Boris storing up a thrashing from anti-Tory Britain.

There goes the Australian government. The Liberal, that is conservative, Prime Minister Scott Morrison has been ejected from office. Labor’s Anthony Albanese is the winner of the country’s general election.

In foreign policy terms will it be disruptive? He won’t change much initially, seems to be the view of observers. Those who like the West will hope the intelligence briefings explaining what’s going on in the world, which he’ll get on arriving in office, will scare the life out of a leader who is untested on foreign policy, during a war in Europe and with China a threat. Australia is in the Five Eyes intelligence group and under Morrison signed the AUKUS deal with the US and the UK. Seeking to reverse it, President Macron will be all over new man Albanese like a rash.

Macron’s on a, er, roll. His recent speech on reorganising Europe in his own image was possibly his wildest yet. He might have checked this plan with the Poles, Swedes, Finns, Baltics and Romanians first, but there you go. They seem less than keen on being led like children by the French President, after his performance on Ukraine and Russia. 

There are pointers to the next British general election in this Aussie election result too. Voters in Australia have had enough of politics with a populist edge. Labor was helped by a new breed of ultra-green independents – teals – standing to target the governing party for not doing enough to tackle climate change, among other things. The teals are well-funded professional women on a mission to take out conservatives in areas that the Liberals thought were safe.

That sound – an audible shiver – is coming from CCHQ in London. They will know that the Tories won their majority last time not only because they knocked over Labour seats in the Red Wall. The Conservatives in 2019 won a majority because they also did well in the South and Midlands. There’s no way to win without the South, where in prosperous areas there are a lot of unhappy punters. In Richmond, London, where between 2010 and 2018 the Conservatives ran the council, the Tories now have one seat. The Lib Dems have 48 and the Greens 5. In Westminster elections this was not long ago marginal territory, where the Conservatives under Cameron were highly competitive.      

Which brings me to the current Tory leader…

The greased piglet, as David Cameron calls Boris Johnson, has escaped again. He has survived. He has wriggled himself out of trouble over Partygate, the scandal that a few months ago looked like it might do him in. The Met has wrapped up its investigation. That’s the Met the London police force, not the Met New York opera company, though Partygate would perhaps be best performed in operatic form.

At the height of the farce, when it was revealed the Prime Minister had presided over serial partying in Downing Street, it seemed to me his reputation would not recover. “Bojo is buggered,” is how I put it in this newsletter. Not a nice turn of phrase but then what he did, imposing the most draconian rules on the population in peacetime, virtually imprisoning the young, while taking such a casual attitude himself to those same laws, still strikes me as stunning in its impertinence and immorality, if not surprising. The rules not applying to Boris is the entire Boris schtick, the sole Boris rule for living life as you want and forever getting away with it.

Now, he has done it again. Or has he?

Johnson’s most ardent fans have been rejoicing since the Met announcement. They have chorused – opera style –  the supposed vindication of their man. He’s free, with no stain on his character. That’s balls, by the way. The essential point stands. While imposing those draconian rules on the rest of us, he behaved appallingly, repeatedly, and millions of Britons won’t forget it.

Ah, but that doesn’t matter because in the end he is a winner, say his supporters.

Boris Johnson has been a remarkable winner, even his critics should admit it. He won the mayoralty of London twice. He was on the winning side in the 2016 referendum. He won the Tory leadership and then, having driven his opponents so mad that they gave him exactly what he wanted which was not in their interests, a general election, he won that with a majority of 80.

Everything ends eventually. Even winner’s luck runs out at some point. This happened to Tony Blair, pushed aside by an ungrateful party. It happened to John Howard in Australia when he tried to win a fifth election. It has just happened to Angela Merkel. She dominated European affairs and departed as Chancellor after an unintentionally comical farewell ceremony at EU HQ, where her strategic genius was applauded by her fellow leaders. She didn’t lose an election, she stood down. Then her reputational luck ran out and she has since 24 February and the invasion been ruined by history. Her legacy on Russia and defence looks more disastrous by the day.

Of course it is just about possible voters in the Red Wall, the Midlands and the South will reward Boris Johnson for his handling of the cost of living crisis. Or perhaps he will find a way through the price rises and then get lucky next year if inflation falls away and voters forget. Such scenarios are plausible because general elections are a choice between available options. Labour’s leader lacks charisma, although the Labour front bench is whacking the Tories in the Commons.

The opinion polling is telling a pretty consistent story of what’s going on. The Tories are down but not out. Labour is ahead by 8 points in the latest YouGov poll.

What a focus on the lead misses is what Sam Freedman, on Twitter, highlighted. That’s the scale and dispersal of the combined anti-Tory vote. Now comfortably well above 60% of Britons are backing anti-Tory parties. In the first past the post system the Tories can counter the effect of the other parties ranged against them by getting up closer towards 40% on polling day, or even only 37% as they did in 2015.

But the 2015 election won by David Cameron took place with growth relatively healthy and the inflation picture benign. This time, coming out of mid-term and going into the run-in, the Tories are in a different position. They are manning the beach while an economic tsunami races in from the horizon.

Ominously for the Conservatives, it seems angry voters have also started to figure out tactical voting again, which if it persists spells doom for the party under the current voting system. That means voters working out how best to use their vote in their locality to get the Tory out.

The various scandals and looming by-elections will provide a test of this. The evidence from focus groups, according to those who conduct them, is that the benefit of the doubt has been withdrawn after Partygate.  

