibly
knuckling down. When he did choose to set out his thinking on the way
forward, it was not in a speech to the nation but in his own highly
lucrative column for Monday’s Daily Telegraph – and what a
muddled column it was.
In it, Johnson
basically argued for a magical world of unicorns and rainbows; a deal
where Britons were still free to live and work abroad but could
somehow have curbs on European nationals coming here, and where we
could remain part of the single market with all its economic benefits
but not bother with all the cumbersome red tape. It was as if the
real Boris – the liberal Londoner who could preach the economic
benefits of immigration to elderly Tory activists and get them eating
out of his hand – was trying to reconcile himself with the Boris he
had been forced to play for the last six months and failing dismally.
Remainers feared the
“have your cake and eat it” plan would not survive five minutes
of contact with the enemy. But it was the fury of leavers that really
blew the doors off.
The leave campaign
had indicated throughout that Brexit would mean leaving the single
market and thus ending the free movement of people. Could it be that
in his heart of hearts he never really wanted to leave Europe, and
was now trying desperately to ensure that Britain did not?
To make matters
worse, when angry Tory leavers started asking what the hell was going
on, the response from the Boris camp was confusion. Boris, we were
told, had been “tired” when he wrote the column, so maybe it
wasn’t phrased right.
The reality of how
such policymaking on the hoof might sound coming from a prime
minister – someone who can wipe billions off a stock market
overnight with one clumsy U-turn – began sinking in. And with the
May camp now signalling that the home secretary would be tougher on
immigration, the ground began to shift. By Wednesday Boris was no
longer the nailed-on favourite, the candidate ambitious MPs felt they
had to back whatever their reservations.
Boris’s second
great mistake, however, was to risk making the rightwing press look
ridiculous. Both the Mail and the Sun backed Brexit, promising their
readers a rosy economic future where all their fears about
immigration would be solved; now Boris looked as if he was weaselling
out of the deal. The Mail’s editor-in-chief, Paul Dacre, has long
regarded Boris as morally reprehensible, because of his serial
affairs, and fundamentally unserious, enjoying a much warmer personal
relationship with vicar’s daughter May. Rupert Murdoch, meanwhile,
does not take kindly to being made a fool of. Enter perhaps
Wednesday’s leaked email from Gove’s wife, the Daily Mail
columnist Sarah Vine, urging her husband to get more specific
assurances from Boris.
If he wouldn’t
give the rightwing press everything it wanted then perhaps, of
course, that is ultimately to Boris’s credit. Perhaps at the very
last minute he was clumsily trying to do the right thing, to plot a
more liberal way forward. Well, too late now, and it’s easy to
conclude he has nobody to blame but himself. But perhaps that’s not
quite the whole story.
If nothing else,
what the last 24 hours have shown is the sheer ferocity of the
Conservative party’s instinct for survival. But it is also
testament to the enduring power of the Conservative establishment in
Westminster, Fleet Street and beyond; to the ruthless efficiency with
which it calculates how it can best hold on to power. It has
correctly identified and neutralised its weakest link, even though
until last week he was seemingly its strongest.
Already there are
signs of leavers and remainers starting to bury differences over the
referendum, moving on to the pragmatic question of who is best placed
to manage the crisis ahead – and of course, where their own
personal interests lie. The country may still be as broken and
divided as it was last Thursday, and the Labour party perhaps even
more so, but an apparently devastated Tory party is rebuilding itself
at astonishing speed, like a cyborg regenerating. Life will go on.
The king is dead. Long live the king or queen
|
A
very British betrayal
How
the Brexit ‘dream ticket’ fell apart.
By TOM MCTAGUE and
ALEX SPENCE 6/30/16, 11:25 PM CET
LONDON — It was
just after 8:30 a.m. when Michael Gove’s “treachery” began to
filter through.
Boris Johnson’s
closest allies had gathered in a small office off Horseferry Road in
central London, near the Grey Coat Hospital school where David
Cameron and Gove, the justice secretary, send their children. The
office had only just been rented as Johnson’s leadership campaign
headquarters.
Johnson, the former
mayor of London and the man who led Britain out of Europe, was set to
announce his campaign to become prime minister just around the corner
at Westminster’s St Ermin’s Hotel at 11:30 a.m.
