Return of Boris Johnson fastest way to a Labour government

This is Iain Martin’s weekly newsletter, exclusively for Reaction subscribers.

The former Prime Minister Boris Johnson has earned £1m in the last six weeks, from book deals done and speeches given. Johnson is back doing what he likes most, performing impish tricks and playing the role of Boris for money. Naughty but nice work, if you can get it.

Johnson has also shown his serious side, visiting Kyiv and reminding the audience that he got right, and he did, the important call, warning of an invasion and backing Zelensky early on, when it was unfashionable in some of the Chancelleries of Europe.

This performance is not the main act, though. This is the warm-up routine, the throat-clearing precursor to Johnson’s bid to take back control of Number 10 and the Tory party as soon as an opportunity arises in the next three to twelve months. In Boris World there is unfinished business.

Do not be deceived by the relative quietness of Boris’s supporters in the last few weeks after an early flurry of speculation post-Christmas and “Bring Back Boris” commentary from the true believers. Rishi Sunak’s difficulties right now need not too much amplification or highlighting. The Prime Minister is having a tough time, with Tory chairman Nadhim Zahawi’s tax troubles damaging Sunak’s claim to be running a different type of government from the Johnson administration.

In this period of difficulty for the current PM there may even be disingenuous statements to come from Johnson that he will not seek a return to high office, and other unbelievable musings. Next week he will be star guest on the new show on GB News, hosted by Nadine Dorries.

Off the record, Borisites told the plugged-in Dan Hodges of the Mail on Sunday last weekend that the Tories “might as well take one last gamble with the big fella.” Their hope is Sunak will suffer such disastrous local election results in May that he can be forced out.

It should be clear to all involved in the attempted resurrection of Boris Johnson that having one last spin with the big fella is an idea so bananas, so crackpot crazy, so mindbendingly suboptimal, that if it were to be attempted this would look to the overwhelming majority of Britons like a scheme concocted by half-witted persons who have ingested magic mushrooms at the end of a long day they spent in the pub downing tequila shots and, in the car park, smoking extra strong cannabis.

The return of Boris Johnson is, let’s be clear, a bad idea.

It would be regarded by many voters the Tories need to win back, in the south too, as the most grievous insult. Imagine the incredulity and explosion of disgust if the Tories did this. After everything, the bloke who needed an undeclared £800k credit facility when in office, who ran such a slipshod operation that staff had no fear of the PM and held parties while the country was locked down and the old died alone, is back for another go.

It is a sign of how much the Labour leadership is gaining in confidence that the party’s spindoctors and frontbenchers have enough of a sense of humour to claim the one they fear is Boris Johnson. This is what is known as a double bluff, or a lie, designed to excite Johnson’s supporters among Tory MPs.

The truth is – and Labour knows it – Johnson could not form a government and the Tory party will disintegrate and collapse into an early general election if he tries and comes close or succeeds.A return of the chaos is the fastest route to a Labour government. There are many Tory MPs who would not go along with his return, or vote for his measures in parliament, even if the Tory membership voted to make it happen, which is not guaranteed.

Either way, the effect on the markets of such a protracted fight, after a period of relative calm, does not bear thinking about.

It will be said by Boris Johnson’s most devoted supporters that outside the bubble, in Red Wall seats, the real voters, salt of the earth Britain, would rally to him one last time. That is an illusion. For every one British voter who might think like that, there are ten more who would be straightforwardly appalled and made more determined than ever to finish off the Tories.

America the machine

Warfare is in large part an industrial activity, resting in the end on manufacturing capacity and innovation just as much as grand strategy. That was the subject of this newsletter a few weeks ago, inspired by Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman’s book Hitler’s American Gamble. It was when Churchill and British officials got sight of what the US was going to deliver in terms of production and supplies, in the aftermath of Pearl Harbour and the German dictator’s declaration of war against America, that it became clear the war against Nazism was going to be won in the end. It was a question of industrial capacity. It was a matter of time.

This week, the US government announced it will increase artillery production as much as six-fold, to give the Ukrainians (facing the toughest of springs) what they need to win and to replenish US supplies.

For all its political troubles, the US can still do it. The industrial machine, when it comes to it, starts to motor and there is no way a small, backward economy such as Russia’s can match it.

