Like Boris, the Tories stand for nothing
As the Jubilee celebrations reached their climax, some Conservative MPs thought it might be a wizard wheeze to give the Queen a surprise present: her 15th prime minister. The candidate’s name was as yet unknown, but that was of no consequence, since the purpose of the exercise was to remove the 14th incumbent, name of Johnson. It is a measure of the precariousness of power that one can watch a national pageant on Sunday just after receiving news that one might cease to be prime minister by mid-evening on Monday.
That outcome did not happen, but the attempted regicide by 148 Tory MPs signals that the party has opted for death by a thousand cuts rather than a clean shave on the guillotine. Boris’s survival by 211 votes to 148 is a very poor result. So, what has gone wrong? The universal explanation among politicians and the media is that this crisis is due to the many flaws in Johnson’s character.
That thesis can hardly be refuted. Formulating Draconian lockdown laws and then flagrantly and serially breaking them betrays a sense of entitlement provocative to a population virtually imprisoned and hate-inducing among those prevented from saying goodbye to dying family members. That is not to say that, during the first onslaught of the most dangerous variant of the Covid virus against an unvaccinated population, those precautions were not justified; but they should have been applied indiscriminately.
Then there was the unsatisfactory tone of the Prime Minister’s apologies and the string of unravelling defensive myths, all of which contributed to mounting distrust of Boris. Yet there were far more factors contributing to the genesis of this crisis than that simple narrative. In the context of Boris’s character flaws, the parties and the birthday cake are the least of it – as the public, if not the political/media class, well knows. The real problem is that we have a Prime Minister going through the motions of government, to justify his retention of the trappings of power and its more agreeable aspects, without a philosophical compass or a real political programme.
Boris resembles that scourge of the literary world, an individual who wants to be an author, rather than wanting to write: the interviews, the book-signings, the celebrity all appeal – it’s just that horrid, lonely bit in between, staring at the blank page, that spoils the prospect. Ambition spurred Boris to make his play for the premiership, then to lure his opponents into a Brexit election in which they were decimated; after that, he assumed he had earned the right to put his feet up in Number 10.
Soon, though, his twitching whiskers scented danger. While nearly losing his life to the first pandemic wave, he had the gambler’s foresight to order in advance a large consignment of every vaccine that might later prove effective. That initiative was an outstanding success. It must have saved a significant number of lives. Justice demands that, if we rightly deplore the impression Boris’s conduct over “partygate” made on those who lost loved ones, the opposite column in the ledger should record his life-saving vaccine success.
The same applies to his response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. While Emmanuel Macron was running up a telephone bill of terrifying proportions, pandering to Vladimir Putin, Johnson assumed the leadership of the European response. It was a striking demonstration of the efficacy of Brexit Britain, contrasted with the ineffectuality of the European Union.
Consider the three things that Boris got right – Brexit, vaccines and Ukraine – and place them in their historical context. The paralysis of Parliament by stubborn Remainers, trying to overturn the verdict of a democratic referendum, was the biggest constitutional crisis since the 17th century. The spat between the Liberals and the House of Lords in 1911 does not compare in seriousness. The whole compact that is our unwritten constitution nearly came undone, on the most fundamental constitutional issue of all – national sovereignty – until Boris cut the Gordian knot.
That was a crisis such as few prime ministers are called to face, yet it was followed by two more Horsemen of the Apocalypse – pestilence and war – in a short space of little more than two years. Boris responded to all three more adequately than one can imagine any of those being touted as prospective successors. And yet, contradictory as it may seem, Boris’s overall performance has been profoundly unsatisfactory.
His weakness for big projects, itself arguably a symptom of a statist, big government mentality, burdened our struggling economy with the white elephant that is HS2, still stubbornly supported by the Prime Minister. Infinitely worse is the insane net zero commitment. This monstrous miscalculation threatens not just economic meltdown, but civil unrest in the future.
Those are the flaws in Boris’s personality that have brought him to the present pass. Indolent by nature, he can rise to a crisis with impressive effect, only to slump back into stumbling rhetoric when the immediate danger is past. Most of this is generally acknowledged, but what is not recognised on the Tory benches is the extent to which Boris Johnson’s futile indulgence in high-spending, high-tax governance, with no apparent philosophical compass, is a personification of the malaise afflicting the whole Conservative Party.
The Tory Party is rudderless; it has no beliefs beyond the prejudices of focus groups and a woke orthodoxy that has subsumed the entire political class. And if tax rates are at an atrocious level, so are immigration rates. The government seems impervious to the mounting anger of voters on this issue. That anger is aggravated by the promises made in 2019 and cynically reneged on. The public is not interested in focusing exclusively on EU migration, it is concerned about total numbers and they are rising relentlessly.
Since Boris promised redress of this grievance, the numbers have soared. The country that supposedly “took back control” of its borders is playing open house to all comers. The bogus terms “refugees” and “asylum seekers” are applied to people who have travelled through innumerable free and democratic European states to reach Britain. The Yorkshire village of Linton-on-Ouse, with a population of 600, is to have imposed upon it 1,500 North African “asylum seekers”, all male and single. The government (i.e. the taxpayer) is shelling out £5m a day to house incomers; that is an electorally reassuring way of saying £1.8bn a year.
Against this background, the proposal to send a few migrants to Rwanda is mere theatre, and recognised as such by the public. As for net zero, the sensible course for a country like Britain, which only contributes 1 per cent of the greenhouse effect, would be to wait and see how seriously the big polluters such as China (28 per cent) take their net zero commitments before adopting proportionate measures, instead of greening the country back to the Stone Age.
Under the Tories the intruder State is making massive inroads into privacy, enterprise and personal autonomy. Freedom of speech is increasingly a memory rather than a right. What Conservative principle bans access to any form of therapy of which an individual might wish to avail himself, provided it is purely cognitive? How much further are the rights and authority of parents over their children to be eroded in a supposed Tory democracy?
Those MPs who successfully launched the first stage of the political elimination of Boris Johnson will say they did so to promote their political survival. That does not depend on personalities, but on principles. Is there any one of Boris’s putative successors capable of running an authentically Conservative government? The answer is No, because, despite the departure of the Remainers in 2019, the Conservative political culture is extinct within the parliamentary party. There is more to a Tory polity than cutting taxes and public spending, important though those objectives are.
Nigel Farage, despised by the political class for having robbed it of its ultimate totem of EU membership, made an interesting point recently. After rehearsing how the public’s real grievances against Boris were policy concerns rather than “partygate”, he recalled how it had taken the rise successively of UKIP and the Brexit Party to force the Tories back onto what should have been their natural ground.
That worked, as a threat forcing the Conservatives to implement Brexit, but it was a single issue and the two parties folded after achieving their objective. However, that experience provokes the thought: what would happen if a similar party emerged to challenge the Conservatives on all their broken promises: immigration, low taxation, small government, respect for the family and tradition? What if conservative voters could desert their hopelessly drifting party without either abstaining or voting Lib/Lab, having found an alternative home?
Nature deplores a vacuum, so it is bound to happen, sooner or later. In that context, it was not just Boris Johnson who received a bloody nose in the 1922 committee room, but the whole company of pseudo-Conservatives whose political lives now hang by as weak a thread as their leader’s. Unless, of course, Boris has a sudden rush of sanity and self-preservation and starts doing all the things a truly Tory prime minister ought to do and which he pledged to perform. Just don’t hold your breath.