56 new york | december 9–22, 2019
servatives’ best issue and that they were vulnerable on other domes-
tic issues, especially on austerity and public spending. If Boris deliv-
ered Brexit and then called an election, he argued, the campaign
would be on Labour’s terms: domestic economic and social policy.
But if the election was called quickly, before Brexit, it would be on
Conservatives’ terms: “Get Brexit Done,” as Boris has repeated end-
lessly while campaigning. The fear was a rerun of the Churchill 1945
election, when a victorious war leader was thrown out once he was
no longer needed and the Brits voted en masse for a socialist revolu-
tion. He also saw that Boris had a chance to unite the “leave” vote by
winning back Brexit-party supporters but that the “remain” vote
remained hopelessly divided between the Labour and Liberal Dem-
ocratic parties. He saw a chance to create a new Tory coalition based
on the “leave” vote. Some Brexiteers resisted, seeing a chance to get
Brexit passed without any election potentially messing things up.
So far, the gamble appears to be paying off. A huge poll of over
100,000 Brits by YouGov last month, using the same methods that
had rightly predicted a hung Parliament in 2017, showed apossible
Tory majority of 68 seats. In the poll, the Tories held onto their
traditional base in the South but made striking gains in the North,
turning long-held Labour seats into Tory ones overnight.It is the
same dynamic that saw the Democrats lose the Rust Belt swing
states in 2016. The poll shows Labour at 32 percent with the Lib
Dems at 14, while the Tories have 43 percent support and the Brexit
Party has collapsed to 3 percent. Boris’s strategy destroyed both the
former U.K. Independence Party and then the Brexit Party—the two
parties of the far right. Divide and conquer was how Thatcher won
three times in a row in parliamentary seats despite never having
majority support in the country as a whole. If Boris wins, it will be
by the same strategy.
But his appeal is very different from Thatcher’s. Far from con-
fronting people with hard economic choices and threatening ever-
deeper austerity amid soaring unemployment, as she did,Boris is
promising much more public spending than his Tory predecessors,
in an era of very low unemployment, while trimming tax for the
working and middle classes. The cut in corporation tax, planned by
Theresa May, was scrapped. He plans big increases in spending on
the National Health Service and schools and doubling thegovern-
ment science budget, while also getting tougher on crimeand ter-
rorism. Much of this appeals more to traditional Labour voters than
to the London Tories who read The Economist.
And, of course, Brexit will not be “done,” as Boris promises. The
Withdrawal Agreement is just the first step in a long and agonizing
process of trade talks. Boris has promised these will be over by the
end of 2020 and said so in the first televised debate between him
and Corbyn. But no one can possibly believe that (and most people
don’t). What Boris seems to be counting on is that he will conclude
a withdrawal agreement by the end of January, make a huge fuss
over it, declare the matter finished, and hope that most Brits will not
want to immerse themselves in the mind-numbing detailsof trade
talks. He’s gambling that Brexit is largely a symbolic issue—a new
statement of British sovereignty and independence—andthat the
details of future trade don’t really matter. And he may be cynical
about this but also right.
One sign of this possibility is the immigration issue. It was critical
to the Brexit vote but disappeared as a major issue in thepolls as
soon as the referendum was over. The question has played almost
no part in the current campaign even though Britain’s immigration
system hasn’t changed significantly since 2016. The xenophobic
ugliness that appeared before the referendum largely subsided after-
ward. It’s as if people just wanted to be heard on the subject and
broadly shift away from mass immigration but actually didn’t care
that much. It may be a function of the fact that E.U. migration to
Britain has fallen drastically since the referendum, andBoris is
pledging to transform the entire system toward the Australian
model of selection based on proven abilities and skills. But the ability
of most people to move on from difficult subjects once they feel
they’ve been listened to should not be underestimated.IT IS THIS ASPECT OF Boris’s politics that some of his close allies
insist has been misunderstood. He has done what no other conser-
vative leader in the West has done: He has co-opted and thereby
neutered the far right. The reactionary Brexit Party has all but col-
lapsed since Boris took over. Anti-immigration fervor has calmed.
The Tories have also moved back to the economic and social center
under Johnson’s leadership. And there is a strategy to this. What
Cummings and Johnson believe is that the E.U., far from being an
engine for liberal progress, has, through its overreach and hubris,
actually become a major cause of the rise of the far right across the
Continent. By forcing many very different countries into oneincreas-
ingly powerful Eurocratic rubric, the E.U. has spawned a nationalist
reaction. From Germany and France to Hungary and Poland, the
hardest right is gaining. Getting out of the E.U. is, Johnson and
Cummings argue, a way to counter and disarm this nationalism and
to transform it into a more benign patriotism. Only the Johnson
Tories have grasped this, and the Johnson strategy is one every other
major democracy should examine.
Consider, by contrast, Germany, where the center right is reeling
and the extreme-right AfD has 91 seats in the Bundestag. Or, for that
matter, France, where the mainstream right has collapsed and
Marine Le Pen won 34 percent in the last presidential election.
Compare it with the U.S., where the GOP has been overthrown by a
far-right insurgency and turned into a disturbingly fascisticperson-
ality cult. Or Hungary and Poland, where reactionaries control the
entire system. The Tories under Boris, helped in part by thewinner-
takes-all electoral system, have kept the far right at bay, now favor
tax cuts for the poor, have a strong program for climate change, and
have proposed an Australian-style immigration policy to defuse
native panic. They are not socially conservative in the American
sense. And all of this has been made possible by Boris Johnson’s
shameless ability to shift and reinvent his politics, betray his allies,
lie to the public, and advance his own career. One of thoseclose to
him told me that the next group he will betray is the ERG, the hard-
right Tory Brexiteers. And if he wins this election by a solid margin
and seizes the center, he may force the Labour Party to reexamine
how far left it has traveled in the past few years.
What Boris is offering as an alternative is a Tory social democracy
rooted in national pride and delivered with a spoonful of humor
and entertainment. In some ways, his personality is part of the for-
mula. His plummy voice and silly hair and constant jokes are
deeply, even reassuringly, British even as demographic change has
made Britishness seem fragile. And if you still believe in the nation-
state, in liberal democracy, and have qualms about the unintended
consequences of neoliberal economics, it’s about as decent a con-
servative political blend as is on offer in the West. It makes the GOP
look deranged by contrast.
Yes, Boris has shifted and lied and betrayed on his path to this
moment. But he will gladly point out that the same criticisms were
made of Churchill, who switched parties, alienated almost everyone
in the Establishment, and was regarded long into the 1930s as a
crank and a joke with a funny way of speaking. But Churchill was
right about the one thing that mattered, and Johnson not so subtly
implies the same is true about him and Brexit. It takes a large ego to
use Churchill as an analogy, and Brexit is hardly the Battle of Britain
(and Churchill famously wanted a united Europe after the war). But
in defense of Britain’s independence from foreign power and its
unbroken national sovereignty, without foreign invasion, for a thou-
sand years, you can see, or rather feel, the parallel. Andwhen it
comes to chances for political analogies, Boris the opportunist will
take what he can get. ■