Tory leadership race – the contenders to succeed Boris

What a week it has been in politics. In the olden days, before the internut, in the late 1990s and early 2000s when Simon Cowell was working as a waiter in a cocktail bar and it was common to say that the Tory party might never, ever be back in power, that phrase – What a Week! – was the regular introduction to a weekly column I wrote anonymously for Scotland on Sunday, then the biggest selling serious newspaper in Scotland.

The column was Mungo McKay’s diary, the main character being a fictionalised New Labour MSP, member of the Scottish Parliament,  attempting to stop the advance of the SNP (that worked). The column was pre-website. Don’t look for it, it’s not there anymore.

The thing ran for several years. Mungo was MSP for Lanarkshire Deep South, a made up constituency, but not that made up. He had a (theoretically comical) inside track on Donald Dewar, former First Minister of Scotland, giant of Scottish politics, and the astonishingly inept doings of the Labour Party as they attempted to grapple with the realities of what they had unleashed by introducing a Scottish parliament. Great idea. Well done, everyone involved. The notorious Blairite bagpiper Alastair Campbell, shouting a lot down the phone from Number 10, sometimes featured in the column terrorising the incompetent Scottish Labour machine.

I thought the Mungo spoof column, one of the most enjoyable things I’ve ever done professionally, or unprofessionally, sort of worked and then in about 2001 I went for an intensive series of drinks with a friend, one of Glasgow’s funniest men – think Billy Connolly crossed with Stanley Baxter with a dash of Lloyd Cole – and he took a long draw on a cigarette (it was legal for us to smoke in pubs!) and he said: “Aye, it’s alright that column, not badly written, but it’s got nae jokes in it.”

Nae jokes? None? This was a big blow. I thought the Mungo McKay column while not exactly Puckoon by Spike Milligan was mainly about jokes and had week in week out about three half-decent jokes per episode, all contained in 600 words. But most of these things in journalism are subjective. That’s what we tell ourselves when we face justified criticism. But my friend, with impeccable good taste, didn’t crack a smile reading the column each week. It was time to stop. Mungo was retired.

I’m not saying it was my fault, but the SNP won power at Holyrood in 2007 and now they say they are on track to win Scottish independence via St Nicola Sturgeon. Mind you, their cockiness on how they will definitely rule the future reminds me a great deal of New Labour hubris in the late 1990s.

No-one knows better the power of subjectivity when it comes to jokes in columns and journalism in general than Boris Johnson, one of Britain’s finest renegade journalists and columnists, currently serving not entirely satisfactorily as Britain’s Prime Minister. Is Boris laughing now? The bloke appears to be having the most terrible time.

You’re thinking “I thought this was supposed to be about the leadership contest to succeed Boris, and there’s all this warbling about someone called Mungo and Scottish politics and all that jazz.” Get to it. Who is going to take over from bumbling Boris?

Okay.

The reason I began this by saying “What a Week!” is that this – here and now – has been a hell of a week in the bubble that is Westminster and what used to be called Fleet Street. Sometimes this happens. Seismic events barely register on the BBC 10pm news but if you know the topography you can see it. The penny dropping was not just concern about the Internal Market Bill (details too boring to go into). What matters is that the elders of the Tory tribe – in the parliamentary party and the Lords – are savaging Boris on the grounds of his general hopelessness, which is the first step to imagining life after Boris. His performance in front of the Commons liaison committee this week was atrocious, the worst kind of “dog ate my homework” drivel.

Lord Howard, Michael Howard, is a fearsome opponent and he is on Boris’s tail on that Internal Market Bill. Tory peers, among them Brexiteers, are furious about the Bill’s attempts to break international law, but they are also worried that they have entrusted the fate of Tory party to Dominic Cummings, Boris’s chief aide. Dom hates the Tory party.

On Thursday, the Spectator’s cover story written by Fraser Nelson landed, addressing this subject. And it was bloody brilliant. The cover illustration was a painting of a man lost at sea, a distant figure, blond hair bobbing, oars abandoned. This was the (current) Prime Minister. The headline asked: Where is Boris? This was a question – where is he? – asked a lot a when Boris was editor of The Spectator. My friends there seeking Boris should ask Mary Wakefield, Spectator senior editor and wife of Dominic Cummings. Dom might know where Boris is.

This extraordinary assault was prefigured by assorted columnists (raises hand) in various non-socialist newspapers writing columns condemning the Number 10 shambles.

