Making Boris the card Prime Minister is too much of a gamble
The Mail Online had a feature on Boris Johnson campaigning in Walsall for Thursday’s local elections. It’s the kind of thing Johnson does well, the kind of thing he does best indeed. There he was being photographed, being kissed by admiring women, chatting to pensioners, patting a big dog, pouring and drinking a pint in a pub, making a butcher at the farmer’s market laugh. Johnson is better at this sort of stuff than any other Tory. He’s better at it than anyone in British politics today – except perhaps Farage. He’s as good at it as Alex Salmond used to be in Scotland.
On his best days, doing this sort of thing, he reminds me of Denry Machin, hero of Arnold Bennett’s novel “The Card”, played by Alec Guinness in the excellent 1952 film (scripted by Eric Ambler). Denry is a poor boy on the make. When he has indeed made it, a pompous or stuffy councillor asks indignantly to what worthy cause he has ever committed himself. “Why”, replies the Countess of Chell (played by Valerie Hobson, the future Mrs Jack Profumo) “to the great cause of cheering us all up”.
Well, yes, and Johnson at his best cheers up the Party Faithful. There’s no doubt about that. So it’s quite likely that a majority of the loyal, if dwindling, band of Conservative Party members will vote for him in a leadership election, should he be one of the two candidates to emerge from the rounds of voting by Tory MPs. Some of these, a good many probably, will have their doubts about Johnson, but even the doubters may opt for him if they listen to the members of a constituency association. Johnson is not only a card in the sense in Arnold Bennett’s use of the word; he may seem the last card the Tories have to play. Yet the doubts are real. Bennett’s Denry Machin wasn’t only a card; he was a bit of a twister, unscrupulous about money, and two-timed his girl-friends.
Johnson was the favourite to succeed David Cameron after the EU referendum. Not surprising. His decision to come out for Brexit and his prominent role in the campaign, made him seem the natural Tory successor. Logic suggested that Cameron’s successor should be a leaver and, even if Johnson’s decision to come out for leave had been made at the last minute – after weighing the options, perhaps as much for his own career as for the country – nobody could deny that he had been the most effective advocate on the leave side. If Farage might reasonably claim to have been the man most responsible for forcing Cameron to promise a referendum, Johnson might reasonably claim to have been the man who won it.
But the favourite didn’t even start in the leadership election. Michael Gove, his chief and most influential backer in the Cabinet, decided, overnight it seems, at almost the last minute that Johnson wasn’t up to the job, and withdrew his support. What happened then? Johnson seems to have given way to panic. He baulked at entering the starting-stalls. Instead of fighting his corner, he threw in the towel. Denry Machin, one thinks, would have shown more courage. Denry Machin wouldn’t have chickened out.
Nevertheless, the new Prime Minister rewarded Johnson. He became Foreign Secretary. It’s true that the job is not what it was, and is now one that carries prestige rather than power. In Bagehotian terms the Foreign Secretary-ship has become a decorative rather than efficient office. It is still one in which it is possible to put on a good show. Johnson failed to do so. His term of office was embarrassing. Gaffe succeeded blunder after blunder. A British Foreign Secretary should at least command respect abroad. Johnson had serious politicians elsewhere wondering about the state of a country that entrusted its representation abroad to a man who seemed happy to play the buffoon.
Still there he was in the Cabinet, one of the committed leavers, with, one would have thought whatever one’s views on Brexit, a responsibility – a moral responsibility – to support his Prime Minister’s effort to get an agreed Withdrawal Agreement through the House of Commons; to do so indeed even if this deal seemed less than perfect to him. This however was another responsibility he shirked. Instead of rallying the support of Tory MPs – and perhaps reaching out to leavers across the House, Johnson again walked away, or, if you prefer, flounced off the stage. He knew the Tory Right were disappointed with Mrs May and were getting ready to rid themselves of her as soon as could be. So he certainly wasn’t going to be tied to her, not our card.
Yet how many times can you disappoint or desert others and still be held in high regard? It’s quite likely that Party Members still see Johnson as their Favourite Son. But what about your ordinary Tory voters? What about the swinging or sleeping members of the electorate whom the Conservatives have to attract or win back if they are to have any chance of winning a majority of seats in the next General Election? Do they still think he’s a card? Or have they come to distrust him and – even worse –to despise him? Perhaps they no longer think of him as one who is engagingly playing the Fool, but rather as a Fool indeed, and an unreliable, treacherous one too.
There are two questions to ask of any candidate for leadership: does he inspire trust? – does he inspire respect?
Johnson has, through his own folly and self-indulgence, reached the point when the answer to both questions will most often be “no”.
It’s sad if you believe there was something substantial there once. As it is now, it seems that Dryden hit him off more than three hundred years ago in his sketch of the Second Duke of Buckingham in the character of Zimri:
Some of their chiefs were princes of the land/ In the first rank of these did Zimri stand:/ A man so various that he seemed to be,/ Not one, but all mankind’s epitome./ Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong,/ Was everything by starts, though nothing long,/ But in the course of one revolving moon/ Was chymist, fiddler, statesman and buffoon”.