Let Boris go, for all our sakes
The former premier has a dwindling but committed band of acolytes who still yearn for him to return, but it shouldn't happen and won't, and they need to accept that
At the beginning of this month, I penned a genuine and painful cri de coeur to fellow Conservatives to stop for a moment and focus on what the party needs to do in order to have even a chance of winning the next general election. My first point was that individual feelings, preferences and old wounds have to be set aside and a line drawn under Boris Johnson’s premiership and the impossibility, as well as undesirability, of his making a return. If we do not bind this wound and give it time to heal, it will continue to bleed, sapping our strength and attracting predators, until polling day some time next year.
That was before the matter of Johnson’s truthfulness in responding to questions in the House of Commons over “Partygate” boiled over again as the former prime minister appeared in front of the Committee of Privileges on Wednesday this week. In purely partisan terms, it was never going to be an edifying spectacle. Although the committee is chaired by Labour veteran Harriet Harman, the longest-serving female MP, it has, like every committee, a government majority (in this case four Conservatives of seven), so there was an inevitability to some of the blue-on-blue “friendly fire”. The relationship between Johnson and the committee is tense and strained, as was plain at some times on Wednesday afternoon, and I take the view that most of this is due to Johnson’s instinctive aggression when challenged on his behaviour.
We have to be brutally honest here. Ad hominem remarks in politics always have an extra sting, and we would all like to live in a world in which clashes were polite, high-minded discussions of policy and ideas, with good faith taken as read on both sides. But character matters: very few of us can transcend our behavioural instincts, our natures or our life experiences, and this is all the more true of Johnson who has for decades made his personality his chief political asset.
The Boris who made the leap from swashbuckling editor of The Spectator to high-profile Conservative MP for Henley (despite having been appointed to the editor’s chair by Conrad Black on the understanding that he would set aside his parliamentary ambitions) and then to the Commons front bench under Michael Howard in 2004 did so with a glamour and aura of celebrity which transcended his offices. While he had developed a reputation as a Eurosceptic during his tenure as the Brussels correspondent for The Daily Telegraph, Johnson was not known particularly for his ideological leanings but for his upbeat bravura, quick if sometimes provocative wit and willingness to challenge the prevailing orthodoxies. A sentence from his Wikipedia entry describing his selection as Conservative candidate for Henley has a much wider relevance: “Some thought him amusing and charming while others disliked his flippant attitude and lack of knowledge of the local area.”
One very striking feature of Johnson’s career almost until the end of his premiership last year was his ability to shrug off any setback, weather any storm and maintain forward momentum in a professional sense. We have all taken as read his tendency towards infidelity—I still find it hard to wrap my head around the fact he was prime minister for three years and yet the number of children he has is not a matter of public record, though we know it to be at least seven with three different women—and he has consistently been able to overcome scandals and crises which would have derailed or destroyed more conventional politicians.
Being dismissed by The Times in his early 20s for fabricating parts of a story; repeatedly using derogatory terms like “watermelon smiles”, “tank-topped bumboys” and (of Liverpudlians) “hooked on grief” in his written output; agreeing to supply the private address of a journalist to a friend who wanted to have the newsman beaten up; repeatedly missing meetings and events as editor of The Spectator; attending only half of divisions in the Commons as a new MP and letting that decrease to 45 per cent in his second parliament; lying publicly about his affair with Petronella Wyatt before being exposed as a liar; comparing Conservative leadership contests to cannibalism in Papua New Guinea; taking a tech entrepreneur with whom he was having an affair on official trade visits when mayor of London; any of these would have challenged an ambitious Conservative, but Johnson simply refused to acknowledge political gravity, and even the last-minute denunciation by his ally, Michael Gove, in the 2016 Conservative leadership campaign merely delayed the eventual, perhaps inevitable, rise to 10 Downing Street in the summer of 2019.
So here’s the speculative bit. Based on what I have seen and read of Johnson, it seems to me that his upbringing, career and experience has shielded him from a great deal of criticism that other people would face, and partly as a result of that he is unusually disinclined to entertain, let alone acknowledge, criticism. This matters because he has now come to the climactic confrontation with the authorities of the House of Commons, in this case the Committee of Privileges, and is being directly and specifically accused of misleading the House—which is supposed to be one of the most grievous offences a Member can commit—and perhaps of doing so deliberately or recklessly. His approach, as was in my view inevitable, has been to double down on his position, insist on the rightness and good faith of his actions, and, by extension, to challenge the authority, propriety and procedure of the committee.
