Bad Boris, the rise of virtue and why the new political divide is culture

Never before in the modern era has a leading candidate for the office of British Minister Prime Minister had to be hidden, held under virtual house arrest, in case he says or does something interesting.

Since the advent of more open competition that began in the 1960s – after the Conservatives were condemned for choosing their leader in 1963 by a closed “magic circle” –  there has been a general, base assumption that those seeking the leadership of a major party will want to explain themselves to the country, as well as to party members and MPs

Team Boris – which has done a remarkable, ruthlessly efficient job,  so far – is trying a new approach. Boris is a Ming vase of a candidate, a front-runner whose prospects are so fragile that he must be carried carefully across the great hall of leadership until he arrives at the destination – power.

Some 114 of his colleagues, convinced that he has this magic allure, backed him in the first round of voting on Thursday. Control-freakery is working.

Johnson has been allowed out for a newspaper interview, but despite the efforts of the tenacious journalists involved he said little. There was also a confused newspaper column by the candidate that suggested on the tax system he has some work to do getting on top of the subject.

At the time of writing, he has declined to take part in the broadcast debates with other Tory candidates that the BBC and Channel 4 have coming up in the next few days. Pressure is mounting from journalists and rival contenders who accuse “Bunker Boris” of being afraid of debate. The suggestion is that Boris is worried about people ganging up on him. If so, wait until he hears about the bearpit that is weekly PMQs, or the cabinet, or general elections.

“You don’t like him,” a Boris supporting MP said to me the other day when I raised questions about his campaign.

The remark unwittingly got to the heart of a key problem with Johnson and the way he and his fans expect support rather than earning it. Whether I – or anyone else – thinks he’s an amusing and intriguing fellow (and he is) is really not the point.

Note their underlying assumption: it’s my fault for being insufficiently enthusiastic. As always with Boris the implication is that the rest of us must accommodate ourselves to him. Rather than him having to work, work, work to convince us, we must automatically be blown away by the magic of Boris, even if we’re not and want as taxpayers to see whether this intensely ambitious figure can prove himself capable of doing the job.

A male member of the Johnson clan once asked me sharply: “Are you part of that gang out to get Alex?” Alex is Boris’s first name.

I’m not, but the question and the way it was put was revealing. It reeked of Johnsonian entitlement and my response probably contained an f-word or two. The rest of us Britons are not extras in the Johnson family movie, though I suspect that’s how they sometimes think of us.

As it happens, I’ve written plenty of pieces acknowledging the man’s potential appeal, for all his flaws. In a previous existence I was an executive on the Daily Telegraph, where Boris still writes a weekly column. I well remember the anguished discussions about whether the paper should back its columnist to be London mayor in 2008. Several of my senior colleagues, branding him untrustworthy and a liability, said the paper should not back him, which would have been an extraordinary snub by the paper that pays Johnson, even if the impact of newspaper endorsements are over-rated.

Personally, it seemed obvious to me that the Cavalier Boris was miles better than the grim Roundhead leftie Ken Livingstone. I wrote and said so.

The then editor sensibly decided that the Telegraph in its leader column should back Boris.

I can well imagine the response of a Boris partisan on hearing all this media angst about whether their man is worthy. Get with the programme, they’ll say. Grow up. He’s going to win and only he can deliver a battling British Brexit and be the big beast who defeats Corbyn.

Perhaps, and from an anti-Marxist perspective he had better be successful, but anti-Corbynites with even short memories recall that Theresa May was the grown-up polling brilliantly against Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn ahead of the 2017 election. Until – mid-campaign – she wasn’t.

Team Boris are so nervous that he could blow up that the MPs they have put up to defend him have started to experiment with Trumpian techniques to beat back and attack the media striving to question him.

Sadly, Team Boris are probably right that this will work. Many of the voters Johnson will ultimately need to win a general election – from the Brexit party – hate the media class (even though Boris is in it) just as much as they hate the political class. Two sides of the same coin. Such voters tend to hate commentators they assume to be arrogant and reporters they brand biased pushers of “fake news”.

This all reminds me horribly of being in the US in 2016, when liberal journalists wrongly assumed that the public would hate Trump being rude to the media. Very few people care about the feelings of journalists. Trump blew up politics and the media game. Enough voters liked watching the explosion.

