One of my favourite quotes, central to my outlook on politics and indeed life, is GK Chesterton: “I’ve searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees.” It’s the epigraph of my new book on political leadership, published this week.
The last chapter is a study of Boris Johnson, drawn from my recent Prospectportrait of him as “The Prime Etonian.” It makes the case that whatever you think of him as a human being, and however much you detest his politics—as I do on Brexit—you can’t understand his success without appreciating his compelling strength as a leader.
We aren’t talking just about charisma, although Boris—yes, you have to call him that if you want to understand his appeal—is one of only two modern British politicians to be an A-list celebrity (Tony Blair is the other).
Over the course of a 35-year political-journalistic career beginning virtually the day he arrived at Oxford University from Eton, Boris has created a uniquely original and compelling Wodehousian political brand. Utterly ruthless beneath a veneer of lackadaisical bonhomie (Bertie Wooster meets Henry VIII), he is far more decisive, ambitious and politically professional than he seems—Eton did its classic job there—and leagues more so than any of his rivals in the Tory party or the present opposition. He sucks the oxygen out of the political air with a highly attuned sense of the popular mood, and how to shape and deploy it as an instrument of ideological momentum and personal advancement.
The fact that Boris doesn’t really believe in anything besides himself makes it all the easier for him to switch horses at the drop of a hat. Remember those two Daily Telegraph articles arguing both sides of Brexit until he decided which way to plump before the referendum? The way he dropped Owen Paterson overnight was the same, after a failed forcing manoeuvre to try and abolish the existing parliamentary standards regime—I suspect because of its long-term threat to him personally—demonstrating both in the act and its reversal a ruthless boldness and urgent instinct for survival.
This week’s jolly japes at the CBI are of a piece. I doubt he intended to lose his place in his speech quite like that, although ruffled slapdashery is part of Brand Boris. But Peppa Pig, tongue-in-cheek comparisons with Moses, the boosterism, the ridiculing of opponents—all textbook Boris. Sure enough, it stole the headlines and the TV coverage. It got a whole debate going on the relevance of a children’s theme park to the state of the nation. It distracted from the social care rebellion taking place in parliament on the same day. And it consigned to the cuttings floor poor Keir Starmer, who reportedly practiced his speech three times over in the empty CBI conference hall before the proceedings had started, trying to be, well, professional.
Boris fits straight into my thesis—first set out in a 2017 Prospectfeature which has stood the test of time in its predictions—that in democratic elections success almost invariably goes to the best leader, judged by the full range of political attributes, and nothing else matters. This applies to all “two-horse” national elections in mature democracies where elections lead to the formation of a government with a single person in charge. Britain’s 2019 general election was Boris v Corbyn, and that’s all you need to know.
Of course, there is hardly a political historian or election analyst who doesn’t attribute some importance, often a lot, to leadership. Leadership ratings are part of the mix of things regularly polled and leaders dominate coverage of election campaigns. But my theory is different. It is that leaders are basically all that’s important.
What about ideas, policies and political parties? After all, they are central to what politicians do: debate ideas, frame and implement policies, and engage in party organisation. All this is true. But all this is subordinate to leadership and none of it succeeds without successful political leaders.
“People don’t believe in ideas, they believe in people who believe in ideas,” wrote the political columnist Jonathan Freedland 15 years ago, and I entirely agree. He expressed the fundamental truth that the battle of ideas in politics—indeed in life—cannot be comprehended separately from the people who advocate those ideas. As an insight into the nature of government it is as profound as Hobbes on power (“covenants, without the sword, are mere words”) and Machiavelli’s dictum that it is better be feared than to be loved, if you cannot be both. Political parties and movements stand or fall by their leaders.
The leadership-driven essence of political parties is underappreciated because these institutions often keep the same names over decades, even generations, while in reality they are franchise operations in the hands of their leaders pro tem, not vehicles for stable bodies of policies and ideas. The Labour Party of Tony Blair and Jeremy Corbyn may have had the same name, largely the same constitution, and even a substantial continuity of members and activists, but its creed and positioning changed so radically—in the space of less than a decade—that it would be more meaningful to split it into the “Blair Party” and the “Corbyn Party.”
Political parties are most obviously franchise operations in the United States, where each of the two major parties is transparently auctioned to the highest electoral bidder every four or eight years in a “primary” election. This results in an overnight change of leadership, personnel and policies. So little does ideology or affiliation matter that the successful leader—like Donald Trump in 2016 and Dwight Eisenhower in 1952—may not even be a member of the party that they go on to lead until they enter the primary election.
Britain’s Tory party is a similar franchise operation. Cameron, May, Johnson: three leaders in the same decade; three radically different political programmes, diametrically opposed between the first and the third on both Brexit and austerity.
It’s the Leader, Stupid—which means today, and maybe for a while to come, it’s Boris, stupid.