This is, to express it extremely mildly, unfortunate. Whether Johnson misled the House or not, and whatever his intention was, it would have been far more helpful, appropriate and seemly for a very prominent politician, a long-standing Member of Parliament and a former prime minister to acknowledge there was concern over his actions, that there were legitimate disciplinary institutions available to the House of Commons and that these would undertake due process to establish their view of his conduct. (It is worth reiterating here that any verdict, including any penalty to be applied to Johnson, can only be recommended by the Committee of Privileges; it can only be made effective by a vote of the whole House of Commons, giving Johnson in fact a rather old-fashioned trial by his ‘peers’.) Instead, he had the Cabinet Office pay £130,000 to a legal team led by crossbench peer and distinguished barrister Lord Pannick KC to provide a critique of the Committee of Privileges’s procedures (an unsolicited submission to the committee which was flawed insofar as its criticisms were based on the notion that the committee did not work like a court, which it is, of course, not).
My friend Alexander Horne, a barrister who spent nearly 20 years as a legal adviser in Parliament, has written repeatedly, elegantly and accurately on the investigation by the Committee of Privileges, and there is no benefit to my rehashing his expert opinions, so I would direct you to his work in Prospect, The New Statesman, The Spectator and The Critic. If I may paraphrase him, he essentially maintains that the committee’s procedures are fair, that they are proportionate and necessary to make a judgement on Johnson’s conduct and that lawyers who accuse the committee of impropriety or unfairness are simply incorrect.
Johnson’s defiance and lack of repentance is hardly surprising, and is even, within a certain context, forgivable. What is more damaging is the cohort of Conservatives who have decided to stand by their ousted chief and imitate Leonidas’s hoplites at the Hot Gates, their loyalty, if not their judgement, unimpeachable. It may be that their numbers have dwindled—last summer’s mass departures from government drained Johnson’s forces considerably—and what remains is a rather mixed assortment.
There is Nadine Dorries, the former culture secretary whose wide-eyed adoration of Johnson is unsettling; Jacob Rees-Mogg, the impeccably courteous West Country throwback to Queen Anne-era Toryism; Brendan Clarke-Smith, a standard-issue populist from the East Midlands; Mark Jenkinson, the literal Workington Man, a Cumbrian whose political journey began in UKIP; Scott Benton, the Member for Blackpool South, who read theology at university and somewhat rashly quipped that Johnson’s taking of an oath at the committee session was “designed to evoke the drama of the OJ Simpson trial”; Lord Greenhalgh, a former management consultant who was one of Johnson’s deputy mayors at City Hall before being ennobled to become a Home Office minister and who stammered and bluffed his way through an excruciating encounter with Victoria Derbyshire on Newsnight this week.
There can only be one sensible message to the dwindling band around Johnson from anyone who cares about the Conservative Party or our political institutions and culture: stop. Stop this now. Let the Committee of Privileges conduct and conclude its inquiry, accept its verdict on Johnson and any punishment if he is found guilty, and look to the future and the general election of (probably) 2024 and how we maximise support for the party at that election. And there are three reasons to follow my advice, which I will explain briefly.
Damaging the Committee of Privileges damages everything
One of the most strident tactics adopted by Johnson and his supporters has been to attack the legitimacy and procedures of the Committee of Privileges. This is not a subtle tactic: if you want to mitigate any potential damage to Johnson if he is found guilty by the committee of misleading the House of Commons and committing a contempt, a brutal but effective method is to suggest that there is something wrong with the system which is investigating him. Unreliable process means unreliable judgement.
Johnson has been pursuing this avenue since last autumn when he commissioned and published a legal opinion by Lord Pannick KC and Jason Pobjoy of Blackstone Chambers which concluded that “the Committee is… proposing to adopt an unfair procedure”. They challenged a number of aspects of the committee’s working methods, including its “failure to understand” that it would have to prove that Johnson intended to mislead Parliament, the fact that its verdict would not be subject to judicial review, its disregard of the need to establish Johnson’s guilt “to a high degree of probability” and its failure to allow Johnson to be represented by counsel. All of these shortcomings meant that Johnson would not be subject to “fair procedure”.
