Boris Johnson’s weakness is his need to be loved

Voters warm to him on the campaign trail but as British PM he will soon find he can’t keep all his promises.

Boris Johnson will almost immediately need to judge whether to lean towards the US or stay aligned with the EU in response to the Iran crisis. Picture: Getty Images

Election campaigns are like the X-rays of a politician’s character and many of Boris Johnson’s flaws have been exposed in the Tory leadership contest. His temper, disloyalty and loose relationship with the truth have been on display as well as his undeniable charisma and natural ability as a campaigner.

None of his frailties have put off the majority of Tory party members who have made him the next British prime minister.

Now the real test begins. If the leadership contest was an X-ray, then running the country is the political equivalent of open-heart surgery. In Downing Street there is nowhere to hide and Johnson will have to win over tens of millions of voters rather than thousands of Tory activists.

Constitutional historian Peter Hennessy describes Johnson as the “unknown prime minister” who despite his celebrity is strangely elusive. “Margaret Thatcher used to say ‘one must have stars to steer by’,” he says. “Boris’s stars are still a mystery apart from his own, which is of course the brightest to him.”

Tony Blair talked of his “irreducible core”, although it took him years to find it, and he found cabinet reshuffles “a ghastly business”. Gordon Brown had run out of ideas by the time he got to No 10 and Theresa May turned into a vacuum at the top. Sir John Major says the new leader “must choose whether to be the spokesman for an ultra-Brexit faction or the servant of the nation he leads. He cannot be both and the choice he makes will define his premiership from the moment of its birth.”

Johnson once joked he had no convictions, except an old one for speeding. His preferred political strategy is to be “pro having (cake) and pro eating it”, which he won’t be able to sustain. During the leadership campaign he tried to keep as many people as possible happy by promising different things to different groups. Now he has to choose who to betray.

Within days, the disappointments will begin as he chooses his first cabinet. The many MPs who believe they are in line for top jobs in return for endorsing the Tory favourite cannot all be right. The balance of the ministerial team will set the tone for the new administration. As one ally puts it: “The plan is that Boris will be a good chairman of the board. If he has competent and experienced people who can run departments around him, then there’s a chance it can work.”

But a former cabinet minister predicts Johnson will struggle to be “first among equals”. The former colleague says: “Boris has always taken criticism to heart and I think he’ll find it very hard to deal with the bear pit of cabinet. It will be full of people trying to game the situation for their own self-interest. He needs to be loved; it’s in his nature. That gives him a slight vulnerability, which is one of the things that makes people warm to him. But, as prime minister, that strength becomes a fatal ­weakness.”

Controversial policy decisions will crowd in on the new Tory leader from day one. He must judge whether to lean towards the US or stay aligned with the EU in response to the Iran crisis, a diplomatic dilemma with wider ramifications for Britain’s place in the world.

He also urgently needs a Brexit plan. It is extraordinary that with only hours to go until he moves into No 10, Johnson still appears to have no strategy for taking Britain out of the EU. There are in fact two competing factions in his camp: the moderates, led by Attorney-General Geoffrey Cox, believe there is still a way to get a tweaked version of May’s deal through the House of Commons. As one supporter of this approach puts it: “If Boris gets a fair wind then he can resolve the European issue by putting some lipstick on the withdrawal agreement and then go back to being a One Nation Tory.”

Others, including Iain Duncan Smith, Johnson’s campaign chairman, want to prepare unambiguously for a no-deal Brexit on Halloween. There are mixed messages emerging from Johnson’s team because the candidate himself has not decided between these contradictory routes. On the one hand, there are reports that European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker will be invited to Chequers for talks as early as this weekend; on the other, there are suggestions that the new prime minister intends to let the EU stew rather than going cap in hand to other European capitals seeking a compromise.

Johnson’s rhetorical flourishes have only highlighted his inconsistencies. He promised, memorably, to deliver Brexit on October 31 “do or die” but also claimed that there was a “million-to-one” chance of leaving without a deal. Both cannot be true, but Johnson is like the White Queen in Through the Looking-Glass who boasts that she can believe “as many as six impossible things before breakfast”. He has promised to strike a better deal than May, without the Northern Ireland backstop (something the EU has said it will never accept) and if he cannot do so then he has pledged to take Britain out without a deal (which MPs would reject). He has ruled out another EU referendum and has said he will not hold a general election until Brexit is delivered, yet he will be forced to do one of these if he does not get his way. He claims he can “unite the party and then the country” but there is an enormous discrepancy between what the Tory membership and the wider electorate want. Rhetoric will soon clash with reality.

Sir Alan Duncan, who resigned as a minister on Monday, once claimed that one country’s foreign minister had referred to him as Johnson’s “pooper scooper” because he had cleared up his mess so many times. As leader, he will not have that luxury. One MP who saw him recently says he seemed terrified at the thought of having to take responsibility for the consequences of his own actions.

“Through his whole life Boris has had somebody who makes things OK. He’s always had a fixer but Brexit is unfixable. He knows he’s in trouble. I saw it in his eyes. He’s scared of failure and of being found out. He sold something that he knows he can’t deliver and now the facts are going to catch up with him. He can see the train coming down the track that’s going to destroy him.”

The Times