If a picture is worth a thousand words, how much more a video? It has never been colloquially quantified, but watching Priti Patel clutch her forehead as Boris Johnson delivered his statement to the House of Commons yesterday, we can hazard an estimate. An essay, at least. Perhaps a novel.
For there on the Home Secretary’s face was writ the doom that likely awaits Conservative MPs if they fail to depose this Prime Minister: to spend two years sitting behind him, like a gallery of haunted paintings, before losing the next election.
This is the Home Secretary. One of the most senior members of his government, sitting at his left hand, on camera, as he delivered a statement that could make or break him and the administration he runs. Even then, the façade of enthusiastic, confident loyalty was too much to fake.
I don’t know Johnson. I therefore can’t really attest to the extraordinary, sorcerous power his personal presence seems to carry. But it must be mighty indeed.
How else could a Tory MP come out of a meeting with him yesterday evening and tell a reporter that they felt a “vast majority” of colleagues were giving Boris Johnson the benefit of doubt and were relieved that changes were coming in Downing Street?
Yes, if the Prime Minister clings on long enough then this story might “go away”, in the sense that the media cycle must move on at some point. But the damage has been done. The Teflon quality that allowed his personal ratings to endure previous crises – and thus Tory MPs to grit their teeth and stick with him through gaffe after u-turn – is gone.
Look at a side-by-side graph of prime ministerial popularity ratings and we see that Johnson is now tracking his predecessors at the terminal point in the cycle. The most likely pathway from here to the next election, for an administration which has held office in some shape or other for 12 years, is painfully clear.
Perhaps Johnson can turn it around! Well, perhaps. There is no denying that he is an extraordinary politician. But what slender grounds we have to believe it. There is no “Johnsonism”; beneath the slogans he has no transformational domestic programme to offer. The Ukraine will not furnish his Falklands War.
And what are Conservative MPs hazarding against this improbable miracle? Almost everything he won them.
Take Brexit. Should the Tories win in 2023 or 2024, Labour will not take office until 2028. By then, Brexit will have bedded in, and the rising generation of opposition politicians will have come to maturity in the new normal.
Sir Keir Starmer, by contrast, is a veteran of the gruelling battle to get us out, and our relations with Europe are not yet settled. He will have plenty of scope for unpicking the substance of Brexit if he takes power in 2024.
Likewise the Red Wall. Voters in these seats lent their vote to the Conservative party because Johnson, to his undeniable credit, convinced them it had changed. But two years in he has not delivered, and there are perhaps only two years left in which to make good on the promise of 2019.
Victory in 2024 could entrench the realignment and transform the Tories’ electoral coalition for a generation. Fail, and the party will face a needlessly long and difficult road to win their trust a second time.
The Conservative party is supposed to be “an absolute monarchy moderated by regicide”. If the will to regicide is absent, a vital component of the election-winning machine is missing – and it will not win.
Henry Hill is incoming deputy editor of ConservativeHome.
