Philip Collins
(Picture: Daniel Hambury)We might just have found the perfect metaphor for this government. Yesterday the news broke that Boris Johnson’s former head of propriety and ethics had been fined by the Metropolitan Police over a karaoke party in the Cabinet Office at which there was a drunken brawl. As many as 20 members of staff at Downing Street have been issued with fixed penalty notices. The police have not finished yet and there is a chance that the Prime Minister himself will have to dip into his pocket. This is both extraordinarily new and, perhaps, a sign that an old kind of politics is returning.
For the last half-century there has been a simple formula that predicts political good fortune. If living standards are going up and a party’s leader is preferred to the alternative, then that party will win. Economic competence plus leadership was an infallible guide to victory or defeat. Then Brexit intervened and appeared to upset the simplicity of British politics. At the 2019 general election, the dominant issue was European belonging or not and the dividing line was where you stood on the culture. Class-based politics, income-based politics, gave way to attitude-based politics.
Yet maybe there is life yet in the old formula. At a dinner for Tory MPs late last week, the Prime Minister happily told a series of jokes about the parties that took place while the rest of the country was in lockdown. He obviously thinks he is in the clear, even if he is fined for attending the party organised by his own private secretary. The impulse to get rid of him has gone and even if the May elections are awful for the Conservative party — which they will be, and especially in London — Mr Johnson has probably got away with it yet again, at least with his colleagues.
The verdict of the public may be less forgiving. Mr Johnson’s ratings fell to the lowest of any prime minister on record when the parties were making the news. They have recovered only a little since the Ukraine crisis began. No serving prime minister has ever been found to have broken the criminal law. It will be outrageous if Tory MPs are so craven that they turn away from this. There is already plenty of evidence, from all the focus groups that the polling companies are reporting on, that the public now has the measure of the Prime Minister.
The second part of the old political formula was about living standards and economic competence. Just before the May elections, the increase in national insurance will bite on top of a vast hike in energy prices. In households which are having to make the choice between warmth and nourishment, gratitude to the Government may be thin.
The projections from the Office for Budget Responsibility show real household disposable income falling this year at the fastest rate on record. The Chancellor seems strangely allergic to raising Universal Credit, which means that people on benefits will see a 3.1 per cent rise in their income at a time when inflation is 8.7 per cent. According to the Resolution Foundation, 1.3 million people will fall into absolute poverty next year, half a million of them children.
This is going to hurt and it is hard to imagine that real economic hardship will not find its way into the popular political verdict. So far in his time in office, Mr Johnson has been the serial single-issue Prime Minister. First it was Brexit, which he co-authored, then it was Covid, which he didn’t. Now it is the war in Ukraine. Soon enough it might be Covid again, as infections are hitting high levels again, even if our attention has now gone elsewhere.
Yet it is more likely to be the cost of living that dominates the second half of this year.
The real danger for Mr Johnson is that these two issues join up and that people view his leadership through the prism of their more difficult economic circumstances. Voters are apt to be tougher on indiscretions when they feel otherwise badly disposed to you.
The reason that Mr Johnson survived the party saga is largely that his colleagues think he can practice the mysterious electoral magic that propelled him to the mayoralty in London and then the premiership, and they could not see Rishi Sunak or Liz Truss performing that same conjuring trick. Yet that was done with the wind of Brexit at his back in a time when it seemed the rules of politics had changed. If the old conventions are back, Mr Johnson is in trouble.