It should have been
a triumphant occasion, another step to Johnson’s coronation at the
pinnacle of British politics.
Johnson’s
withdrawal from the race leaves Home Secretary Theresa May as the
clear frontrunner.
Instead, Johnson’s
advisers realized that their boss had been knifed by the man who was
supposed to lead his leadership bid.
After a week that
has turned British politics inside out, Westminster insiders thought
there was nothing left to surprise them. Gove’s decision to
withdraw from the “dream ticket” and stand for the leadership
himself was stunning. What came next was even more dramatic: at 11:53
a.m, seven minutes before the cut-off to enter the Tory leadership
race, Johnson pulled out.
Days after the
Conservative Party lost its leader, humiliated by a referendum defeat
masterminded by his old friends, the party had lost arguably its
brightest star.
Johnson’s
withdrawal from the race leaves Home Secretary Theresa May as the
clear frontrunner.
It also makes
divorce from Brussels inevitable. Feint hopes that Britain under a
Johnson premiership could negotiate a “Brexit light” deal with
the EU have been extinguished.
The remaining
candidates — May, Gove, Andrea Leadsom, Liam Fox and Stephen Crabb
– have all committed themselves to full Brexit with controls on
free movement of people.
MPs, political aides
and journalists, frazzled and sleep-deprived after days of turmoil,
scrambled to get to the bottom of Gove’s startling betrayal.
Suspicions fell on the role of Rupert Murdoch, whose Sun newspaper
campaigned aggressively for Brexit. Days earlier, the media mogul
told a conference of business leaders in London: “I’d be happy
for Michael Gove to get it.”
Cracks in Johnson
and Gove’s relationship appeared Wednesday when an email to Gove
from his wife Sarah Vine was leaked to Sky News. In the message,
Vine, a Daily Mail columnist, urged her husband to play hardball with
Johnson, and to withdraw support unless he received specific
assurances about his plans. “Do not concede your ground,” she
wrote. “Be your stubborn best.”
Vine’s influence
over her husband’s thinking has been “significant,” said a
journalist who has known the couple for years.
Party members
wouldn’t back Johnson without Gove alongside him, Vine said, and
nor would Murdoch or Paul Dacre, editor of the Daily Mail, another
powerful, pro-Brexit tabloid.
That the support of
Murdoch and Dacre figured so prominently in the Goves’ thinking
sparked alarm among media-watchers who have long argued that the
tabloids have too much influence over British politics.
Support ebbed away
When Johnson’s
team gathered on Thursday morning Gove was still onside.
The previous night
Gove and Johnson had attended the Conservative’s Summer Ball
together at the exclusive Hurlingham Club in Fulham, West London, and
then later went on the Tories’ 1922 party.
At the meeting
Thursday, Lynton Crosby and Mark Fullbrook, the Australian campaign
gurus, were joined by Johnson’s communications chief Will Walden,
long-term ally Ben Wallace and a handful of other MPs backing his
leadership bid.
When Gove’s
decision came through the room was stunned.
“The surprise was
genuine,” according to one person in the room. “The Boris ultras
were shocked and really angry. Everything was thrown into the air. We
were all trying to work out what the numbers were and whether Boris
was going to make it into the final two.”
Over the next two
hours, Johnson’s team frantically hit the phones trying to get hold
of MPs who had previously pledged support.
“He’s given the
dagger back to Michael” — Johnson ally
By 11:20 a.m. it was
clear that allies had drifted away and he was in danger of failing to
make it to the final run-off.
“Suddenly people
weren’t answering their phones or had turned them off. Others were
starting to go lukewarm. The momentum was all going the wrong way.”
Johnson, who was not
at the office, made his final decision minutes before leaving for his
campaign launch after taking soundings from his closest advisers.
“It was late in
the day — it was certainly agonized over,” the Johnson ally said.
“There were some people who wanted to fight on. But the worry was
that Boris would not have prospered as much as he wanted. He would’ve
been diminished in the process. He was trying to bring unity but
carrying on would’ve been divisive.”
“It was a bloody
brave thing to do. The easy thing would’ve been to carry on and
then pull out over the weekend. In the full glare of the world, he
stood down.”
