Seven reasons to bet against Boris bouncing back from North Shropshire

 

Seven reasons to bet against Boris bouncing back from North Shropshire

The prime minister’s spell was a peculiar magic for very particular times. It is beginning to look as if it is broken

By  Tom Clark

December 17, 2021

ZUMA Press, Inc. / Alamy Stock Photo

If Boris Johnson is good for anything, it is changing the conversation. We saw that as recently as Sunday night. There had been five weeks of unremitting headlines about sleaze and a hat-trick of suspected fibs—concerning his flat refurb, the allocation of spaces to dogs rather than people on planes out of Afghanistan and, of course, that Christmas party.

Suddenly, however, with a breath-taking broadcast promising Covid boosters to everyone in just three weeks, the PM seized the initiative, and shifted media attention away from arguments about his integrity and towards debates about whether the impossible could be done. A former journalist (of sorts), he has a real gift for throwing the press pack off the scent. But now his battering in North Shropshire has sorely exposed the limits of his control over the way that people away from Fleet Street think of him.

Yes, history suggests prime ministers are often harder to shift than they look. Yes, many lost by-elections are soon forgotten. And yes, rallying to third parties like the Lib Dems last night, rather than the main opposition, is an especially cost-free way for voters to let off some mid-term steam. Plenty of sages will therefore argue that our Houdini head of government will soon enough squeak his way out of yet another tight bind. But forget the wise heads. I can see seven powerful reasons why he may not be able to escape this time.   

The sheer arithmetic on Thursday. Yes, all governments lose by-elections—but not like this. The swing was 34 percentage points. Barring the very special internal Conservative family row at Clacton in 2014 (where the popular local MP defected to Ukip), over the last quarter-century, no government has fared so badly in defending a seat. None of Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Theresa May nor David Cameron ever faced a comparable collapse. One has to go back three decades, to John Major’s routing at Christchurch in 1993, to find anything similar, and of course the Major government is the only government in modern history that ended with a landslide defeat.

The creaking of the novel Johnson electoral coalition. This had looked invincible a mere six months ago, at the Hartlepool by-election. But that suddenly seems like another political age. You can’t keep all of the people happy all of the time in government, and if Johnson’s earlier defeat at Chesham and Amersham in June suggested the prosperous, home-county commuter belt was getting fed up with the PM’s singular fixation on his new friends in the post-industrial north, this week’s disaster reveals that a similar resentment now burns in the heart of rural England.

A shift from Brexit to political business as usual. Having thrown himself behind it at the last minute in the referendum, Johnson’s mercurial character proved perfectly suited for exploiting the turbulence and fraying of loyalties wrought by Brexit. We ceased to be a single electorate subject to anything like a national swing. Instead, in 2017, 2019 and even, remarkably, in the local elections this spring after Brexit was “done,” two different swingometers pointed in different ways in Leaveland and Remainia. And it began to look like the Boris brand of sunny nationalism simply couldn’t lose in Leaveland, the bigger of the two countries. That’s why the really frightening thing for the prime minister isn’t the parallel with Chesham (which had voted roughly 55 per cent Remain in 2016), but the twist. North Shropshire had gone 60 per cent for Leave. Suddenly, it transpires that Brexit bonhomie is not enough for voters in Leaveland.

All that peculiar recent political geography leaves Johnson with a party that doesn’t buy his big idea, namely a “hands-on” industrial and infrastructure programme, driven through—if needs be, as needs very much have been—by looking away from mounting public debt. For the new Tory seats in the Midlands and north this programme makes absolute sense, although even here the deep Thatcherite instincts of some MPs makes them nervous. But more Tory MPs are still found in the south, where the free-market economy has mostly supported prosperity, and they feel no reason to compromise on their laissez-faire dogma. The huge rebellion this week, on the unpopular cause of resisting Johnson’s modest Covid restrictions, reveals that ideological resistance is stiffening.  

At a more personal level, Johnson suffers from a dearth of true friends, which is why—at a time when Tory MPs saw they still had other options—his run at the top job in 2016 had to be aborted after he was stabbed in the front by Michael Gove, who openly aired late doubts about the character of the Vote Leave colleague he had been planning to champion. There just wasn’t the support on the benches to bounce back from that. Only after three suffocating years of Theresa May, when it became obvious that the Tories could only survive Brexit by turning to a charismatic Leaver, did Johnson build a wide but shallow base of support. By marching MPs up the hill to defend Owen Paterson’s disgraceful lobbying before beating a retreat, and then expecting colleagues to hold a line about there being no Downing Street party, Johnson has rapidly drained what was always a fairly small pool of good will.

Meanwhile, a growing band of enemies have not merely motive, but also the means and perhaps opportunity to go for the kill. They are empowered by an unsentimental Conservative rule book. Only 15 per cent of MPs (that is 54) need to write letters demanding a confidence vote in the PM for one to be summarily staged. (The contrast with Labour, where Jeremy Corbyn could rally the party in the country to brush off a 2016 vote against him, is stark.) A secret Yes/No ballot then follows which gives MPs a free chance to vote what they feel, while the leader cannot shelter behind the inadequacy of rival candidates or anything else. He could be out in a flash, like Iain Duncan Smith in 2003, or limp on wounded, as May did for another six months after a large minority of 117 MPs gave her the thumbs down. Either way, the clock would be ticking.

The economy. Back in the real world, away from all the Westminster intrigue, voters are facing a serious squeeze, and there is every reason to think they are beginning to notice. They are subject to precisely the “double whammy” of higher tax and higher prices which John Major successfully pinned on Labour, shortly before Black Wednesday set him on his fast slide towards first Christchurch and later oblivion. The tax burden is heading towards its highest in 70 years. Inflation this week shot up to 5.1 per cent, rather higher than the latest figures for earnings growth and fully ten times the last uplift in benefits, of just 0.5 per cent, this April. The Bank of England’s nudging up of interest rates on Thursday adds to the pressures on family finances. Meanwhile, the hit from Brexit to trade with the continent and, through that, national income and government revenues, is steadily translating from the domain of projection to that of fact.

Shamelessness and good cheer has indeed been enough to get Boris Johnson out of many a remarkable scrape in the past. The problem with governing as chancer-in-chief, however, is simple. In the end, the truth has power.

Tom Clark

Tom Clark is a fellow at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and Prospect contributing editor

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