Last week, Boris Johnson addressed parliament as prime minister for the last time. He leaves Downing Street under a cloud of disgrace, fined by the police for breaking the law, and up before a privileges committee inquiry into whether he misled the Commons that could result in him facing his constituents in a recall petition. His parliamentary swan song showed the same disdain for high office he has held throughout his premiership.
Johnson’s tenure as prime minister may be all but over, but the first week of the head-to-head stage of the race to succeed him suggests that his spectre will haunt British politics for some time to come. MPs on Wednesday selected former chancellor Rishi Sunak and foreign secretary Liz Truss as the two candidates who will be put to Conservative members to select as prime minister. Johnsonian populism looks set to dominate the contest. The debate about tax cuts – at a time when public services, particularly the NHS, are being increasingly run threadbare – has taken centre stage, with Truss promising to reduce taxes to a level that even her own economic adviser admits could spike interest rates to 7% and Sunak promising to be as radical as Thatcher on economic reform, without saying anything about what that means. Truss has sought to blame the French passport control for travel chaos at Dover and Folkestone last week – conveniently ignoring the impact of Brexit and the fact that the British government reportedly refused to fund an expansion of border infrastructure at Dover to help the port cope. Despite the climate crisis, Sunak has pledged to make it more difficult to build onshore wind farms, as a sop to the Conservative activists with whom they are unpopular. Truss has promised that all remaining EU-derived regulation would be allowed to expire by 2023 – far sooner even than on Johnson’s timetable – which, given the limitations of the parliamentary timetable, would inevitably mean a whole raft of employment and consumer rights disappearing overnight, with no democratic legitimacy for this.
