It is testament to Boris Johnson’s extraordinary powers as a politician that “What will he do next?” remains, even now, four months after his resignation as prime minister, an interesting and important question.
It’s true that Johnson has followed David Cameron and Tony Blair down the post-premiership path of more-or-less dignified money-spinning. But nobody (save perhaps a few Blairite ultras) thinks that, for Blair or Cameron, such efforts are anything more than the postscripts to their political lives.
Johnson, on the other hand, is precisely the sort of person who would take time out to deliver the keynote speech at a blockchain conference in Singapore and then take another run at high office. We are, after all, talking about the man who flew back from a Caribbean holiday (undertaken while parliament was sitting) to mount his abortive leadership bid last month.
On that occasion, he either failed to reach the nominations threshold or got cold feet. But that scores of Tory MPs were prepared to rally to his standard a couple of months after his government collapsed, and that party members might well have voted him back as leader if given the chance, testifies to his enduring hold on a section of the Conservative party.
And he seems in no mind to let go of it, as he wanders round Cop27 in Sharm el-Sheikh proclaiming himself “the spirit of Glasgow”. And as Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt gear up to deliver a bitter course of austerity medicine – for which there is no appetite in the country or among their backbenchers – one can easily imagine how he could start making trouble.
“Levelling up betrayed! The red wall abandoned! If only you had stuck with me, comrades, there could have been cake for all …”
Implausible as all that is, there would be a constituency for it. Johnson is more than anything else a first-class illusionist; his skill lies in his ability to sell people a vision of themselves, their party, their country, and him that is often only tenuously connected to reality.
His record on infrastructure is a clear example. While mayor of London, he would talk ceaselessly about “Boris Island”, his plan for a brand-new hub airport in the Thames estuary – a bold plan that would solve the UK’s runway capacity issues and give us a bit of statement architecture too.
Of course, building a brand-new airport some way outside London is not within the gift of the mayor. But it is the sort of project a prime minister can do something about. Yet once he entered Downing Street, we heard no more of the estuary airport; indeed, the government couldn’t even make a decision on Heathrow v Gatwick.
In the end, a staffer who worked with Johnson at City Hall spelled it out for me: Boris Island was about making their man sound like a go-getting sponsor of grands projets without him having to actually deliver anything that might make him unpopular in London.
Untethered from the hard realities of power, Johnsonism could flourish in the minds of believers as ever it did. And if the Conservatives lose the next general election, the man himself might be well positioned to stage his comeback as leader of the opposition, a role probably better suited to his talents than prime minister.
Might this actually happen? I can’t rule it out. But the test I’ve taken to using when trying to guess what Johnson will do next is to pose the following question: “Would it improve the ending of his autobiography?”, and the answer here is surely no.
Johnson understands the power of narrative. So, crucially, do the people helping him put together his lucrative political afterlife. Reports that he pulled out of the leadership contest because defeat would have knocked millions off his earning potential is just putting numbers on an obvious truth: he cannot afford to dent the myth of Boris.
That myth is perhaps the last great illusion he has left to sell. As time passes and memories of specific scandals fade, he will remain the man who (sort of) “got Brexit done”; who delivered an historic majority at the 2019 election; and who rightly identified the future shape of the Conservative electoral coalition.
Set against the Liz Truss fiasco and two years of austerity, the idea of Johnson as the great lost prince of ”red wall” Toryism might prove an easy sell, and a great comfort to the man himself. Sustained contact with power would probably ruin it. After all, it did before.
The best possible ending to the Book of Johnson would, of course, be a Churchillian return from the wilderness. But the odds are long, and the price of failure high: not just tens of millions in lost commercial opportunities, but the image-shattering indignity of cutting and running from his constituency (holding on to a London seat looks increasingly risky for the Tories) and more besides.
Against all that, a comfortable afterlife and comforting illusions must seem awfully tempting to a man who seems to relish the idea of being prime minister more than the fact of it.
Henry Hill is deputy editor of ConservativeHome
