One of the worst things about the perpetual winter visited upon Narnia is that it is “always winter and never Christmas”. CS Lewis’s most faithful character, Lucy Pevensie, describes this as “awful” when first told about it: a reaction Conservative MPs can probably empathise pretty well with today. First their government effectively cancelled Christmas for millions of Brits with the last-minute introduction of a fourth tier of coronavirus restrictions. Now, even more areas are heading into the higher tiers, and a third national lockdown looms as the new variant of Covid surges in the south-east and takes a foothold in the rest of the country.
The Covid winter is starting to feel as long as the one wrought by the White Witch in Narnia – and at least she did this deliberately, rather than constantly promising that things would be all right in a few months’ time.
Boris Johnson started this year by promising it would be a “fantastic” one for Britain. Of course, he couldn’t have foreseen that he would have to repeatedly downgrade those expectations – to hoping at one point that people might be able to see their families over Christmas, and then saying that many couldn’t even do that. But now the prime minister’s consistent refusal to confront reality, stringing everyone along with increasingly incredible promises, has left many Conservative MPs feeling shaken.
More and more, private conversations with backbenchers yield the phrase, “We can’t really take him at his word any more.” This is a stunning and swift loss of trust in a prime minister who in normal times would still be celebrating the stonking majority he won a year ago. It should be the kind of accusation a leader of the opposition would throw hopefully across the Commons, not something Johnson’s own MPs have largely come to terms with.
Many tell me that they no longer pay attention to his regular attempts to set a date by which life will return to “normal” (the latest is Easter, for those wondering which family engagements they should cancel next). Even those who accept that, as one backbencher puts it, “Boris is obviously not enjoying any of this: he looks miserable as hell”, are still infuriated by what they believe is the trigger-happy attitude of health ministers Matt Hancock and Nadine Dorries towards ever-increasing restrictions. Some have asked Johnson to get those ministers to show a little more reluctance about lockdowns. They don’t feel their concerns have been heard.
Ministers might well retort that these anti-lockdown MPs are out of step with the public, which continues to support tough measures to stop the spread of the virus. One ally of Johnson’s mutters that “the narrative against lockdown is led by half a dozen very confident, very articulate men who are willing to speak out against the prime minister”. The reality, they point out, is that the majority of the public thought the Christmas rules could be even tougher and have consistently supported tightening the rules.
But that doesn’t wash with some senior Tories, who claim that people aren’t telling pollsters what they really think: that they support more restrictions for other people, while themselves breaking the rules in ways they have privately justified to themselves. “The polling is flawed rubbish,” says one backbencher. “I suspect almost everyone is transgressing from the rules, but in their own minds they are doing this in a ‘responsible’ way – and unlike those other transgressors who are the cavalier, irresponsible ones. The threat and application of the law to moderate human behaviour has run its course.”
Similarly, the threat and application of the Conservative whips’ office may also have run its course, with MPs who have generally been minded to back the government either rebelling or not turning up for key votes. Rebels are insistent that they need the government to pay parliament greater respect by consulting it on the ongoing restrictions, rather than claiming regularly that new measures are urgent and won’t last very long.
Ministers might think that avoiding parliamentary scrutiny will help them dodge awkward rebellions, but one exasperated Johnson supporter argues this strategy will only build the pressure in the party until dissatisfaction with the government’s handling of Covid turns into a revolt against the prime minister’s personal leadership.
The Johnson camp is trying to make the whips’ office work better to collect information on the interests and concerns of backbenchers, particularly those elected in 2019 who still feel very much out in the cold, given how little time they’ve been able to spend in parliament with their colleagues over the past year. But the prime minister’s biggest problem is not that his whips’ office isn’t collecting enough intelligence on his MPs; it’s that they no longer trust him.
There’s no deep magic that will fix that: it’s a simple question of Johnson learning to hold his tongue and listen to his colleagues.