Boris, having seen how it worked in the Brexit referendum, must be banking on something similar happening here at a Westminster level at the early election which is coming because the government has no meaningful majority.

Boris will again be the standard bearer of a new type of politics that celebrates breaking the old rules and a refusal to be bound by the norms of behaviour. The leadership contest seclusion is a temporary tactic to get him into Number 10. Boris will then be much more like Boris.

Potentially Boris’s cunning assault on the system is potent, because politics in the UK is disintegrating and being remade along cultural lines. This was apparent first in the Brexit referendum, and in the bitter aftermath where the two sides defined themselves in direct contrast in terms of self-conception.

To be an ultra-remainer is to be one of the educated, cosmopolitan, wise ones with access to a superior understanding of practical realities, up against the supposedly vulgar mob that lacks virtue. Dedicated Brexiteers – who own televisions and can read what the illiberal liberals say – see this condescension and put up two fingers.

We hear a lot about the characteristics of the populist movements that have emerged recently. They are a manifestation of a rejection of the excesses of globalisation, and a desire for community and nation to be respected.

The equally interesting flip-side is an increasingly aggressive liberalism that defines itself as uniquely virtuous.

This fissure appears to be remaking the party system in Britain, with voters wanting to cluster with like-minded citizens, but finding that the old party labels do not fit the new dispensation. Hence the sudden decline of the two main parties and the revival of the Lib Dems and the rapid emergence of the Brexit party. Which party will now build the biggest home for one of the two main tribes?

A century ago the parliamentary system in Britain was broken and remade along class lines, when the Liberal party was ruined and the Labour party replaced it with a direct appeal to class interests, that is the interests of the working class and the widespread desire for decent housing, healthcare and collective social advancement. The Tory party responded and reinvented itself by seeking to satisfy those desires under the banner of “one nation” as an alternative to socialism.

This time the big divide is the concept of secular virtue, illustrated best beyond Brexit by the green issue and climate change. To a self-identifying liberal it is obvious that all “nice” and “civilised” people see that the economy and our way of life must be radically recast to save the planet. Who is against the planet? Only nasty people, surely, and evil, racist Brexiteers with their tattoos and taste in terrible foreign holidays in the ruined fringes of Spain.

Here we go again, say the anti-liberals, once you bossy bastards have blocked Brexit next you are going to make those who can least afford it replace the gas boilers in their houses – if they have a house – and stop flying to Malaga for a fortnight in the sun. Right, how do you like your no deal hard Brexit? As hard as possible you sanctimonious, metropolitan Muppet. Don’t care if we feel the pain too, as long as you get so furious you slip and drop your organic Waitrose tote bag.

This is not a healthy or productive state of affairs, for a major economy that surely needs to refocus on improving productivity and taking advantage of the huge opportunities in front of us, by capitalising on the extraordinary national strengths in higher education, the digital economy, high-end manufacturing,  services, and finance. And using the proceeds to extend prosperity and improve the creaking public realm.

For political parties the widening cultural divide is a complete nightmare, because it makes it very difficult to know how to construct a winning coalition. David Cameron won in 2015 by securing the Tory base and then building out to appeal to liberals, who now tend to hate the Tories. How the hell can any politician find a way through and win sufficient seats to govern in a first past the post Westminster system?

The only path available to Boris, the likely winner in the leadership contest, is to try to put the Brexit party out of business first. That alters the map of potential Tory support. There will be liberal-minded seats in which the Tories were once competitive that are now gone for good because of Brexit and the culture war. Likewise, there are unlikely Labour seats in which voters might be persuaded to switch to the Brexit Tory party.

If he somehow makes it through Brexit, Boris will then have to switch to “one nation” (rebuilding public services and encouraging investment) in an attempt to broaden his coalition and win back some centrists. In places such as Scotland the Tories are in serious trouble and “Boris the bampot” is potentially highly toxic electorally.

No-one involved – participating or observing – has a clue what the geographical spread of seats will be, during and after Brexit, or what the impact of a redrawn electoral battlefield is likely to involve. A volatile electorate, bitterly divided along cultural lines, could throw up just about any outcome ranging from a Tory landslide powered by Brexiteers, with the centre-left split between Labour and the Lib Dems, or the destruction of the Tories and a government led by a Marxist in coalition or otherwise.

With the situation so dangerous and unpredictable, thank goodness Boris has given such a good account of himself and knows what he is doing…