And that’s where character and integrity  matters. History shows voters will put up with a lot, if a leader is deemed to be decent and doing their best in the face of adversity. This applies only if that leader is perceived to be on their side. That’s what Boris Johnson squandered and he will struggle to get it back.

Nicola Sturgeon, Sinn Fein’s new best buddy

The statement this week by Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, on the Northern Ireland Protocol and the Good Friday Agreement was so historically illiterate and full of errors that I wondered whether it had been written after input from an opponent of the United Kingdom, someone who wants to break up Britain. 

Of course, Pelosi has shown on numerous occasions she is more than capable of getting it wrong without any assistance, but did she have help this time?

Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s First Minister and Queen of the selfie, was in Washington this week. The SNP leader got to pose with Pelosi. Did they talk about Northern Ireland, Brexit and nasty old Britain? There is much common ground there. It would be odd if they didn’t discuss it. There’ll be a diplomatic record somewhere for posterity.

Back in Edinburgh, next up for a Sturgeon selfie on the steps of Bute House was Michelle O’Neill. The vice-president of Sinn Fein is in line to be First Minister in devolved Northern Ireland.

The glee with which Sturgeon has embraced Sinn Fein, the former political wing of the IRA, after its recent election win has surprised some observers with long memories of the Troubles. The last thing Scotland needs, with its long history of sectarianism, is to import a dose of Northern Ireland politics.

But Sturgeon is clearly very excited in having a new ally in her battle to break up Britain. She has hailed O’Neill and lambasted those calling for reform of the Northern Ireland Protocol, that part of the Brexit deal that put in place trading restrictions between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK.

The DUP refuses to restart the Good Friday Agreement institutions until the NIP is scrapped. The British government wants it watered down, so devolved government led, or co-led, by Sinn Fein this time can start again. The EU refuses to budge on the Protocol.

Interestingly, Sinn Fein’s line on the Northern Ireland Protocol has been far less hysterical than that of Sturgeon. Wanting back into government in Northern Ireland, Sinn Fein’s leaders have admitted the Protocol needs reform.

Sinn Fein is also going slow on any talk of a border poll, to avoid alarming the Unionist majority in Northern Ireland. The plan is clearly to make Sinn Fein government, first in the north and then in Dublin, seem like the norm over time. So that memories of IRA murders fade until eventually unionism dissolves. Or drifts away, like dozing off in a warm bath. 

Again, as with Scotland, I wonder in the case of Northern Ireland if that’s an assumption that will survive contact with the upheaval resulting from the war in Ukraine. We are back in an age when there is going to be a premium on defence and security. When having a nuclear umbrella to shelter under as part of one of the key players in Nato is highly desirable. When Northern Ireland or Scotland leaving the British Army, Royal Navy and RAF (for what instead?) is an obviously duff idea.

Windfall tax now, like Thatcher and Howe did

Should the government introduce a windfall tax on the surging profits of the oil and gas industry? Yes, as the Reaction leader says in our Weekend section.

I’m a free market kind of guy and Reaction is for maximum economic freedom within a framework of robust institutions and sound law. 

But it seems to me that the defence of the energy firms, and opposition to a windfall tax in parts of the Tory party proclaiming themselves to be free market, is based on ideological confusion and a misreading of history.

The energy giants aren’t bastions of free markets. They are corporatist creatures of government, products of statecraft, regulation and the strategic, defence decisions made by government down the decades. Anyone in any doubt about this should read Helen Thompson’s riveting new book Disorder, or Daniel Yergin’s classic history of the oil industry The Prize.

Of course the story of oil and gas features numerous examples of entrepreneurialism, and people risking capital, but the epic profits this year are not the result of innovation or an improved product. They are a grim windfall, a result of geopolitical accident and disaster. So, tax it.

The industry itself is only half-heartedly opposing such a move. They’re making so much cash that investment wouldn’t be imperilled, they admit. Industry leaders clearly expect the Chancellor to opt for such a tax later this year. Why waste time waiting?

For Britain’s very poorest, and affluent too, to pay even higher bills to protect the windfall gains of the energy giants is monstrous, really, and not going to sustain when it hits. Those in the Tory party defending it aren’t defending markets, they risk discrediting them.

The claim a windfall tax today would be somehow un-Thatcherite or left-wing is nonsense. Margaret Thatcher did it several times. As Chancellor, Geoffrey Howe in 1981 used a levy to tax the excess profits of the banks in the recession. A year later he did something similar to the oil and gas sector. There are plenty of precedents. Windfall taxes didn’t start with Gordon Brown.

The government should introduce a windfall tax now, softening the blow of the cost of living crisis before it gets even worse. This should also apply to the renewables sector, where all the nice, green marketing in the world cannot disguise that they too are making out like bandits thanks to geopolitics.

Gideon Rachman interview

The latest of my Authors in Conversation series is with Gideon Rachman, FT columnist. His new book is The Age of the Strongman. It contains particularly sharp pen portraits of Putin and Modi. I don’t think Boris Johnson (friend of Ukraine) merits inclusion, but the book was written before the war and Gideon admits in our interview he did think quite a bit about whether or not to include the PM. The greased piglet gets his own chapter.

You can watch it here, where you’ll also find the archive of previous interviews, including with Helen Thompson, whose book Disorder I recommended earlier.