Can Teflon Boris keep getting away with it?

There is a pleasant air of melancholy about Westminster in the dog days immediately after parliament has risen for the Summer Recess. Even in normal years, MPs are suddenly thin on the ground and their many camp followers need no more encouragement to make themselves scarce. The final week of July 2020 felt just the same, even though there have been fewer people around SW1 all year.

Those who remain are the dutiful busybodies, finishing that report, getting the other one out and making sure that everything is set up for when they and vacationing colleagues return in a few short weeks. 

Tourists and maintenance crews swamp the area in August, but for a brief moment at the end of July, it is easier to spot the dedicated stay-behinds scuttling across emptier pavements. Since it is almost holiday time they are more inclined than usual to pause for a quick chat. This year such exchanges have much in common: “Extraordinary times… well yes.. quite unprecedented.. can Boris Johnson go on defying gravity forever?”

The Prime Minister is so skilled at getting away with it that, according to Charles Moore, “some of us have referred to him over the years as the greased albino Piglet. And his way of slipping out of a situation is a sort of form of genius.”

Created Baron Moore of Etchingham last year, the distinguished biographer of Margaret Thatcher sits as a non-affiliated peer and, as a licence fee refusnik, declined the invitation to be the government’s favoured candidate to chair the BBC. He has known Johnson since their time as journalists on the Telegraph and Spectator decades ago. Moore’s insight is as true now as it was then. 

This week Boris Johnson is celebrating two years as Prime Minister – still comfortably ahead in both personal and party opinion poll ratings, having secured an eighty seat majority in the December 2019 General Election. 

What could possibly go wrong for the Prime Minister in the coming months? 

In his speech outside Number 10 on the day he succeeded Theresa May, the new Prime Minister promised, amongst other things, to recruit 20,000 more Police, to sort out Social Care and to cut waiting times to see a GP. 

None of this has yet been delivered. Instead, manifesto promises have already been broken deliberately. 

Early bravado about getting Brexit done has degenerated into a seemingly intractable dispute over the Northern Irish Protocol, which was drawn up and agreed with the EU by Lord Frost or “Frostie”, as his personal negotiator is known to the Prime Minister. 

The Covid pandemic has taken up the eighteen months since the General Election. The vaccine programme is one gamble taken by Matt Hancock (remember him?)  which has paid off. But the UK has still suffered one of the greatest death tolls and death rates in Europe. Hospital waiting lists for other treatments are at record lengths. The economic contraction here has been among the most severe. The government has imposed a series of confusing and conflicting restrictions on the public’s behaviour which ministers and officials have been noticeably reluctant to follow themselves. As public debt soars billions have been wasted on a test and trace system which has never worked, except for a voluntary “pinging” app that has paralysed the lives of many law-abiding citizens and businesses. 

Then there’s the personal stuff. The dodgy financing of a luxury holiday and interior decoration. The courting of donors whatever their provenance. The inaccurate statistics and the casual disrespect for the truth in hundreds of statements, carefully recorded by the Prime Minister’s critics. 

Yet none of this seems to have mattered up till now. Johnson remains the clear favourite to win the next general election whenever it comes – sooner rather than later, one suspects, if he has his way. 

Many blame the opposition. Labour has replaced the unelectable Jeremy Corbyn with the flat-footed Keir Starmer. Sir Keir is heading into the Autumn with the confident prediction that Boris Johnson “will run out of road”. But unlike the Prime Minister, plodding Sir Keir seems to lack the ability to create his own luck, or as Johnson puts it wittily “opportunities for fresh disasters”. According to intimates, on entering any room Johnson’s eyes instinctively flick round to identify any emergency exits which might come in useful. Even if his party let him play it, Starmer’s long game could be too long to reel in the Prime Minister.

Starmer seems to embrace the questionable truism that oppositions win elections, governments lose them. There are many who think the greatest threat to Johnson lies within Conservative ranks. The ludicrously indulged Dominic Cummings says he’s not a Tory and is certainly not one of the present dangers to Johnson. He damages himself as much as his target with each assault on the Prime Minister’s integrity. His testimony will only be useful years hence when there is an official inquiry into the handling of the pandemic. True to form Cummings is likely to have disowned it by then.

A rift between the Thatcherite fiscally conservative chancellor and the free-spending “levelling-up” Prime Minister could be terminal, as Number 10/Number 11 conflicts have often been the foundations of government failures in the past. 

Boris Johnson has a long private history of borrowing and never paying back. In his world, based on language, promises made boldly are more important than whether they are delivered in reality. When it comes to belt-tightening he was fully aligned with Rishi Sunak on the symbolic and painful breaking of the 2019 manifesto promise to maintain the level of foreign aid spending. They will be held responsible together if the pangs of public sector austerity become too sharp.

Conservative MPs in the deliberately intimidatingly named Northern Research Group may quibble that the cash for levelling-up has not been forthcoming. But they’ll have to think carefully about why they were elected in the first place before launching a public assault on the strategy’s frontman. The ambitious Sunak has a different problem, would his long term prospects be enhanced by being caricatured as the man who says No?

The gap between promises and practical circumstances has never been more exposed than over global warming and what is increasingly known as “the climate emergency”. The Prime Minister does not want to increase the burden on “ordinary people” paying for what needs to be done yet he has high hopes of assuming the mantle of global leader at this November’s COP26 summit in November The run-up is not going smoothly – the advance group of ministers meeting in London this week got nowhere. Joe Biden’s envoy John Kerry has quite a different agenda for American global leadership on climate. It is possible to envisage circumstances where the Irish Americans use the summit to settle scores with Johnson who they neither like, trust, nor respect. Other members of the club, most notably Macron and whoever replaces Merkel in Germany, are equally disinclined to big him up. After an initial bout of jingoism against a COP failure, the British might conclude as they did with the hapless John Major, that Johnson is just “not up to it” – in the immortal words of Clement Atlee.

Then there are the dangers lurking unforeseen. Johnson would clearly rather be Prime Minister than not and he’d like to notch up a significant term in office – four to five years and another election win – before moving to more lucrative pastures. But is he enjoying the job and is his appeal holding up with the voters? How good is his health?  He looked a pathetic figure last week clutching a small travel umbrella in the pouring rain as he gave the daily unchallenged soundbites which pass these days for communicating with the public. 

It could just be turbulence or is public opinion turning against him? A new YouGov poll has found that “Not sure” is now the most popular choice for Prime Minister, ahead of both Johnson and Starmer. The Tories maintain a lead in most polls, but it has halved of late to below the talismanic 40 per cent, with rising support for opposition parties. 

Like the Prime Minister, I need a break. I won’t be back with this Reaction diary until after the August Bank holiday. Only the most diligent will carry on working through the summer. Their efforts should not be discounted. 

I was among the cynics sniggering when Kenneth Baker and John Major, then Conservative Party Chair and Chancellor respectively, announced they were sacrificing their holidays for a Summer Heat on Labour campaign. We were still laughing at them in September. In hindsight they had laid the foundations for Major to take over from Thatcher and for the Conservatives to win a fourth election. 

We often don’t see what’s moving in the summer shadows but that doesn’t mean it won’t matter.