In the thinned ranks of Conservative MPs who still support Boris Johnson, few consider him a man of honour. Perhaps none. Their loyalty can’t be composed of moral inspiration or shared principle, since the prime minister believes only in his entitlement to live in Downing Street. Mostly it is fear of losing current privileges and hope of gaining new ones.
Some MPs have been promised promotion; others cling to ministerial jobs that would never have been available if competence had been the recruitment criterion.
Policy is not absent from the transaction. A wounded prime minister without convictions and desperate for friends is attractive to ideologues whose conditional backing can be wielded as a veto over the government’s agenda. That is why there was a U-turn last month over an anti-obesity plan that would have banned some junk food advertising and supermarket deals. MPs who hated the infringement of market freedoms threatened Johnson with letters of no confidence. He yielded.
This explains also why 22 Conservative donors, responsible for more than £18m in past contributions to party coffers, signed a letter offering “unwavering support” to the incumbent leader. A man fully on the hook to his political creditors is reliably biddable.
And then there is Europe, ever present in Tory feuds. It is the old infidelity, unmentioned in the bickering stage of a marital tiff, that gets blurted out when tempers flare. In the hours before Monday’s confidence vote, Nadine Dorries, the culture secretary, declared that Johnson’s critics were disgruntled remainers. Jacob Rees-Mogg, the cabinet’s official groomer of Eurosceptic hobby horses, denounced the ballot as a plot “to undermine the Brexit referendum”.
That is nonsense as a description of Tories who oppose the prime minister. Their number includes plenty of hardline leavers. But as a premonition of the trauma that Johnson’s departure will one day inflict on the Conservative party, it is right to invoke Brexit. Sacking prime ministers calls their legacies into question. That doesn’t mean that Tories will suddenly start pining for lost intimacies with Brussels, but new leadership will reopen the possibility of a relationship based on diplomacy instead of threats, facts instead of fictions.
In Tory mythology, Johnson brought the party back from the brink of annihilation in 2019 by getting a Brexit deal. He succeeded where Theresa May had failed and was rewarded with a landslide election victory. What actually happened is that Johnson hit the same negotiating impasse as May – the issue of the Northern Ireland border – but resolved it differently. While May had struggled to find compromises that would operate in reality, her successor dispensed with that onerous obligation, freeing himself to do a deal in the realm of Brexit fantasy. He signed things without intending to implement them, then lied about their contents.
The current threat to enact a law that would override the Northern Ireland protocol amounts to an admission that the original deal was a bad one after all. Fixing it requires a return to the quagmire from which Johnson’s election was supposed to be the release. The monument where Tory MPs pay tribute to their leader’s record – Boris rampant over Brussels – will one day have to come down.
It is hardly surprising that Rees-Mogg and friends want to defer that moment, and not just because a replacement will probably end up looking more like May’s deal. To contemplate the succession at all is to ask what direction the Conservative party should take next, which is an uncomfortable question after years in deviation from economic, diplomatic and strategic rationality.
Johnson loyalists complain that the rebels cannot agree on an alternative leader; that none of the potential successors has celebrity heft to rival the incumbent. What they mean is that no one can repeat the trick of winning over traditional Labour supporters in those fabled “red wall” seats in northern England and the Midlands, while also holding the affections of a conventional Conservative base in the south.
The flaw in that defence is that Johnson himself shows little prospect of repeating the trick, which was as much a function of Jeremy Corbyn repelling voters as it was proof of a magnetic “Boris effect”. Opinion polls, council ballots and byelections suggest there are plenty of demagnetised seats available to a less toxic Labour leader.
The appeal to electoral alchemy that only Johnson can perform is born of fear that Britain doesn’t really want to buy what the Conservative party is selling, except when it has a talented fraudster at the sales counter. It is a recognition that the Tory majority is brittle, not least because it is glued together with votes that might have gone to Nigel Farage’s Brexit party if he hadn’t withdrawn candidates from 317 Conservative-held seats. Farage had tormented the Tories for at least a decade prior to that ceasefire.
Brexit merged two antithetical forces: a Conservative party that traditionally convenes around pillars of the British establishment and a demagogic insurrection that defines itself as a scourge of the establishment. Johnson’s campaigning talent was to represent both things at once. But it was an illusion, a spell that can’t be recast once broken. No wonder so many Tory MPs are disoriented and alarmed. They know Johnson is a problem, but also that removing him will expose how much deeper the problem goes. They remade their party in the image of a leader without conscience, integrity or values beyond the desperate pursuit of power. So they don’t like this disreputable “Boris” character that they now see in front of them? They are looking in the mirror.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