The opinion is effectively worthless. Pannick is an extremely distinguished lawyer, experienced in public law, human rights and constitutional law, but he is not an authority in House of Commons procedure, while Pobjoy, his junior, is distinguished in public and human rights law, and they proceed from the flawed assumption that the committee is or should act like a court; where it does not, Pannick and Pobjoy argue, it falls into error and acts unfairly. But even barristers as distinguished as Pannick and Pobjoy must deal with the world as it is, rather than as they would like it to be. Simply, the Committee of Privileges is a committee of Parliament, not a court, and it constitutes a parliamentary process, not a judicial one. You need not take my word for it (though I was a clerk in the House of Commons for more than 10 years so am not absolutely without locus): instead read Alex Horne’s views and those he cites in support of his arguments.
Nevertheless, the assault on the committee’s probity and integrity has continued. The impartiality of the chair, Harriet Harman KC, has been repeatedly attacked, because she expressed views on Johnson’s conduct in a political context before the matter was even referred to the committee and before she replaced Sir Chris Bryant as chair. This assumes that a Member of Parliament cannot possibly act with independence and good faith in a select committee, which, if true, would render the whole select committee system existentially flawed and useless. I have worked for a number of committees of all kinds, with varying party dominance, under Labour, coalition and Conservative governments, and I can assure you from long experience that the majority of parliamentarians understand perfectly well the importance of their scrutiny role and the need for a non-partisan attitude and a willingness to accept facts that may not support with their political positions.
The slurs and insinuations against the committee and its members have not been helpful, to put it mildly. It was especially disappointing to hear Rees-Mogg, a former leader of the House of Commons and devotee of parliamentary procedure who even made a podcast about the chamber and its workings, dismissing the authority of the committee. He commented snidely that “I think he’s winning in the court of public opinion, who see this as a kangaroo court”, an insult also used by Dorries. She had previously gone even further, describing the inquiry as a “witch hunt” and an “egregious abuse of parliamentary procedure”. Last summer, Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park, a man regarded as having run an unpleasantly negative campaign for the London mayoralty in 2016, stooped lower, calling the committee:
A jury comprised of highly partisan, vengeful and vindictive MPs, nearly all of whom are already on the record viciously attacking the person they are judging. It is an obscene abuse of power.
This is a single-minded, destructive and outrageous traducing of a very important committee of the House of Commons, which exists to defend the privileges of the House, a role one might have thought Rees-Mogg, at least, would regard as vital. If one believes in parliamentary sovereignty, the Commons must be able to protect its rights and its place in our constitutional arrangements.
At business questions on Thursday this week, the leader of the House, Penny Mordaunt, was uncompromising in her defence of the Committee of Privileges. In response to a question from the SNP’s Deidre Brock, she was resolute:
During last week’s business questions, I reminded Members that the whole House had asked the Privileges Committee to undertake this task, and that the Committee’s members were doing the House a service in doing so… the hon. Lady referred to particular remarks that some Members had made about the Committee. Some of them have built their reputations on being servants of the House, and would never let grubby politics get in the way of true, good, sound argument and also good manners. I would gently point out to those colleagues who mentioned, for example, marsupials that they might have been too full of bounce when they made those remarks. The Committee needs to get on with its work.
Mordaunt is absolutely right, and it is very much part of her brief as leader of the House to speak in the committee’s defence. She has also spoken repeatedly of the importance of restoring trust in public institutions, for example at the launch of the Edelman UK Trust Barometer 2023 earlier this month and to unveil a new code of conduct for MPs. This wider effort is hugely important, and the attacks on the Committee of Privileges does exactly the opposite. If we are to expect the electorate to begin to rely on our political institutions more readily (though the expenses scandal of 2009 will remain a blot on the Commons’s reputation for ever), we cannot at the same time have our political leaders dismissing those institutions from purely partisan motivation.