Would Robert Burns recognise the SNP’s sour Scotland?

To the West of Scotland this week, travelling home to attend the world’s best and most illustrious Burns supper, as a guest this time rather than as a speaker. The quality of speeches, jokes, scholarship and singing was the highest I’ve encountered in many years of attending and speaking at these things.

My friend Alex Massie, the most sublimely talented of writers, someone almost as talented as Allan Massie, hates Burns suppers. The speeches are all recycled he claims, although every year Alex writes a variation of the same column denouncing Burns suppers. The Massie anti-Burns supper missive is so good, if wrong, that it could in time become a Scottish tradition, as enduring as the Selkirk Grace or Tam o’ Shanter. I envisage the Massie column being read out a century from now, annually and theatrically, accompanied by assorted hand gestures, at Burns suppers around the world, and possibly on different planets.

At the world’s greatest Burns supper this week there were many good jokes. One stood out, about a lonely Scot on holiday in Thailand winning the national lottery, but I couldn’t possibly tell it here, even to Reaction subscribers. There was another surreal routine from a local comic genius about a baby giraffe in the desert quizzing a mummy giraffe on the oddities of being a giraffe, although camels and giraffes had perhaps got mixed up in the telling.

A good Burns supper is an act of worship, an exercise in togetherness. Scholarly insights are book-ended by funny stories and the assembled throng spills out into the night, perhaps after a whisky or two, reminded how interesting and amusing life can be.

Isn’t this precisely the effect Burns was aiming for with his work?

There has long been a debate about whether Burns was a Nationalist or a Unionist. There is evidence support both claims, of course, but reflecting fondly on last week’s event I did wonder what the Ayrshire poet would have made of Nicola Sturgeon’s Scotland. Not much, I suspect.

Burns knew how to have fun. There’s humour amid the poignancy. There’s excitement and a lust for life. Compare that vision of Scotland to the SNP’s grievance-seeking version. The Nationalists Sturgeon leads present such a pious, dreary, humourless picture of the place. But Scotland is not the SNP.

Gender scandal a disaster for Sturgeon

Something unprecedented happened this week. The BBC’s main news bulletins led on Nicola Sturgeon being in trouble over her gender recognition obsession. Viewers were told a rapist was convicted in Scotland and she (a man until she was caught and put on trial) was sent to a women’s prison. Try unscrambling that concept.

On Thursday, following a public outcry, Sturgeon announced that the rapist would go to a male prison after all. Sturgeon has been refusing to listen to campaigners saying her botched legislation, allowing anyone 16 to change sex without medical intervention or consideration, will lead to more of this stuff.

Usually, the First Minister is allowed to present herself south of the border as a celebrity observer of the scene, like a Jacinda Ardern character at a book festival being asked to name her favourite books and explain to her fans how generally ace she is.

Instead, there it was on the main UK bulletins this week. The First Minister leading the news, in full retreat.

What I’m watching

I had expected to enjoy Moonage Daydream, the acclaimed David Bowie documentary from director Brett Morgan. A trusted Reaction subscriber and friend raved about it, and Morgan’s earlier film Crossfire Hurricane on the Rolling Stones was a gas.

But I couldn’t get along with Moonage Daydream, at all. Amid all the digital pyrotechnics, and mystical meanderings, the structure was confusing. The Bowie family helped with this documentary, I think, and that may be the problem. It is far too reverential and unquestioning in tone, and I say that as someone who likes Bowie’s music a lot. Or large parts of it produced before that last great hurrah, the song Absolute Beginners made in the summer of 1985. Incidentally, Absolute Beginners was recorded in the same sessions in London as Dancing in the Street, the collaboration with his old friend Mick Jagger, for Live Aid. Bowie had the musicians assembled anyway, and Jagger flew in and away in under an hour.

Like any of the true rock and roll greats, Jagger included, Bowie made mistakes. There were some terrible, unintentionally amusing, artistic choices along the way. The late 1980s work was dismal hack work to fulfil contracts. The legend of the perfect artistic arc, of Bowie supposedly rising towards the stars and stretching out into space for eternity, is ludicrous myth-making. Come on. He appeared in the film Labyrinth.