The ally said that
in doing so, he had damaged Gove “fatally,” by ensuring voters
knew who was to blame: “He’s given the dagger back to Michael.”
“I don’t think
he [Gove] thought Boris would pull out. When you think about it, what
Boris has done is quite clever. He’s chosen not to run in a
leadership election that he didn’t want to happen this soon. I
thought it was a noble thing to have done.”
“Michael runs the
risk of looking treacherous, I think that will stick.”
A European faultline
The Johnson ally
said Gove pulled his support because he did not think the former
London mayor committed himself to the Leave campaign or to fully
pulling Britain out of the EU.
“Michael had a
genuine wobble and decided to pull his support. They didn’t think
Boris was focusing enough and in the end, he just couldn’t do it.”
On Europe, the
source said, “Boris’s instincts were to get a compromise.”
But this was
unacceptable to Gove and his ally Dominic Cummings, who had led the
Brexit campaign Vote Leave. “The hand of Cummings is all over this.
Boris considering EEA [membership of the European Economic Area] and
budget contributions was not acceptable to them,” the source said.
“He didn’t display enough clarity for them. Michael is much more
ultra on Europe than Boris ever was.”
In his first
interview after declaring his intention to stand, Gove suggested
Johnson was not committed to leaving the EU. “After the referendum
result last week I felt we needed someone to lead this country who
believed heart and soul in leaving the European Union,” Gove told
the BBC.
Doubts about whether
a Johnson-led government would follow through on Brexit, or try to
find a compromise, intensified after Johnson’s weekly column
appeared in the Daily Telegraph on Monday.
The
fury and sense of personal betrayal at Gove is intense.
He appeared to be
trying to reassure all sides that there was no reason for panic. In
doing so, his views on what should happen next seemed confused,
contradictory, unachievable. Many Leavers worried that he was
minimizing the need for immigration controls, which they regard as a
red-line issue. It gave fuel to those who believed that Johnson had
never really believed in quitting the EU in the first place.
Johnson’s allies
pointed out that Gove had seen the column, suggested changes and
approved it before it was published. On Thursday night ITV’s
political editor Robert Peston obtained an email from Gove to
Johnson, sent just after 6 p.m. on Sunday, suggesting amendments to
the column. Gove’s verdict: “Overall very very good.”
Worse than the
Telegraph column, a long-time Johnson supporter said, was the former
mayor’s disappearance after the Brexit result. Johnson should have
appeared in public immediately surrounded by “ordinary people,”
this source said. As leader of the Leave campaign, he should have
sought to calm anxieties. Instead, he gave one somber press
conference with Gove a few hours after Cameron resigned, and spent
the weekend out of sight.
“The moment was
there to be seized,” the Johnson supporter said. “Instead, he
went into hibernation and allowed other people to fill in the gaps.”
Adding to the
shadowy role of media moguls in the back-room drama was the presence
of Evgeny Lebedev, the owner of London’s Evening Standard and
Independent, among Johnson’s entourage on Sunday, according to a
source close to Johnson. Lebedev knew Johnson from his days as mayor
of London and had regularly hosted him at his villa in Umbria, in
Italy.
In a curious twist,
Lebedev had also been present at Johnson’s house in February, when
Johnson, Gove, and their wives decided over drinks that the two
politicians would turn on their friend Cameron and front the Leave
campaign, according to Vine’s column in the Daily Mail.
Gove alerted friends
about his decision to run late Wednesday night. One member of Gove’s
campaign received a call at 1 a.m. Thursday morning to be told he was
needed to run Gove’s campaign.
The fury and sense
of personal betrayal at Gove is intense.
The justice
secretary had insisted repeatedly — including in a live TV
appearance during the referendum campaign — that he did not want to
become prime minister. However, privately he has not ruled it out,
said a friend of the Goves. “It’s not that he’s suddenly
decided.”
At Johnson’s press
conference one Tory MP pointed the finger at George Osborne, who has
a reputation for Westminster scheming. “The Chancellor’s
fingerprints are all over this,” he said.
The MP Nadine
Dorries, who had sat in the front row of Johnson’s press
conference, had a blazing row with Gove in the Commons Thursday
afternoon, according to one MP.
Cameron, meanwhile,
was seen in parliament’s Members’ tea room looking “happy and
relaxed.”
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