This ought to be the cabinet’s moment. A prime minister who exults in his own uniqueness is dragging his party down in the polls. Byelection reverses loom, and perhaps even a general election defeat. An unexpectedly large number of MPs have just voted no confidence. If ever there was a moment for his most senior colleagues to speak and act on behalf of the Tory party, this is it.
Instead, what do we get from Boris Johnson’s cabinet team? We get parroted rhetoric about massive agendas, his capacity to “deliver”, lines in the sand, and moving on. We get a video of the cabinet compliantly listening as Johnson delivers a five-minute Putin-style ramble in which he pointedly ignores Monday’s revolt entirely. And now we get windy, wishful waffle about how it will all be solved by tax cuts.
Where’s the beef in all this? Where is the honest sense of the actual moment that the government is facing? I’m not naive. It’s obvious that when the prime minister decides to bring the TV cameras into cabinet, other ministers have to zip it for the duration and be supportive. It even makes sense that ministers need to decide whether a cabinet meeting likely to be full of leakers is the ideal place to criticise a leader or a policy.
But cabinet ministers do not have to be doormats. These ministers are very senior politicians. They run departments that spend millions of pounds. They have experience, opinions and even in some cases judgment. Above all, though, they have a responsibility to their party and their country. And this cabinet is shirking it.
The main evidence for this is the evasive conceit on the Tory right that policies provide the answer to the government’s problems. Yesterday’s papers were full of stories that Johnson is being pressed to bring in tax cuts as a means of restoring his and the government’s popularity. The business secretary, Kwasi Kwarteng, always an inveterate state-shrinker, was an early proponent. He was followed by the health secretary, Sajid Javid, another small-government Tory.
This is lazy thinking and ideological nostalgia. Taxes are high because public needs are great and the global economy has been disrupted, not because the government desires high taxes or has failed to follow the gospel of Margaret Thatcher. Cutting taxes in current circumstances would put some money in the pockets of millions of citizens but would result in cuts to spending and services and greater borrowing costs for future generations, and could feed inflation.
The focus on tax cuts is also a wilful misreading of Monday’s vote. The issue on the ballot paper was not tax cuts or any other policy. It was about whether MPs had confidence in Johnson as party leader. The outcome was that 211 said yes and 148 said no. Since there are, indefensibly, about 160 Conservative MPs on the so-called payroll vote, with government jobs of some kind, it is likely that most of these voted for Johnson (though a few did not). This in turn suggests that around three-quarters of backbenchers voted against him.
That’s a devastating verdict. Yet detailed analyses agree on one thing: that those who voted no confidence in Johnson came from very different wings, generations and areas of the country. They included remainers such as Caroline Nokes and leavers such as Steve Baker, one-nation Tories such as Damian Green and rightwingers such as Andrew Bridgen, veterans such as Andrew Mitchell and tyros such as Angela Richardson, southern MPs facing a Lib-Dem challenge (Steve Brine), northerners facing Labour (Dehenna Davison) and Scots fighting the SNP (Douglas Ross).
They were not brought together by a desire to cut or raise taxes; on policy, they have differing views. They came together to vote against Johnson’s leadership of their party. Sensing the strong tide of opinion against his lockdown parties, many will have agreed with Jeremy Hunt’s powerful comment that Monday was a “lose or change” moment for the party. That was true on Monday and it is still true now.
“Lose or change” was also the ultimate issue back in 1990, when Thatcher lost power. But look at the stark difference between the way the cabinet acted then and the way its successors are acting now. In 1990, the entire cabinet backed Thatcher initially. But when the scale of defection became clear, ministers stepped up to the plate and pushed her out.
Ken Clarke provides a vivid account in his memoirs. He describes how the cabinet saw what was happening and acted. They did not do this around the cabinet table. They did it by caballing in corners and corridors and by talking to backbenchers. Above all, they took charge of the situation. Fourteen out of 19 cabinet ministers told Thatcher she must go. She went. And the cabinet majority was right. “We had acted as candid friends, and had … given her the frank and truthful advice which she had lacked,” says Clarke.
This is exactly what the cabinet of 2022 should also be doing. Perhaps, in secret, some of them are. Knowing what he has said about Johnson before, it is hard to believe Michael Gove has been reduced to an obsequious code of silence. Would a smart, sensible minister such as Steve Barclay really think all this is for the best for the Tories? Do the Scottish secretary, Alister Jack or the Northern Ireland secretary, Brandon Lewis, really not believe that their jobs would be immeasurably easier if Johnson was replaced? And why would the potential successors not be quietly prowling the corridors too?
The bleaker conclusion is that this is not happening because the current cabinet is hand-picked for its readiness to do Johnson’s bidding. Besides Ken Clarke, Thatcher’s 1990 cabinet still included big figures such as Douglas Hurd, John Major, Cecil Parkinson and Chris Patten, all experienced and confident operators. Their departmental equivalents today are Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak, Grant Shapps and George Eustice.
In his letter explaining why he would vote against Johnson this week, the former minister Jesse Norman put the government’s mediocrity in searing context. Johnson lacked a mission, preferred campaigning to governing, rhetoric to planning, and was attempting to import elements of a presidential system, Norman wrote. “All these things are at odds with a decent, proper conservatism: with effective teamwork, careful reform, a sense of integrity, respect for the rule of law and a long term focus on the public good.”
The problem, in short, is Johnson. That was the problem that Norman and the other 147 MPs faced up to this week. It is the problem that the 211, and the cabinet in particular, are still avoiding. Offered a choice between changing and losing, the Tory party has chosen to lose.
• Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
