The Sunday Times December 19, 2021 31COMMENT
“Bloody French hens coming over here
and getting access to our carols!”“Trust in the voters is at
an all-time low”Steve Richards
Even when PMs are in deep water
sinking them is never an easy task
Like Peter
Sellers, he
seems at ease
in public only
when he is
dressing up
The Brexit glue that held Boris Johnson’s coalition together is weakening but that’s no guarantee he’ll go
H
ere we go again. Another
prime minister is in deep
trouble and may be gone
before long. After Thursday’s
breathtaking by-election
defeat in North Shropshire,
Boris Johnson is besieged on
so many fronts that questions
about his longevity, not least from
Conservative MPs, are inevitable.
The Conservatives’ great vote-winner
is losing votes. The early summer, when
Johnson’s party gained Hartlepool and
almost won Batley and Spen, seems
ancient history. All electorally successful
prime ministers cast a spell for a time. In
Johnson’s case there was an intoxicating
set of perceptions along these lines:
“Look at his rapport with voters. They
know he is trying his best. As a result his
party must pay unquestioning homage.”
Johnson’s near-omnipotence across
his government over the past couple of
years was based solely on what admiring
voters chose to see, not necessarily
what was in front of their eyes. Last
week’s by-election defeat shows the spell
is broken.
More worrying for him is the mood of
his parliamentary party. This is partly
for the obvious reason that Conservative
MPs have the power to determine his
fate. If enough of them decide to do so,
they can trigger a vote of no confidence
in his leadership. Although his
predecessor, Theresa May, survived such
a vote in 2018, the insurrectionary act
further undermined her already
crumbling authority. She also faced
endless revolts over Brexit, each one
making her position more vulnerable.
Last week Johnson could win a vote
on his response to the latest Covid
emergency only with the backing ofLabour MPs. He had made a judgment
on what was necessary. One hundred
Conservative MPs opposed him. Since
the mid-1990s Tory leaders have
struggled to manage the Conservative
parliamentary party. Apart from rebels
on Covid rules, Johnson also faces tax
rebels, rebels for more spending, rebels
for less spending and now libertarian
evangelists turning on their instinctively
liberal prime minister, a ghoulish dance
in an impossibly stressful context.
In the end divisions over policy are
more nightmarish for a prime minister
than all the other crises that erupt when
a honeymoon passes. Brexit alone
bound Johnson’s wide coalition of
support, from traditional Labour areas
to affluent southern constituencies. The
outcome in North Shropshire shows
that, although Brexit is far from done, it
has lost its salience and electoral
potency. The most pro-European of UK
parties won in a seat that had
overwhelmingly backed Brexit. Now the
internal policy divisions that were
masked by the united support of
Johnson’s parliamentary party for a
single issue are in the open. A popular
prime minister can transcend such
divisions, as Johnson did with his
ideological flexibility. An unpopular
prime minister soon gets blamed for a
split party and a lack of clear direction.
Johnson’s ideological ambiguity
extends to other parts of his public
character. Like the troubled comic
genius Peter Sellers he seems to be only
wholly at ease in public when dressing
up. The most vivid image of these recent
extraordinary weeks is Johnson wearing
a policeman’s costume at dawn in
Liverpool to launch with unintentional
irony his “law and order” week.if the gatherings were nothing to do
with him.
When politics is partly a
performance, it is easy to see how some
rules can seem tedious and
accountability a bit of a bore. But when
the political mood changes, the act can
become dangerously discordant. The
admiring laughter fades and questions
rage about the layers of artifice, the
mendacious distance from the lives of
those that follow the rules. When a
prime minister is not trusted, he cannot
rule effectively.
There is, though, a significant twist.
To return to my opening sentence, here
we go again. Having written a book
recently about the prime ministers we
never had, I am wary about assuming an
imminent prime ministerial fall.
Speculation about the fate of a prime
minister is constant. After winning an
even bigger victory than Johnson in
1966, Harold Wilson was neurotically
worried about his survival only three
years later. He felt so insecure he
interrupted a speech to address reports
about a looming challenge, stressing that
while the audience might have
wondered what was going on, he was
going on. He went on for nearly seven
more years. John Major spent much of
his time facing frantic talk about his
future. He lasted nearly seven
continuous years. There are many other
examples of seemingly doomed prime
ministers soldiering on, dashing the
hopes of potential successors.
How the likes of Rab Butler, Roy
Jenkins, Denis Healey and Ken Clarke
yearned to be in No 10. They never got
there for lots of reasons, but the main
one was the power of incumbency. Rishi
Sunak should note they were allchancellors many assumed would be a
prime minister. Liz Truss, posing regally
for her Christmas card, should also
observe that another reason some fail to
become prime minister is that their
ambition is too clunky and transparent,
a factor in why a likely leader in the
mid-1990s, Michael Portillo, is now
better known for travelling around the
world on trains.
Nonetheless, when a prime minister
is in deep trouble, the crises tend to feed
on themselves. There are no more sunny
days but only increasingly wild storms.
There are no relaunches that work.
Prime ministers do not “change”. Rivals
begin to flex their muscles. Sunak, Truss
and others will now be wondering
whether their moment of destiny is
about to arrive, intensifying Johnson’s
fragility.
