I very much hope that Boris Johnson resigns in the coming week, although he will not do so without being forced. Even then it won’t happen with a fraction of the apology made by Theodore Agnew, the Treasury minister who literally resigned at the ministerial despatch box of the House of Lords on Monday. Agnew’s reason for resigning was that he could no longer defend the lax oversight and fraud relating to the tens of billions of pounds’ worth of state loans made to businesses under the Covid-19 rescue schemes, for which he had overall responsibility.
It is inconceivable that Johnson, the entitled “Prime Etonian” who operates outside conventional morals—let alone rules-based codes—would resign like Agnew to do the “decent thing.” He has never ever resigned on that basis. It would anyway be a logical impossibility, since he has made a career out of not doing the decent thing. When he resigned on Theresa May as foreign secretary it wasn’t on a point of principle or responsibility, but as a forcing manoeuvre to out-Brexit and replace her. As it happens, she was so weak and he was so relatively popular that he would probably have seized the crown in about the same timescale even if he had stayed put.
The point about Johnson is that he should never have been entrusted with office in the first place. But for politicians and officials of decent standing and conviction, it is wrong to resign unless you want to admit to failure and can’t see a way of putting it right, in which case you are essentially giving up.
I don’t know Lord Agnew personally, but he struck me as a capable businessman-turned-politician. He was evidently on top of his brief, given the chapter and verse he gave the Lords on the oversight and audit failures in the Covid-19 business loans schemes. So I can’t see what he thought he would gain by his resignation that he couldn’t have better achieved—and maybe had a duty to seek to achieve—by sticking at it and trying to sort out the mess he described. If he thought the missing ingredient was publicity and salience, it doesn’t require resignation to get those, inside or outside the government machine.
I suspect the truth is that he resigned because he had had enough and just wanted out. That is the cause of most resignations from high office, and it is usually a mistake if you are serious about your work as a project.
This is true too at the very highest levels. The three political leaders I have most admired, and in different ways worked with most closely in my life, all resigned voluntarily. Roy Jenkins resigned as Labour’s deputy leader in 1972 when Harold Wilson came out for a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU. Michael Heseltine resigned from Thatcher’s Cabinet in 1986 in a dispute over a helicopter manufacturer. And Tony Blair resigned in 2007 because he was fed up with resisting Gordon Brown’s designs on his job, and because his reflection on Thatcher’s political demise was that you shouldn’t try to do more than 10 years in No 10 whatever your electoral mandate (he had only two years previously won a third decisive election victory while pledging to serve a full term).
In my view all three resignations were serious mistakes, weakening or even eliminating the resigner from the political fray and strengthening the very forces they claimed to be resisting. By resigning, Jenkins and Heseltine both probably sacrificed fairly good prospects of succeeding the leaders they so despised, and strengthened their internal opponents in the short term. As for Blair, if Captain Hindsight had told him what would happen to the Labour Party and the country as a consequence of his “orderly and dignified departure” (a phrase much used at the time), I think he would have stayed and maybe fought a fourth election, however great the struggle. In my view he should have done so. If Merkel could successfully manage 16 years and four terms in office, a further Blair term was well within the realms of the politically possible and desirable. Even Merkel’s voluntary departure may turn out to be a personal and public mistake.
On my tiny personal level, I think the same. As a No 10 adviser and minister for 12 years, I four times came close to resigning. On each occasion it would have been counterproductive and unprofessional. And my one actual resignation, in 2017, was a mistake. It was from my leadership of the National Infrastructure Commission, which I had founded as a cross-party state advisory body at George Osborne’s instigation two years previously. I thought I was making a stand against Brexit. But Brexit happened. Meanwhile, several vital infrastructure projects, including HS2 to Leeds and a new high-speed line linking the major northern cities, aren’t happening—yet would probably have won through had I stuck at the NIC and mobilised the political and bureaucratic skills I had honed over two decades.
So as a general rule, don’t resign—but do everything you can to stop the likes of Johnson from holding office in the first place.
