In writing about politics you can either try to explain what you think is happening or you can say what you think should happen. Right now, there is a complete convergence between the two. Boris Johnson’s premiership is on the slide, irreversibly so. The question is not whether Johnson will go. It is when and how – and what will come after.
Simultaneously it is increasingly plain that Johnson should go. Some take this view for partisan reasons or because Johnson’s personality appals them. Fair enough. But that’s not my argument here. There is also an extremely powerful Conservative case against him remaining. In the end, this will be decisive, because he will only go only if it is in the Tory party’s interest; no one else’s.
However the main reason why Johnson should depart is now moral, systemic and governmental, rather than political. His increasingly reckless, and even Trumpian, response to it has now led to the resignation of Munira Mirza, No 10’s policy chief, who described a recent attack on Keir Starmer as beyond “the normal cut and thrust of politics”. It’s about the way the current crisis shows how he sees his job, and about the way he does it. He sees himself as above the system. He should not. His approach cannot coexist for much longer with being a prime minister of a stable and healthy parliamentary democracy. There is too much at stake.
Much has been said this week about how the dangers to Johnson’s position may have lifted a little. That may be true in the short run, although every time anyone says this a new danger pops up. In the longer term, the danger is as great as ever. The simple but profound truth is that the law is above Johnson, not the other way around. As Keir Starmer hinted this week, the police investigation may yet end in the conviction of a prime minister, an event without modern precedent.
It is clear that Johnson would try to brush that aside. He appears ready to argue that a fixed-penalty notice for a breach of lockdown rules would no more call his position as prime minister into question than a parking fine. But the Tory party is almost certainly not so far gone that it would permit this. Tobias Ellwood’s words this week – “We’re better than this” – would become the rallying cry, and rightly so.
Johnson is blind to rules and dismissive of them. But he is also more devious about why they should not apply to him than is sometimes understood. This is fundamentally because he sees himself as an autonomous individual unburdened by the obligations or conventions that others uphold. It means he believes rules do not matter, and it means that in government he is not the first among equals, as the constitutional orthodoxy would have it, but very much the first above subordinates.
This is why he has constructed his government the way he has, with a cabinet composed mainly of sycophants and second-order ministers; with a centralised No 10 operation that overrides departments and undermines their ethos; and with senior civil servants, like ministers, too often chosen for their deference to the man at the centre rather than for their readiness to argue a case.
It is also why Johnson governs not through his control of Whitehall or the House of Commons but through the No 10 media operation. It is why he spends so much time making photo-opportunity visits to hospitals and construction sites accompanied by his seemingly bottomless dressing-up box. It is why he built the press briefing suite in Downing Street. It is why he flew to Kyiv on Tuesday. It is why, in Jacob Rees-Mogg’s highly revealing claim, government in the Johnson era is more presidential than parliamentary.
Johnson’s attitude to the ministerial code offers an example of this approach. Starmer asked Johnson last week if the code applied to him. Johnson replied that it did. But there is a good case for suspecting Johnson really believes otherwise. In the code, ministers are subject to the rules, but the prime minister himself is the code’s arbiter and guardian. It is he, and he alone, who decides if there has been a breach.
Johnson knows this. It is how he overrode his standards adviser in the Priti Patel bullying case. It is also the case he would make if Sue Gray were convinced in her final report that he had lied to parliament. The ethos of the code undoubtedly means that a prime minister should resign for lying. But the letter of the code gives a prime minister the wriggle room to claim to be the judge in their own case.
All of this is at one with the way Johnson conducts himself as the head of government. Constitutionally, he owes the prime ministership to the support of parliament (which is why MPs can and will in the end throw him out). But Johnson sees the 2019 election victory as a personal mandate that bypasses MPs. This is why Rees-Mogg and others have claimed that there would have to be a general election if the Tories chose themselves a new leader. It is completely untrue, but it is how Johnson thinks of it.
Something similar surfaced again in Johnson’s revealing response to Gray’s interim report this week. In the face of Gray’s finding of “failures of leadership and judgment”, Johnson announced that “I get it and I will fix it.” But he doesn’t and he won’t. Beefing up the No 10 operation and centralising government around himself even more firmly are the opposite of what he needs to do.
This week’s “levelling up” white paper provided an example of another systemic failing in Johnson’s solipsistic approach to government. Make no mistake, levelling up is and could be a big idea. Potentially it is as big an idea as Brexit in its importance to sustaining the electoral realignment that Johnson achieved in 2019.
But the white paper shows that levelling up is still more of a phrase than a policy, rather as Brexit also was. The plans do not come close to addressing the scale and intricacy of the problems involved in the nation’s inequalities and uneven opportunities. Without new money, amid large doses of Thatcherite Tory scepticism on the backbenches, and hampered by Johnson’s preference for performative rather than effective presidentialism, it will not do the job either economically or politically.
Johnson owes his prime ministership to running against Britain’s governing system. But at no time has he had an alternative system to put in place for changing Britain – beyond himself and his performance. He is now doubling down on that same approach, even though it will make all the problems worse. This is now an irreparably destructive prime ministership, not just to Johnson and his party, but to government more generally, to the public’s needs, to the country’s reputation and even to the survival of the state.
Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
• The subheading of this article was amended on 4 February 2022 to remove an incorrect statement that Tobias Ellwood had resigned.