On Friday, The Times (the newspaper wot I write a weekly column for) told Boris in a blistering, thundering leader to get his act together or else.

None of this means that Boris is going to be replaced immediately. But political leadership rests -like a similar format, musical theatre – on the willing suspension of disbelief. The moment you start to doubt that the lead character singing that tune is real or believable then the whole thing falls apart. The moment in politics when the participants and observers start to imagine life afterwards, a time when the leader has fallen and been replaced, then they start to make calculations accordingly in preparation for the change. It is a phenomenon as old as the hills.

Competitive Boris, suffering it seems from “long Covid”, may yet bounce back, but he had better be quick about it.

On one level this is wild. The man won a majority of 80 in December. But it’s a tough old life. Want the job of PM? You had better be good at it. An incumbent is not doing the rest of us a favour having all that power and dispensing patronage. Either do it properly or some other sucker will be found.

So it is, incredibly, and you’ve been patient Reaction subscribers, time to consider the heavyweight contenders to be the next Prime Minister. Who are they?  Ding ding!

Michael Gove

In the dark blue corner it’s Michael Gove, the Aberdeen slammer, never to be underestimated. On one level Gove is best-placed. He’s operationally highly effective in government. But will the Tory tribe take the view post-Boris that he was too associated with wild man Cummings? Was he running Cummings? Is Cummings running the government alone or is he working with Gove? No-one knows, not even Dom! After the Boris era is over, or even before that, and Cummings is out on the street shouting about Bismarck and defence procurement, will wily MG end up denying ever having met Dominic Cummings? Dom, this is possible.

Jeremy Hunt

Ding ding! The defeated candidate for the leadership was never knocked out. Goodness he’s been effective as the chair of the Health Committee. “Sorry we didn’t do  it this time,” Hunt said to supporters on the day Boris’s victory was announced. He’s upbeat and he’ll run. Do not underestimate his chances of success of winning or wangling a return to one of the great offices of state. His critics say that as a former Health Secretary he’ll emerge badly from a public inquiry, but, let’s face it, so will Boris and many other people and it will likely be all lost in the general noise. Hunt is determined to restore a form of optimistic Toryism after the carnage. Might just do it.

Rishi Sunak

Let’s face it. Sunak is the favourite. Lightweight frame, heavyweight brain. I must admit that when he was appointed as Chancellor I had my doubts. But from what I hear from the Treasury he’s voracious, hungry for “paper” (that is policy papers and briefings) on economics and markets. Loves detailed work and is nice to officials! Could this catch on? It reminds them, said a Treasury old hand, of Nigel Lawson and life as described in Lawson’s View From Number 11 memoir, a key Tory text. Unsurprisingly, Rishi looks highly stressed right now, really stressed, but he is having to fight off the Dom operation lunacy, so this is understandable. A Rishi leadership could be great for the fight to save the Union too because my fellow-Scots might like him. Very different from Boris and possible to see him embodying a generous, outward-looking Britishness at home and abroad after the nation’s reputation has been trashed of late.

Dominic Raab

Brexiteer Raab is much more level-headed than the other Dom. His strength is, I’m told, that he simply ignores Cummings and does his own thing in the Foreign Office. Basically refuses to engage with the madness. Sensible. Quite possible to see Raab having another run at it amid the wreckage of whatever emerges from the smoking ruin of the Brexit talks, and might get a hearing. An outside shot.

Matt Hancock

No.

Sajid Javid

The former Chancellor is unusual in that he, early on and bravely, refused to sign up to the Dom lunacy. When Boris tried to get him to fire his advisers and accept subjugation, Javid resigned and quite right too. He’ll run again if there is a contest, or he’ll team up with Rishi. Has a social policy agenda that he blends with being robustly pro-enterpise. Reaches out, properly, into England.

Theresa May:

Experienced, used to negotiating with the EU. I’m joking…

Boris Johnson:

Ding-dong! Could the golden-haired former Spectator editor be the answer to the Tory party’s post-Covid problems? Eurosceptic Boris was the Daily Telegraph man in Brussels. Loved by the Tory activists and a firm favourite at party conference he might be just the man to take over. Oh, hold on, bugger. Boris is already Prime Minister.

So, the Tory tribe has started to imagine life beyond Boris. The elders of the tribe will deny it. But they have started to think about what is next, always an interesting moment in politics. Boris may turn this around in the next few months. Or he will be defenestrated, meaning retired and replaced. Such is the politics of the Tory party.

Have a good weekend.