Boris is not coming back
It might be regarded as a sufficiently lost cause to take up arms in defence on Boris Johnson’s reputation, especially for truthfulness and transparency, but those who are doing so should also ask themselves what the longer game is. If it is some aspiration to see Johnson return to the head of the Conservative Party, they should put this as far as possible from their minds. It is not a realistic proposition. The mythology of Johnson’s downfall last summer has already been developed, with a sour, suspicious and entirely fictitious version of the post-First World War German Dolchstoßlegende emerging. According to this theory, Johnson, the epitome of one of history’s Great Men, was brought low by lesser political beings for various but universally base reasons of thwarted ambition and antipathy towards Brexit. The myth’s adherents believe that the party membership at large remained, and remain, loyal to the king over the water but were shut out of the connivance which saw Johnson’s administration collapse slowly.
In a sense, the myth is partially true. Johnson was forced to resigned as prime minister because his parliamentary colleagues, their patience tested by repeated scandals and stumbles. In June, there was a test of Johnson’s strength through a vote of confidence, which the prime minister won but in which 148 MPs, around 40 per cent, voted against him. The breaking point for many was the mishandling of the episode in which Christopher Pincher, deputy chief whip, became drunk and inappropriate at the Carlton Club on 29 June 2022, and to attempt to resolve which inaccurate information about how much Johnson had known about Pincher’s manner was presented to the public. Ministerial resignations began on 5 July, with the chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, and the health and social care secretary, Sajid Javid, walking out within minutes of each other. After that, the house of cards collapsed, and within 24 hours, 31 ministers had resigned, leaving Johnson barely able to plug the gaps. So, yes, the parliamentary party did “abandon” the prime minister.
But no leader of a UK political party (with the striking exception of Jeremy Corbyn in 2016) can long survive the loss of confidence of his colleagues in the House of Commons. Nor should a prime minister be able to survive such a loss: the prime minister is invited by the monarch to form a government on the explicit understanding that he or she is able to command the confidence of the House in order to carry out the King’s government and, especially, to guarantee supply, the agreement of the House to make provision for government expenditure.
But to suggest that Johnson was “betrayed” for reasons of personal antipathy or opposition to Brexit is to ignore (deep breath) the loss of the government’s working majority in September 2019; the withdrawal of the whip from 21 Conservative MPs, including the Father of the House, Kenneth Clarke; the resignations of the universities minister, Jo Johnson, and the work and pensions secretary, Amber Rudd; the decision of the Supreme Court that the government’s advice to the Queen to prorogue Parliament in September 2019; the effective dismissal of the chancellor, Sajid Javid, after the general election because of an insistence that he share his special advisers with those at Number 10; Johnson’s failure to attend five COBR meetings in the early stages of the Covid-19 epidemic; delays in introducing a lockdown to mitigate the effects of the pandemic; the scandal of the prime minister’s senior adviser, Dominic Cummings, ignoring lockdown regulations and driving from London to County Durham; mistakes, failures and alleged corruption in the procurement of personal protective equipment for emergency workers; the shortcomings and high cost of the Test and Trace scheme; the necessity of a third lockdown in January 2021; controversy over the cost and source of payment for a refurbishment of the prime minister’s Downing Street flat; an attempt in November 2021 to block the suspension from the House of Owen Paterson, found guilty by the Committee on Standards of paid advocacy; and the long-running saga of “Partygate”. Those who decided Johnson’s time had run out were not short of reasons from which to choose.
The bare truth is that Johnson, having emerged from countless scrapes which could have felled him, eventually resigned when it was clear even to his face-hardened ego that he no longer had the support to continue. It had happened to Heath and Thatcher before him, though only Heath’s stubborn self-assuredness had kept him in office until he was positively voted out, and it had happened to Duncan Smith and May. It would subsequently happen to Liz Truss. So Johnson is not the victim of some glaring injustice or extraordinary misfortune.
It is sometimes hard to remember this, but Johnson only announced his resignation as prime minister eight months ago, and only physically gave up office half a year ago. We seem to have fitted a lot into the intervening period. However far below expectations Truss fell as prime minister, and however challenging Rishi Sunak is finding the political climate, there is no hard evidence that anything like a majority of Conservative MPs would endorse a second stint in Downing Street of one could somehow be proposed. Nor would his regaining the seals of office wipe away any of the dark clouds which dog him reputationally, whether Partygate or Jennifer Arcuri or the refurbishment of his flat or his current investigation by the Committee of Privileges. Even if he were to be cleared by the committee, the Labour Party would have an essentially inexhaustible supply of accusations to reach for whenever it wanted to score some easy points against Johnson as we draw closer to another general election.
