The comparison is flattering to both but I picture the final showdown between Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak last October as that stunning scene in Heat when Robert De Niro and Al Pacino face each other across a table in a diner.
One’s a cop. The other an armed robber and serial murderer. They get on well but neither forgets his role: “If I’m there and I’ve got to put you away, I won’t like it … but brother you’re going down.” De Niro explains the flip side: “You won’t get in my way. I will not hesitate. Not for a second”.
I wasn’t there when Liz Truss crashed the government (and economy) and Boris had to decide if he was gonna get in the way of Rishi’s coronation. But from what I understand, you could have scripted it in similar terms.
Boris: “We both know if we go to the members that I will crush you.”
Rishi: “… and we both know that if you do that I can ensure the parliamentary party prevents you forming a government.”
Boris must have blinked, because we know the outcome, and that for me was the last time, this side of a general election at least, that Boris could have possibly come back.
Now I’m not so sure. It’s almost impossible to predict what impact his standing down from Uxbridge will have on his prospects but what he undoubtedly did over the weekend was take back control.
The idea of being passively at the mercy of a parliamentary committee chaired by a former (acting) leader of the Labour Party was never going to work. And when he discovered that the outcome of her “investigations” was going to be as predictable as he’d feared, there was nothing to gain by going along with the process any longer. Better to jump than be pushed — kicking, screaming and protesting his innocence — to a humiliating suspension and by-election, in effect having to re-apply for his job under the most hostile conditions imaginable.
His detractors will be screaming at this point — insisting that the “liar” should have been thrown to the wolves, but what if the boot was on the other foot? What if Dominic Raab or William Hague was charged with deciding whether or not Keir Starmer’s beer and curry night with colleagues away from home at the height of lockdown was a breach? Overlooking due process or forgiving its flaws because our emotions are raging and we are baying for blood is never wise.
Some 14 million people voted for the Conservatives at the last election in a contest where Boris’s personal brand was paramount. Even more voted for Brexit, and though I disagree with their decision I respect it.
And I shudder to think what those voters — traditionally marginalised by our politics — make of the relentless manoeuvrings against their man. They know the police found him guilty of just one minor technical breach of Covid regulations — worthy of a £50 fine. But a woman who has now been cleared to become chief of staff to the Labour leader effectively pinned everyone else’s bad behaviour on him. None of those supposedly clever, mature adults in Downing Street were responsible for hard drinking, sordid couplings, swing breaking and staff berating behaviour. It was all down to a “failure of leadership”.
Interestingly, it was Sue Gray who first mentioned to me that Harriet Harman would be a great person to lead the privileges committee. Then there were those unelected tsars drawn from the so-called “great and the good” with their posh titles and privileged education putting in the boot. Strange how the Left championed the likes of Lord Geidt and Sir Alex Allen as long as they criticised the PM without questioning the concept of an ethics adviser who trumps the man or woman with the democratic mandate.
What Boris did lose was the support of his parliamentary party and on that basis there was no way to carry on or come back last October. But they turned on him because they couldn’t see any other way to end the purgatory of an obsession with partygate that neither the media, the establishment nor former advisers would let go of.
If voters felt the same they could have delivered their democratic verdict mercilessly at the next election. That’s how democracy is meant to work. But the system has denied them that opportunity, and many — I’m sure — will feel cheated.
Listen to Guto’s political-memoir podcast Unprecedented on Global Player now.
