Boris Johnson is history. Or so hope Rishi Sunak, many other Tories, the sober parts of the media and most voters. Johnson’s terrible government, which ended only nine months ago, looks even more unlikely to have a sequel after this week’s extraordinarily critical report by the privileges committee on his lies to parliament about Partygate, and his equally extraordinary tantrum in response.
His three years in power, with the constant lying, corrupt sense of entitlement and lethal incompetence, are increasingly presented these days as an aberration, the product of a politician uniquely unsuited to rule us. It is now time to “move on” from the Johnson era, Tories have been saying all week, adopting the faux-casual language politicians always use when conducting awkward manoeuvres.
The argument that his premiership was a one-off suits a lot of people. Ministers seeking to present the Sunak regime as a fresh start. Journalists keen to make a morality tale out of Johnson’s rise and fall. Voters wanting to believe that nothing like his premiership will ever happen again. Even Johnson himself, and his shrinking but still substantial bloc of followers in the electorate, have an interest in his government being seen as profoundly different from what came before and after.
Yet how much of an outlier was his government really? And how far can Johnson be separated from the Tory system that produced him? The answers to these questions will help decide the next election, and the reputation of Conservatism for decades to come. If enough voters can be persuaded that Johnson is not a freak but in many ways a classic product of the Tory media-political complex, the party will be in even deeper trouble than it is now.
Perhaps the favourite conventional wisdom of British politics is that the Conservatives are always changing. Yet the fact that this is broadly true – even relatively dogmatic Tory premiers such as Margaret Thatcher made shameless U-turns – obscures the less-cited truth that in some ways, the Tories are always the same. As the American political scientist Corey Robin points out in his book The Reactionary Mind, conservatives of all countries favour hierarchies; and less openly, “liberty for the higher orders and constraint for the lower orders”. You can see this instinct for inequality in Partygate, or in Sunak’s desire to deregulate the City of London while making protest harder.
He and Johnson may openly loathe each other now, and Sunak may try to present himself as a totally different kind of premier, yet underneath their governments have been pretty similar. In their disregard for the law and enthusiasm for culture wars; their blind faith in Brexit and blatant misuse of facts in parliament; their appointment of the same mediocre but tabloid-pleasing ministers; and their reliance on the same Australian electoral strategist, Isaac Levido. Sunak and Johnson have followed essentially the same formula: Conservatism with populist additives. Johnson was just luckier in having an electorate ready to swallow it.
Another danger with singling out his government is that it downplays other Tory disasters. From appeasing Hitler in the 30s to accelerating the loss of Britain’s great power status through the 1956 Suez blunder to being fatally outwitted by the unions in the early 70s, Conservative leaders have regularly made huge errors. Yet each time, the toxic administration has been effectively sealed off by the party afterwards so as not to contaminate its reputation for grown-up realism in office, which too many non-Tories as well as Tories still buy into.
As the Covid inquiry is already making clear, with its revelations about inadequate pandemic planning under both Johnson and Theresa May, “because of the preoccupation with readiness for Brexit”, it is very important that disastrous Tory mistakes are not treated yet again as isolated and unrepresentative events. In one sense, the Johnson premiership is not even over: we are still living with the damage.
If voters want to reduce the chance of further calamitous Tory governments, there needs to be a much wider awareness that the party of privilege, always including politicians who believe they were born to rule, and egged on by most of the press, has a constant capacity to make spectacular mistakes through overconfidence. And conversely, more voters need to appreciate that Labour, as the party with an inferiority complex that rarely lifts, is likely to make fewer such misjudgements. Its errors are more likely to come from excessive caution, or too much compromise with implacably hostile forces, or a half-defeated passivity in the face of mounting opposition. Labour’s delaying of its one bold spending commitment, to invest heavily in a greener economy, could be a depressing recurrence of this pattern.
If Labour wins the next election anyway and the Tories are faced with the unfamiliar frustrations of opposition, there is little to stop them producing another Johnson: another leader who can bluster but can’t govern. Assuming that Sunak resigns or is removed – the latter scenario is already the subtext of much of his Tory press coverage – the system to anoint a populist successor remains in place. A decisive role for the illiberal party membership is likely in any leadership campaign. Simplistic solutions to Britain’s problems, such as anti-wokeness, are still in fashion in many Tory circles. More nuanced, less modernity-hating Conservatism remains marginal, as it has been since David Cameron abandoned his relative liberalism a decade ago.
Beyond the party, too, there has still not been nearly enough of a reckoning about the Tory record since 2010. Thoughtful centrist or centre-right publications, such as the Economist and the Financial Times, lament the performance of the economy since then, and criticise individual Tory policies, without ever quite facing up to how extreme and reckless the Conservatives have often been. One reason for that silence may be that when Labour offered alternatives, under Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn, that in much of Europe would have been considered respectably social democratic, the business establishment did not back them.
To accept that the Johnson government was merely one episode in a longer saga of Tory misrule requires all who rejected the alternatives, including Miliband and Corbyn’s opponents inside Labour, to admit a degree of complicity in this awful Conservative era. It’s much more comfortable just to write off Johnson as “a wrong ’un”, as the former Tory minister David Gauke did this week. But while we stare at Boris the monster, other Tory beasts roam free.
Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist
