Going forward or back, successor faces long, hard road
Johnson has failed to match the three years and 11 days Theresa May, his predecessor, spent in office. He promised to end the instability that blighted her premiership. He has matched it.
At the front of the queue to succeed Johnson is new Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi, 55. A child refugee from Iraq, who supported Brexit and oversaw a successful vaccine program, he is a popular figure in the party. But the field will be large. Liz Truss, the Foreign Secretary, is keen; so is Tom Tugendhat, the chair of the foreign affairs committee, and Attorney-General Suella Braverman. Sunak and Javid are expected to have a tilt.
Whoever succeeds Johnson will inherit a monstrous in-tray. The Bank of England forecasts inflation to reach 11 per cent in the autumn; the pound is fragile. The National Health Service is grappling with a backlog of 4.3 million patients waiting for elective procedures. The long-term growth outlook is poor. He or she will also confront a deeper question: can the Conservative party reinvigorate itself while continuing to hold office?
The damage Johnson has wrought on the Conservative party is broad: support has fallen across all classes of voters who backed it in 2019, according to our analysis of polling conducted by YouGov in June. The next election will see it fight on all fronts, as new northern seats and southern heartlands face a pincer movement from Labour and the Liberal Democrats. After 12 years in power, four general elections and the loss of a third prime minister, the exhaustion may be too great and the ideological rifts too broad for the party to recover.
Johnson’s policy of vigorous support for Ukraine is not in any great jeopardy. Beyond that, difficult choices lie. Lee Anderson, the blunt Tory MP for Ashfield, an old mining district, declared he had no confidence in Johnson and called for a “government of low taxation (that) will be tough on illegal immigration”. Such simple demands, so hard to meet.
On the economy, Sunak’s departure underlined deep Tory divisions. In his resignation letter to Johnson, Sunak, who espouses fiscal discipline, declared that their approaches were “fundamentally too different”. A leadership contest will be rich in Thatcherite homilies, but unlikely to resolve the party’s simultaneous desires for low taxes, balanced budgets and expansive public services.
On immigration, one right-winger lamented that Johnson might have been safe had he only cracked on with deportations of irregular migrants to Rwanda in defiance of a ruling of the European Court of Human Rights. Similarly, the Eurosceptic right will seek promises to overturn the part of the Brexit treaty on Northern Ireland as the price of its support for any leadership candidate. Yet such violations of international law gravely alarm the liberal wing of the party, which sees them as ruinous to the reputation of Britain abroad. There is no consensus on whether Britain should pursue a rapprochement with the EU or fight it.
Johnson has hooked his party on quick fixes to intractable problems. It will take years to get clean.
On culture, too, it is riven. Mike Freer, who resigned as the equalities minister, accused the government of “creating an atmosphere of hostility for LGBT+ people”; many other MPs want the government to be more sceptical of transgender rights. The question of whether Johnson’s skirmishes with the BBC, universities and other agents of “wokery” were a net gain or a net drag on Tory performance is unresolved. The party never fully digested how it won so handsomely in 2019 and, in place of analysis, many Tories have confused their private hobby-horses for the priorities of the electorate.
The Conservative party will unite on one thing, however, and it is the silver lining to a very dark cloud. Above all, the coming leadership contest will be dominated by the question of who can restore the Conservative Party’s values of government, says Will Tanner, of Onward, a think tank close to the party. Candidates will outbid each other with pledges to restore integrity to public office, uphold conventions and put the national interest over ideological purity. Shirts will be tucked in; shoes buffed. They will agree that chaos in Downing Street has paralysed policymaking. After Donald Trump’s downfall, America’s Republicans doubled down on populist excess. For three years, the Conservative party has leant over the precipice. Johnson might have been happy to plough straight on. But most Tory MPs wanted to turn back.
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Boris Johnson’s premiership started collapsing to the sound of Zadok the Priest. On July 5, beneath the windows of Downing Street, the bands of the Household Division were conducting the Beating Retreat, an annual parade marking the closure of camp gates at nightfall. One hour before, Rishi Sunak, the chancellor of the exchequer, and Sajid Javid, the health secretary, had resigned. In the offices of Whitehall, all hell was breaking loose. On the square below, immaculate precision.