British politics is little more than Boris Johnson at present, just as it was Tony Blair after 1997 and Margaret Thatcher following the Falklands war. There isn’t a rival—not Labour, Tory, liberal or nationalist—who has got the measure of him, and despite the escalating Brexit crisis, he remains in full command. That is the message of this week’s Tory party conference.
Political leaders matter more than is avowed by most commentators (some of whom even think they matter as political shapers). It’s not that parties, opinion formers and policies are irrelevant, but they largely operate in the context of leaders who hold power or are capable of winning it. Political parties are especially misunderstood in modern politics: rather than fixed bodies of ideas or interests, they are essentially franchise operations in the hands of their leader at any given time. This is as true of democracies as autocracies, where—for example—Stalin soon remade the Bolsheviks in line with his "socialism in one country" pitch.
Johnson’s Tory party is as different from Thatcher’s and Major’s as Xi Jinping’s communist party is from Mao’s or Deng’s. It would be more illuminating to talk about the “Boris Party” than the “Conservative Party”—just as we should have referred to the “Blair Party” and the “Corbyn Party,” not their almost meaningless common Labour label. Boris has taken charge of the Conservative franchise and changed it so ruthlessly that he has now expelled or marginalised virtually every Tory who held office before him, along with their policies. Incredibly, this week’s conference is, despite starring the top-tax-cut-cheering, banker-loving former mayor of London, who took the final step up by championing a free-trading Buccaneering Brexit, all about the benefits of economic autarky, wage rises for blue collar workers and a “new deal for the north.” Oh, and another dose of “fuck business.”
The truly weird thing about the “Brexitism in one country” arising from Manchester is that Boris himself only really has one ideology: himself. As I describe in my Prospect profile of him, he owes less to traditions and bodies of ideas than any other British political leader in modern times—far less than Thatcher or Blair. In particular, he never believed in Brexit until he hijacked it as a successful ploy to seize the Tory leadership from David Cameron (remember him?)
Yet it is precisely this paradox which explains why Boris is turning everything upside down. Because Brexit is a very big thing: the biggest change in course for the country since decolonisation and joining the European Economic Community half a century ago. And it now has to be made to work, in crisis conditions, or it will destroy him. And the one thing this supreme egotist, in supreme power, is not going to do willingly is be destroyed by forces he still hopes he can master—somehow, anyhow.
A brilliant analysis by an independent commentator, Edwin Hayward, describes what is happening in fast motion. Faced with a chronic HGV driver shortage leading to petrol station closures and empty supermarkets—and the likelihood of imminent similar crises in other sectors—the Brexit narrative has had to undergo an emergency handbreak turn. Instead of being about sunlit uplands and prosperous Singapore-on-sea, Brexit has now suddenly become the Dunkirk spirit and a “blue labour” project to raise wages for HGV drivers, and other randomly selected groups of the lower paid, who were being exploited by immigrants and rogue employers. Even if some Brexit voters might have liked bits of this, it was never supposed to be at the price of shortages and higher prices, let alone higher inflation eating away at their own pay unless they are lucky HGV drivers, which millions of nurses, and retail and hospitality staff, don’t do in their spare time.
"Paraphrased, the new Tory stance goes like this: ‘Yes, the pain of Brexit is real, but it’s a necessary stepping stone towards the high wage economy of the future,’” writes Hayward. “There are several components to this metamorphosis: they have always said that this kind of economic transformation was a key driver for Brexit, UK businesses are at fault for not paying their British workers enough, and any short-term pain is worth it, when the longer-term prize is higher wages.”
This is simply breathtaking in its audacity and incoherence. But it is a plan, and it will rule the roost, even if it doesn’t work, unless and until Boris changes course again or some other leader can challenge him successfully.
And there’s the vacuum. For as Hayward also describes, as forensically as Keir Starmer in his best courtroom manner, the various Labour parties of the last decade have been holed below the waterline by their failure since long before the 2016 referendum, but more particularly since Starmer voted for Johnson’s Brexit deal last December, to offer any systematic opposition or alternative to Brexit. So, amazingly, the craziest political project of modern times, crafted by Johnson and Nigel Farage, two of the least reputable leaders of modern times, has become the orthodoxy for want of an opposition leader able and willing to take them on.
On Brexit, the “Corbyn party” and “Starmer party” are essentially the same, for all the sound and fury of last week’s Labour conference. Unless and until that changes, or Starmer is superseded by another opposition leader (Labour or non-Labour), Boris fills the vacuum that is the rest of British politics.