Tory MPs will rebel happily on other
issues. When Johnson speaks the truth,
the cry of “liar” will ring out. Once
Wilson became famous for being
devious, he could no longer be
underhand. His colleagues were too
suspicious even when he lit his pipe.
Johnson has reached this point over the
much bigger issue of trust.
No one knows for sure how long he
will last, but once the speculation about
a prime ministerial future begins to rage,
it will only intensify. At the same time, if
the recent past is any guide, the internal
dissenters and rivals will struggle to
topple an exhausted but stubborn
incumbent in No 10 as speedily as they
dare to hope.Steve Richards’s latest book is The Prime
Ministers We Never Had: Success and
Failure from Butler to Corbyn (Atlantic).
Matthew Syed is awayNEWMAN’S
WEEK
Other prime ministers had no great
hunger to dress up. Imagine Gordon
Brown or Theresa May parading as a
police officer. Even the great prime
ministerial actors Tony Blair and
Margaret Thatcher did not have such a
hunger to put on costumes. Johnson
delights in being a nursing assistant, a
labourer on a building site, a farmer in a
field. He is much warier of events
without a disguise: an interview with
Andrew Neil or indeed other forms of
scrutiny. This tendency towards fantasy
even manifested itself in Johnson’s
response to the by-election defeat, when
he blamed the media for asking
questions about rule-breaking parties as“You’ve inflated by 5.1 per cent”“We also need proof that you’re not
Michael Gove”D
rip, drip, drip, and wait. If
you’d told us, before this all
began, that this was how many
of us would soon spend every
morning — standing in the
kitchen in our dressing gown,
waiting for the kettle to boil,
staring at a lateral flow test —
we would never have believed you.
The swab jabbed up your nose
certainly wakes you up. The tension as
the special solution seeps along that little
rectangle of paper further quickens the
pulse.
On Friday I woke up with a mild sore
throat. (Is that a symptom these days?)
So I took a lateral flow test. It was, to my
great relief, negative. So I decided to
commute into the office, where I had
some important stuff to do.
I also made another decision: this was
to be the last lateral flow test I would
take in 2021. I’ve just got too much I need
— and want — to do.
As you read this, I’ll be sitting on an
Avanti train, heading across the country
with a few hundred other passengers to
see the in-laws before Christmas. Unless
I suddenly break out in a fever or
coughing fit or can’t taste my morning
Frosties, I won’t have taken a test this
morning. Because all it can give me is
bad news.
I know this is selfish. But another
Christmas locked up, with our young
children getting no access to their doting
grandparents, and vice versa, is almost
an unbearable thought. I know too many
people — friends and colleagues — who
have tested positive in the past few days,
most only mildly ill, their Decembers
already ruined. Fine — you may be ready
to write off another Christmas for the
sake of next time. But what if it’s the
same situation this time next year?
To be clear, I am not Laurence Fox. I
am no antivaxer or anti-masker, which,
I’m well aware, is often what antivaxers
and anti-maskers say. I got my booster
on Thursday. I don’t mind putting a
mask on. I have worked from home and
sat in pub gardens in longjohns on
freezing evenings. I have, for nearly two
years, done my bit, as has been asked of
me. The in-laws, still in their sixties, are
all jabbed up too. As are my parents,
bored out of their minds by lockdowns.
And I know my fellow countrymen
and women. Our train will be packed, itI know this is
selfish, but
another
Christmas
locked up is
unbearable
being the Sunday before Christmas.
There will be the masked, including me.
There will be many unmasked, too, if my
Friday morning London Tube was
anything to go by.
Even if I am an unknowing Covid-
carrier, I’m unlikely to be the only one
on board, if it’s as infectious as Chris
Whitty says. And if it’s as infectious as
Whitty says, then, positive or negative
when I set off from home, I’ll have it too
by the time I step out onto the platform.
We’re all playing a percentages game.
I’ve never been that concerned about
getting it, or anyone I know getting it and
dying from it. (It is true I know nobody
older than 70. I am grateful my
grandparents aren’t around for this.)
It is hard to “follow the science”. Even
if we tune into the official briefings, the
messages, and the body language, are at
best mixed. Work from home, but, sure,
get a plane; go to the pub. Last year’s
No 10 Christmas parties are not a factor
in my decision-making. If they’re young
people who have been working on top of
each other for weeks anyway, what does
it matter — epidemiologically — if they
stay late for a few drinks?
My understanding — my feeling — is
that Omicron is everywhere, but, from
what I’ve heard, it’s not making us that
ill — especially the fully boostered. The
in-laws know we’re coming. They
already (gently) broke the rules to come
down for my wife’s 40th in the spring,
because there really won’t be another
of them.
Whataboutery is never edifying, but I
also know that many people have
behaved and will behave much more
irresponsibly than I ever will. I have
heard of a Briton who got his positive
PCR test result after he had landed on
the ski slopes of France. He quietly
snow-ploughed on with his holiday.
There is the colleague’s contact who felt
a bit off colour but still went to Paris and
a funeral — and later tested positive.
I’ve felt a bit ill at times this winter.
Every time, I have tested negative. I just
don’t want to risk the next test being the
one that ruins my, and my family’s,
Christmas.Anonymous
I won’t take
another test
— and I bet
I’m not the
only one