Britain has suffered bad prime ministers in various guises: the ineffective and weak, the out of touch, the self-interested. None, however, can match Boris Johnson, whose utter lack of integrity, honesty and commitment to public service put him in a dire class all of his own. His continuing tenure in Downing Street after being fined for breaking his own laws, and as new revelations continue to emerge about his lack of financial probity, is a national disgrace.
Thursday’s disastrous byelection results in Wakefield and Tiverton and Honiton are only the latest sign that the public have fallen out of love with their prime minister. Johnson suffers from dreadful personal ratings and fewer than one in three voters have confidence in the government’s handling of the economy. The results illustrate three uncomfortable truths for the Conservatives. First, Johnson has in the space of less than three years transformed from an electoral asset into an electoral liability for the Conservative party. Second, Brexit has rapidly declined in political salience in the last three years. Johnson was able to use the promise of getting Brexit done to knit together an electoral coalition that brought together Conservative heartlands with many formerly Labour-voting seats in the Midlands and the north in 2019. But even though a majority of voters in both Wakefield and Tiverton and Honiton voted for Brexit, this did not stop significant numbers of voters in each seat voting for Labour and the Liberal Democrats respectively. Last, there is an anti-Conservative sentiment among voters who are prepared to vote tactically in order to unseat Conservative MPs where there is a clear anti-Conservative front runner, whether they are Labour or Liberal Democrat. This cost the Conservatives heavily in 1997 after almost 20 years in government and it is likely to cost them heavily again in 2023 or 2024.
