Harold Wilson – who lost his only election as Labour leader half a century ago today – once said a week is a long time in politics. If that was right, then how long is an entire year?
Eleven months ago, the Conservative party looked into the abyss and decided Boris Johnson was the right answer to its (and Britain’s) problems. It did this because most Tory members, though not most Tory MPs, thought he would deliver the hard Brexit they favoured, and be electorally popular.
Johnson was never the ideal leadership candidate, and many Tories opposed him bitterly. But he won because he was seen by the majority as the party’s last best hope in a very tight spot.
The party got that bit right. A year on, it is clear that the Tories took an electorally rational decision. Johnson duly played hardball with a hung parliament in which he had no majority – and he won. The opposition parties overplayed their hands by agreeing to an early election. Johnson triumphed at the polls at the expense of a mistrusted Labour party. Brexit duly took place, and Johnson reigned supreme. His enemies were cowed and marginalised. And then came Covid-19.
Today, as Johnson approaches the first anniversary of his premiership, there is a volatile new political reality. Criticism of Johnson is again common within the Tory party. There are deepening divides about the government’s direction, priorities and leadership. Some of these relate to the handling of Covid-19. Others concern Covid-19’s vast economic consequences. These are the seeds of future internal conflicts.
But the volatility has other causes too. Clumsy handling of the Black Lives Matter protests and the U-turn on free school meals have added to the unstable mix. These have come on the heels of volte-faces on migrant health worker NHS charges and parliamentary voting. Together they create a nervous Tory mood at Westminster, and foster a wider sense of a government that has lost its way.
These anxieties more typically affect a government well into its midterm period. Whether their occurrence so soon into Johnson’s term is all because of the pandemic, or whether they would have broken out anyway, is an unanswerable question. Experience, though, suggests the latter cannot be dismissed. As the veteran Tory party-watcher Professor Tim Bale puts it: “Johnson’s success was not built on firm foundations in the first place. There was always a real danger of future subsidence under the property.”
Two decisions this week highlight this. The first was the axing of the international development department. This had always been a Little Englander demand, which is precisely why David Cameron made DfID’s continuation and budget such signature commitments in his modernisation agenda. Johnson’s decision is the exact reverse, a dogwhistle to the Tory party’s nativist right wing.
Just as symbolic is the decision, again announced this week, that Johnson will splash the public’s cash on upgrading the prime ministerial aircraft. In the scheme of things, this is a minor matter. Yet, coming in the same week that Johnson had to be shamed by the footballer Marcus Rashford into maintaining the school meals voucher scheme over the summer, it is more resonant. As with the Dominic Cummings debacle, it proclaims one law for the prime minister and another for the little people. It displays an almost Neronian indifference to the nation’s larger anxieties.
All this raises longer term and difficult questions about what kind of Conservative government Johnson really leads. It is true that these flames can be fanned by journalists, who have a material interest in writing about splits. It is also true that this Tory government remains one with a working majority of more than 80, and four years more to run. It has plenty of time to sort things out and regain the initiative before 2024.
It may well do so. Nevertheless, it is clear that Johnson suffered avoidable political damage from Covid-19. The pandemic presented him with a huge challenge but also a huge opportunity. It offered the chance to gain broader national support instead of the highly polarised platform defined by Brexit. Johnson appeared to be flirting with the idea of being a national leader at times but, as so often in his political career, he eventually failed to put his shoulder to the task. Instead he took the easier option. As a result, his poll ratings plunged from their early pandemic heights to new lows.
Johnson’s response to his declining popularity has been revealing, most of all to those who want to believe his one-nation talk. Especially after the Cummings affair, Johnson has retrenched. Many Tory backbenchers are aghast at the degree to which Cummings has been rewarded for the scandal he created, by redoubled control over the government’s agenda. Faced with the first Labour leader in a decade who looks like a prime minister, Johnson appears to have evacuated the middle ground and, at Cummings’s direction, pitched his tent on the right.
There is one long-term reason why this may make sense. The Tory party remains overwhelmingly Margaret Thatcher’s party of low taxes, low spending, the small state, social authoritarianism and a particularly English sense of post-imperial exceptionalism. These views are more firmly in the ascendant than ever in the Tory party. Johnson is the prisoner of that party, not vice versa.
But the long-term reasons why it may fail are stronger. First, it is clear – after the DfID decision and the widely trailed scrapping of gender self-identification plans – that Cummings intends to fight a culture war against what the Tory right regard as over-mighty liberal values and institutions. Other battles are likely to include assaults on human rights laws, the supreme court, parliament, the universities and the BBC. Cummings wants to polarise and prosper – posing awkward dilemmas for Labour – as he did over Brexit.
And, second, the Tory party cannot make up its mind whether it is a Little England protectionist party or a global, free-trading, buccaneering British party. That divide was never resolved in the leave campaign, and the faultline still runs right down the middle of the government. It is embodied in the potent divides between the party’s deregulators and regulators over the US trade treaty – and, of course, over relations with the EU.
If Cummings and Johnson get their way, they may try to wage permanent war on both fronts. In the end, though, the changing Tory party may not permit that. Johnson’s problem is that there are not enough Tories or Tory voters to prosecute the culture war Cummings wants. Tory under-45s are more liberal on cultural issues, just like their Labour equivalents. So are many of the 140 new and disproportionately young Tory MPs elected in 2019. It may have seemed, after the landslide election, as if Johnson commanded the field. In the real world, landslides are evidence that the ground is often unstable and full of hazard.
• Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist