Boris has turned the Tories socialist

Where did it all go so badly wrong? And can it be put right? December 2019 was not all that long ago – just two years – and yet the political landscape has changed beyond recognition. Two years ago the Conservative Party, which had been deeply mired in Brexit dissension, had miraculously reinvented itself, emerged from a general election with an 80-seat majority and, under its charismatic and unchallengeable leader, proceeded in short order to “get Brexit done”, or something like it, if one ignores the running sore of the Northern Ireland Protocol.

For Tories, bliss was it in that dawn. Yet somehow, in the short interval of two years, their party has tumbled from “O frabjous day!” to “Never glad confident morning again.” For Boris does look ominously like a Lost Leader. That said, it is important to remember that the inflexible rules that command the fate of other mortals do not apply to Boris. To be caught hanging helplessly from a zip wire – an image that went globally viral and would have ended the career of any other politician by teatime – and find one’s popularity massively enhanced is not the normal experience of public figures.

It is also instructive to review the career curve of the Prime Minister and his government during the intervening two years. Significantly, it was not a consistently downward trajectory but, like the rest of Boris’s public life, a switchback ride between success and failure, a giddy game of snakes and ladders, with Boris sliding down snakes with monotonous regularity, only to scamper back up a ladder at the first opportunity.

The pandemic began badly for Boris. He delayed imposing travel restrictions, while travellers from China, Italy and other early centres of infection poured into British airports. The government’s response was chaotic, with ministers, including the Prime Minister, goggling like rabbits in the headlights, often on camera, while a rabble of scientists and epidemiological bodies assailed them with conflicting advice. What fuelled the terror of that moment and made the public nervously intolerant was the total lack of protection, either from natural immunity or vaccination, in those pre-vaccine days.

People were afraid, with the fear that comes from finding oneself in a life-or-death struggle, completely unarmed. In that climate, lockdown was acceptable; polls showed a strong majority in favour of the most rigorous protective measures. It is arguable that this public compliance was partly attributable to the fact that recent generations of Britons had been bred to a health-and-safety culture; but it is inescapably true that Covid was a deadly disease, claiming many victims – around 150,000 deaths so far in this country – and it was only natural that people should make extreme sacrifices of normal freedoms to escape its toll.

It was the arrival of the vaccines that saved Boris, as well as a natural public sympathy for a Prime Minister who had himself succumbed to the virus to a life-threatening degree. The world-leading success of the vaccine roll-out (with one bound) restored Boris to meteoric popularity. Without depriving Kate Bingham or Nadhim Zahawi of due credit, it was Boris’s early decision to buy, on spec, massive quantities and varieties of vaccines still in the research stage that saved the day. Boris duly received credit and was restored to his post-election popularity.

Since then, however, it has been downhill all the way. Early disbursement of public (i.e. taxpayers’) money on pandemic support measures received near-universal consent. Then the Conservative Party underwent a massive cultural and philosophical transformation. Having discovered how good it felt to play Father Christmas every day of the year, Boris and a substantial proportion of his parliamentary party became addicted to public spending. Soon Boris was committing spectacular acts of fiscal irresponsibility that would have shocked even Gordon Brown.

The political excuse was that such largesse would play well in the newly Tory Red Wall constituencies. That was a misjudgement. It is in the deprived communities of the North that realism survives: people know there is no such thing as a free lunch. What was the rationale behind serving up to recent converts from Labour precisely the prescriptions they had always been offered by Labour? It seems that while Red Wall voters have been converted to Toryism, a sizeable proportion of the Conservative Party has been converted to socialism – most notably the Prime Minister.

The litmus test was HS2. The refusal to cancel, root and branch, an outdated vanity project, made redundant by a new business culture of WFH and Zoom, signalled that the Millennium Dome mentality had infected the former party of fiscal responsibility. Rishi Sunak’s tax hikes in the Budget were another alarming signal. In its ideological manifestations, whether fiscal or cultural, the Johnson Conservative Party has embraced the fantasy philosophy of the left.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the Tories’ embrace of the Net Zero cult. It is an inane and unaffordable objective. Politically, the out-of-touch Tories have confused the applause of demented ultra-green Twitterati for genuine popularity. The tide of public opinion is on the turn with regard to Green issues. Rising fuel bills and the prospect of winter power cuts, during a pandemic, are already causing a degree of reappraisal by the public. Once they are required to buy electric cars (with lithium prices rising 18 per cent this year alone) and replace their gas boilers with unaffordable, inefficient electric pumps, doubt will change to fury.

The Tories can probably congratulate themselves that they are now unlikely to be in power when the backlash reaches its zenith. For, above all, what has sunk Boris and his party is the perception of entitlement and alienation. Keir Starmer could have spent several million pounds on propaganda without producing anything half as effective as the Allegra Stratton video. Matt Hancock, Owen Paterson, Boris’s flat refurbishment, entitled Conservatives partying during lockdown – all self-inflicted, potentially fatal scandals generated by a Tory culture of self-harm that goes back to Profumo.

Now the chickens are coming home to roost, starting in North Staffordshire; whether that turns out to be a smack on the wrist or a kick in the teeth will provide some evidence regarding how deeply in trouble Boris is. At present his net satisfaction rating stands at a subterranean -37 per cent. Can Boris, once again, turn his fortunes around?

There are just two glimmers of hope. Once again, thanks to Omicron, Britain is engaged in a vaccination race. Its early stages have been chaotic, but that is par for the course. If Boris can reclaim his reputation for record-breaking vaccine roll-out, that would at least partially rehabilitate him with a public whose primary concern is the pandemic. The Tory rebels are probably less representative of public opinion than they would like to think. In contrast, Labour’s pious claim “We won’t play politics with public health” and endorsement of strict protective measures is probably likely to play well with the majority of voters.

The other glimmer of hope is that Britain, or at least England, has a hankering to like Boris, who has achieved a kind of mascot status unusual in a prime minister. Despite his abysmal popularity rating at the moment, many would forgive him if he gave them an adequate pretext. Nor is there any outstandingly eligible potential successor in evidence.

The real tragedy of all this, though, is the squandering of the golden opportunity, post-Brexit, to turn Britain into a free-market powerhouse, fully sovereign and hugely innovative, from financial services to life sciences, a nation of shopkeepers/entrepreneurs that should have been given its head, instead of being forced back into the kind of statist dependency culture that brought stagnation under past Labour governments. What will puzzle historians is the fact that the author of this stasis is the buccaneering Boris Johnson – the last man anyone would have expected to convert the Cavalier party into a Roundhead clique.