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In this column I want to lift eyes from the immediate Tory leadership race starting on Monday and instead look three and perhaps four elections ahead. This is no scan of distant horizons. At least three and, I’ll hazard, four of those elections will have taken place before the end of next year, and two would be general elections.
The first starts on Monday as nominations for the Tory leadership semi-finals close. The second, the finals, when two candidates go before the whole national Conservative membership, will be decided by the end of next month.
The third would be the early general election that would be overwhelmingly likely once Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson had darkened Downing Street’s door, as the Commons wrestled him out of taking Britain out of the EU without a deal.
Steady on, you may say. Johnson hasn’t even got through to the last round yet, let alone won it. But the realist in me knows it’s becoming likely. Wise colleagues inform me that his personal unfitness for the post is already “priced in” so we can forget about it. That he’s a habitual liar, a cheat, a conspirator with a criminal pal to have an offending journalist’s ribs broken, a cruel betrayer of the women he seduces, a politician who connived in a bid for a court order to suppress mention of a daughter he fathered, a do-nothing mayor of London and the worst foreign secretary in living memory . . . such truths are apparently already “priced in” to Mr Johnson. One just hopes the actual electorate are informed that his rascality is already “priced in” and they’re not to bother their little heads with such horrors.
So, reader, let’s “price in” the fact that this candidate is a nasty piece of work, but assume he makes it through. I’m told his people are already playing dirty, using private information to frighten colleagues into declaring themselves early for Johnson. A spokesman for his campaign to whom I put this tells me he has heard of no such thing, and Johnson is running “a positive campaign”. And no journalist can confirm such rumours unless a direct witness emerges to do so publicly.
But I’m beginning to wonder, noticing Johnson’s spectacular transformation from tousle-headed talkalot to smartened-up say-nothing, whether he’s already yielding to behind-the-scenes handlers. Say what you like about Johnson, he knows his limitations.
So let’s imagine him into Downing Street and an early general election — remarking just in passing that it remains within the power of his parliamentary colleagues to prefer a candidate who is not shackled to a “leave on October 31, come what may” promise, and the emergency general election this would bring.
But instead, suppose Tory MPs choose the candidate almost guaranteed to provoke and lose the Commons vote of confidence that would be triggered as Britain headed for an imminent no-deal Brexit.
Johnson would lose a confidence vote because there are at least a dozen colleagues whose party loyalty would snap at that point. Might he win the ensuing general election? Not convincingly, I suspect, but Jeremy Corbyn is surely not impossible to beat and Johnson might do a deal with Nigel Frottage before or after the election. Thursday’s by-election in Peterborough may have dashed Frottage’s hopes of his new party storming to predominance in one leap in a general election, but it confirms his potency as a spoiler
and potential kingmaker. It is entirely possible Johnson could be wobbling back into Downing Street before Christmas.
What then? Let me examine a hypothetical Johnson premiership. His showmanship might get him through a general election this year; it is unlikely to see him through many months before another, in 2020.
What’s it like in Downing Street? You and I cannot know, but over the years I have talked with a few former prime ministers and they all say the same. “You can have no idea,” one once said to me, “of the weight and complexity of what begins to hit you from the very first day.”
Background briefings thud on to your desk or ping on to your screen in stupefying detail. Mastering them is essential. Nothing we know about Johnson suggests talent for the conscientious absorption of detail. I’ve heard horror stories about his negotiations as London mayor with government departments where he so failed to prepare that he left having conceded hundreds of millions more in cuts than the department had planned to be its final offer.
You need to prioritise, a former PM told me, “pick out issues where the decision must be yours, and take it, and decisions you can leave to trusted cabinet colleagues”.
Who in Johnson’s case will these trusted colleagues be? What jobs has he offered to potential foes? Part of Theresa May’s downfall was a cabinet that was a balancing act instead of a band of comrades. Does Johnson even have comrades?
Another former PM told me that the problems that tend to survive Whitehall filters and reach the top are all the insoluble ones: judgments of Solomon, sure to leave one or both sides of the argument deeply unhappy. “It’s no good,” they told me, “wanting too much to be liked.”
A PM needs especially to be a good listener to senior colleagues: to understand in outline and in detail the proposals and problems they bring, to get inside the mind of a senior colleague and understand their situation. Beyond the sly wink and the confiding glance, what evidence have we that Johnson would listen to and understand a colleague’s perspectives?
Foreign policy decisions tend in particular to surface on a prime minister’s desk. Here he will often have a final say. Johnson’s demonstrated talent in this field? Enough said.
The sadness, and it frustrates his critics tremendously, is that in writing this I’m preaching to the converted. They know he’s lazy. They know he’s untrustworthy. They know how he tries to wing things for which he ought to prepare. They look at the £700,000 he has earned since he quit government, much of it on the national and international speaking circuit, and wonder. They know he ducks. They know he makes conflicting promises. They know he skates on thin ice.
And in their hearts they have no confidence in Boris. But they’re scared. They think he may possess a kind of magic. The magic, my friends, will fade.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/let-me-assure-you-boris-johnson-will-fail-as-pm-hl7b6tkx5