When will Boris Johnson throw in the towel?

The jury has returned its verdict. Boris Johnson has to go. He still has his supporters in the party, and in the country, but there are fewer and fewer with each passing day. Soon, if he doesn’t resign, he will be in the Downing Street bunker awaiting the arrival of the chairman of the 1922 Committee, who will place a revolver and a bottle of whisky on his desk before leaving and closing the door behind him. 

That, at any rate, is the story doing the rounds of Westminster and the Tory media, and the chances are that it is true. A rear-guard action is expected. Boris isn’t going to go quietly. But his departure – and with it his disgrace – is, we are assured, only a matter of time. 

So now what happens? What does Britain have to look forward to? Will Rishi Sunak take Boris’s place without an election, thus becoming the Tories’ Gordon Brown, at the head of an administration which has stopped the clock but whose time is up? 

Sunak is an intelligent and skilful operator. His dramatic rise from obscurity is a triumph not only of the will, and of good fortune, but a measure of how far Britain has come in its integration and absorption of the nation’s Asian community. But is he up to the job? 

The hundreds of billions Britain has plucked from the magic money tree in the last 18 months all have his name attached. While he may have questioned the scale or the direction of some of the outgoings in Cabinet or in the Prime Minister’s office at Number 10, he nevertheless gave each and every one of them his stamp of approval. He could have resigned, but he didn’t. He could have delivered a speech that challenged the overthrow of party orthodoxy. He didn’t. Instead, while signing the cheques, he has allowed a whispering campaign to grow, featuring him as the hero of the hour. 

The Conservative Party now stands for free-spending and big government. Which is fine if that is what you truly believe in. Need a project funded? Give the money tree another shake. Need to pacify a sector or a region of the country? Promise them the Earth. Posterity is for the future; what matters today is votes. 

A sub-text to all this is the assumption that there is another Tory Party waiting in the wings, stuffed to the gills with talent, experience and, most of all, common sense. The backbenches, we are told, are full of Mr and Mrs Sensibles ready to step in and rescue the situation. The fact that they voted for Boris as PM and cheered him to the echo when he negotiated a trade deal with the EU more full of holes than a colander is apparently neither here nor there. These stalwarts of the Old School have supposedly been biding their time, reading up on what needs to be done, taking soundings with industry, as well as with Europe and America, and are now ready to go. 

Well, pardon me for breathing. The Tories have been in power uninterrupted since 2010. Their last leader but one, David Cameron, was good at being prime minister. At least he looked and sounded the part. But he got the referendum on Europe hopelessly wrong and left office a beaten man. Now we discover that, among other dodgy dealings, he was paid £7 million for pestering his former colleagues on behalf of a dubious private equity company that has since gone bust. 

Theresa May was hard-working and honest. But she played a bad hand badly during the negotiations with Brussels and left office with little to her credit beyond her good intentions. In the two years since, she has made a ton of money by talking about her experience, though why anybody would bother to listen is frankly something of a mystery. 

And now we have Boris, about whom everything has been said. He is the bizarro, DC comics version of May, without principle or scruples. His own party wants him out. That much was clear when ex-minister after ex-minister, and MP after MP stood up in the Commons this week to condemn his handling of the Afghan crisis. The embarrassment they feel is palpable. They are convinced that only by replacing him with someone from the alternative party hierarchy can the party fulfil its most sacred duty – to be in office on a more or less permanent basis. 

Well, dear reader, I am here to tell you that the Tories do not rule by divine right, any more than New Labour under Tony Blair and his entourage of ideological shapeshifters. 

When Johnson won the general election in December 2019, the assumption on all sides was that there couldn’t – or wouldn’t – be a re-run until at least the Spring of 2024. But is that still the case? What we can safely say is that the Conservatives under Cameron, May and Johnson, have, by any reasonable standard, outstayed their welcome. 

So long as the pandemic remains a burning issue (and even here, the much-vaunted vaccine roll-out looks to be running out of steam), an election would be regarded by most people as an unnecessary intrusion. But what about next March or next April (Covid-willing)? Johnson will be gone by then, the party and the commentariat tell us, and his replacement must be put to the people for their endorsement. 

It may be that the result is another four years of ideological appropriation under the Tories. Maybe that’s what the English want: Socialism with a Tory face. Maybe the Red Wall that turned blue last time round will acquire a deeper, cobalt hue. Maybe the shires, reborn as Levellers, will rise up to demand a better, fairer nation. Who knows? 

For the Labour Party, and Keir Starmer in particular, their moment of truth is almost upon them. Starmer – who would have struck Clement Attlee as a trifle dull – desperately needs a good party conference. He has to raise his game in the Commons, not only during PMQs but in setting out his stall as the leader of a new and honest government. Does he have the will? More to the point, does he have the troops ready to risk their careers in support of his cause? It’s hard to say. So few on the Labour benches have been tried in office. Perhaps Starmer, too, should go, replaced by a Labour alternative – Andy Burnham, say – for whom big government and management of the money tree are at least in their manifesto for everyone to see?

And then there are the Greens, on the rise across Europe, and – for reasons that now escape me – the Lib Dems. Can either of these perennial lost causes make ground? And if not now, when? Once Covid has been dispatched, the demands of climate change, for too long ignored, will move front and centre and it would be nice to have at least some people in charge who truly understand the urgency of the situation.   

Nor can we ignore the domestic preoccupations of the Scots, the Welsh and the Northern Irish as they systematically erect barriers between their nations and what goes on in England. The next general election, whenever it comes, promises to be four separate races. Nicola Sturgeon, as ever, will be seeking confirmation of her mandate to steer Scotland towards independence. David Drakeford, from his platform of Wales First, will wish his party’s candidates for Westminster well, but with an emboldened sense that Cardiff is where the power in future lies. In Ulster, the result will turn on whether or not Unionism remains the majority creed. Only in England, with its 55 million people, will all eyes be on the Tory and Labour leaders, whoever they may be. 

Until then, the focus remains where it has been since Johnson’s putsch of July 2019. Will he resign or will he brazen it out? He knows that he cannot put off forever the terms and composition of a Commission of Inquiry into his government’s handling of Covid. That could be the signal for him to throw in the towel and get out while the going is, if not exactly good, then a lot better than what lies ahead. After all, he has a living to make and his children’s education to pay for. Those memoirs and those after-dinner speeches are not going to write themselves.