the times | Thursday January 13 2022 29
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Buy prints or signed copies of Times cartoons from our Print Gallery at timescartoons.co.uk or call 020 7711 7826Johnson has put the Tories in toxic territory
The prime minister is emblematic of the entitled Conservative cad and the opposition wouldn’t have it any other way
yesterday. Tory MPs looked stunned
and thoughtful, a fateful combination
any politician should hope to avoid
inducing in colleagues. Thoughtful
means they are calculating what
holding on to Johnson might mean
for them, their seats, the
Conservatives and the country.
It is for this reason that Labour
and the SNP are calling so loudly for
the prime minister to resign. They
are desperate for him to stay and
hope the proud Tories will resist
submitting to opposition demands.
Labour wants to face a ruined
Johnson at the next election, not
a different leader pledging to
restore some propriety and
introduce new economic policies.
The same applies to the SNP. Their
anti-Union mascot is the deeply
unpopular Johnson. The last thing
they want is him gone. Day in day
out, the opposition can lash the
Tories for being led by an effete
rule-breaker who makes you poorer.
This is the dilemma now for Tory
MPs, members of the cabinet and
thousands of decent activists and
members who devote their spare
time because they believe Toryism
provides the best, balanced approach
to the management of the nation’s
affairs. The longer they stick with
Johnson the worse the tainting of
their reputation gets — and the
harder it will become for a successor
to repair the damage and win.approach. He won a majority of 80 at
the general election in 2019 by
winning the sorts of seats that would
not normally vote Tory and
convincing enough voters he was on
their side. In the wake of the parties
scandal that strategy lies in ruins.
Already, the saga has an ancien
regime, pre-revolutionary flavour to
it, highlighting what many voters
dislike about the political and media
class in general and the Tories in
particular. Short of Johnson’s
resignation, this is going to drag on
damagingly for months. It is hard to
see how the investigation by
Sue Gray, a tough official gifted a
chance to restore order by “saving
the British state” as one colleague
put it, will improve the prime
minister’s position.
Johnson has apologised and
admitted being at the drinks
bash, although he claims he did not
realise it was a party, an excuse
unlikely to work at Westminster
magistrates’ court.
The mood of the Tory jury at
Westminster has been described as
sulphurous. Actually, it’s far more
dangerous than that for the prime
minister. There have always been
angry Conservative MPs and peers
who cannot stand him and think he
should resign, even before he got the
job. What was much more ominous
was the silence on the Tory benches
at prime minister’s questionsnecessary set of measures, at least at
the start of the pandemic, while
being appalled by the epic social
harms inflicted disproportionately
on the poorest. Infuriatingly, the
person who imposed those
restrictions was at the same time
merrily breaking the rules.
It had looked for a while as
though the normal theories of
political gravity did not apply to
this prime minister. His
extraordinary connection with a
particular kind of pro-Brexit voter
appeared to protect him from thenormal vicissitudes of office.
With Johnson as leader the
Conservatives pulled off another
of their daring manoeuvres.
The party has always been most
successful when it has adapted
cunningly to shifts in society and
demography to appeal to new groups
of voters. That was what happened in
the late 19th century when Tory
leaders persuaded the rising middle
classes and parts of the working class
that Toryism was broad-based,
realistic and patriotic.
On becoming leader, Johnson
adopted an updated version of thisT
he Conservative Party has
long been vulnerable to the
charge from opponents
that it is cavalier, out of
touch and primarily
interested in procuring itself a good
time. Partly this is because its roots
are colourful and aristocratic,
whereas sombre Labour was born
out of the trade union movement
and demanding a fair wage for a
fair day’s work.
Consequently the most astute
Tory leaders in the modern
mass-media era have known that
they must at all times be wary of
creating too strong an impression of
entitlement or hedonism.
It never takes much to persuade
the public that there is something
caddish about the Conservatives.
When that view comes to dominate
opinion, through sustained scandal,
and then combines with the
emergence of an economic crisis and
voters feeling poorer, the Tories are
in electorally toxic territory.
This is precisely where Boris
Johnson has now landed his party.
The cost of living crisis is growing as
inflation feeds into the system. US
inflation topped 7 per cent yesterday
and in Britain households and
industry are braced for whopping
increases in energy bills and tax
hikes that threaten to destroy Tory
claims of sound post-pandemic
economic management.
And at that moment of maximum
danger, with people justifiably
worried, evidence emerges
presenting the prime minister as a
party animal, a careless Conservative
cad, living by a different set of rules
from the rest of us.
Johnson will think this caricature
unfair. In the Commons yesterday,
assailed by the opposition, he winced
and pursed his lips when a Labour
MP accused him of boozy
shenanigans. However, as the prime
minister knows, politics is not fair,
any more than life tends to be. He
has prospered since school by taking
a cheeky, carefree attitude to the
rules and has usually got away with
it on the basis that many voters liked
feeling in on the joke.
Yet in the past two years he has
imposed the most draconian laws
seen in peacetime Britain, restricting
normal social interaction, locking up
the country, confining the young and
vulnerable elderly, and has had
thousands of Britons fined if they
dared breach the rules.
Most of us accepted this as aHe winced as he was
accused by an MP of
boozy shenanigans
Iain
Martin@iainmartin1