The political graveyard of Westminster is full of victims of Boris Johnson who wrote him off at various stages of his takeover of British politics over the last 15 years. Until he is politically buried, be wary. He has a nasty knack of coming back from the near-dead.
He is seriously wounded by this week’s vote, and it is possible that a rout in the two forthcoming by-elections in Wakefield and Tiverton & Honiton will finish him off. Wakefield is especially important because it would be a straight switch to Labour in the so-called Red Wall. As the late Thatcher and late Major years showed, when Tory governments start losing by-elections directly to Labour, rather than the Lib Dems as a half-way protest vote, the writing is on the wall.
The Thatcher parallel is intriguing for another reason. In the leadership election vote in 1990 which caused her resignation, she outpolled Michael Heseltine by almost the same margin as Johnson outpolled the “no confidence” option on Monday. The difference is that under the rules that applied then, she didn’t have a sufficient majority to avoid a second ballot where other candidates—aka John Major—could also enter the race.
However, had the present rules applied in the Thatcher case, few who knew her doubt that she would have stayed and fought on. She might well have made it to the following general election, and in a contest with Labour’s Neil Kinnock in 1991/2 it is hard to be sure that she would have lost.
The 2018 Theresa May confidence vote—which she won by a larger margin than Johnson, although she was gone within little more than six months—is also inconclusive as a precedent. May’s fundamental problem was that her softish Brexit policy was politically unviable, whereas the then alternative Tory leader (aka Johnson) had a hard Brexit policy able to carry the day.
Today, there is no obvious alternative Tory leader and no obvious alternative policy on the cost-of-living crisis which will transform Tory prospects. A key issue in Thatcher’s downfall was her poll tax. Insofar as Johnson has a poll tax it is his hard Brexit policy, which is decimating British trade. But no alternative leader, Labour or Tory, is proposing a fundamental change of course on Brexit.
If Boris falls, I suspect the contest will ultimately come down to Liz Truss v Rishi Sunak, with Truss the “red meat” candidate of the grassroots and Sunak the more obviously competent and electable alternative to Keir Starmer and Labour. It is in Sunak’s interests that the contest does not come too soon, so he has time to rebuild his position. He came back from the brink with his windfall tax and energy costs package, and there is plenty of upside for a chancellor of ambition and competence.
But all that depends upon there being a vacancy. And Johnson isn’t out yet.