Johnson should not come back; and he will not come back. The few faithful may hope as ardently as they like, but the extent of their desire is not enough to overcome the narrowness of his support. In any event, they should not want him back.
Boris isn’t an election-winner
This seems at first blush an unlikely, even disprovable, statement: after all, in parliamentary terms, Johnson led the Conservatives in 2019 to their most emphatic election victory since 1987. That generational achievement must surely mark him out and give him a substantial amount of credit in the bank.
But the unique popularity of Johnson is largely a myth. In 2019, he benefited to an extent from a clear—some would argue simplistic—slogan of “Get Brexit Done”. And it gave him currency with Leave voters who might otherwise have voted for Labour or the Liberal Democrats. At the same time, he was deeply unpopular with Remain voters, even Conservative ones, so at best the Boris effect was a score draw. Moreover, to focus on Johnson’s popularity ignores another huge factor in the Conservative election victory, namely the image of Jeremy Corbyn, then leader of the opposition and Labour’s prospective prime minister. He was even more unpopular than Johnson: YouGov tracked him at an approval rating of about -40, while Johnson muddled through with a less damning (but hardly impressive) -12. In addition, Corbyn had to present himself, like an ageing Janus, to both Leave and Remain voters (his own views have never quite been known, and he had once been an opponent of the European Economic Community), in the end convincing neither, while Johnson was able to go all in with the Leave camp.
Professor Sir John Curtice of the University of Strathclyde, the nonpareil of psephologists and polling, has punctured the Johnson bubble in very simple terms. Commenting last autumn, he explained “Johnson has never been that popular” in overall terms. He went on, “There is a bit of a myth about him being a gloriously popular politician but he never has been, certainly not since 2016.” In fact, Johnson has often been blessed with the second-best thing to popularity, which is good luck. He came to the premiership at the right time to set out a simple, intelligible, attractive stall on Brexit, he faced a truly calamitous leader of the opposition, he was able, by misdirection and frantic activity, to distract the electorate from any underlying problems in his administration until at least 2021, and he was deposited as a magnetic character in an age of politicians who are remarkably low-key.
It is true that some polling at the end of 2022 suggested that Johnson was, at least, more popular than Rishi Sunak, which must have whetted the appetites of the more wide-eyed of Boris partisans. But that period of advantage seems to have ebbed away. Partly, Sunak has scored some reasonable successes recently: the agreement of the Windsor Framework with the European Commission, to replace the Northern Ireland Protocol, has proved popular and allowed Sunak to portray himself as a serious, effective and reasonable leader, and that reputation for unshowy focus on results was emphasised by his and chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s swift negotiation of a deal with HSBC to save the UK arm of Silicon Valley Bank at no cost to the public purse. How the controversial Illegal Migration Bill and his attempt to tackle cross-Channel asylum-seekers and refugees remains to be seen, but pearl-clutching metropolitan lawyers should not underestimate the reactionary knee-jerk instincts of a certain portion of the electorate.
Therefore even if it could somehow be done, restoring Boris Johnson to Downing Street would not automatically change the political weather for the better for the Conservative Party, nor is there any evidence that Johnson is would bring much, or any, additional popularity. His supporters are peddling a myth that supports their own preferred outcome, but it is fanciful and would lead to disaster.
Conclusion
This just has to stop. We have to draw a line under the Johnson era, allow colleagues to think of it what they will until historians are ready to assess it with the first flowering of dispassion, and accept that the Conservative Party has moved on. Whoever one supported last summer and autumn for the leadership, and it is no secret that I was an enthusiastic supporter of Penny Mordaunt, there is no serious figure who thinks that yet another change of leader before the next election would deliver anything but humiliating catastrophe. We are on our fifth prime minister in 13 years, and that must, must, must be an end of it until the electorate next has its say.
I understand the power of nostalgia, and the potency of comforting memories. I know why people want Boris Johnson to come back, but they must rethink their positions and have the uncomfortable encounter with reality that everyone must undergo every so often. Stop damaging Parliament by attacking the Privileges Committee’s inquiry into Johnson’s conduct; stop trying to wish Johnson back into Downing Street; and stop thinking that Johnson is a silver bullet. None of this will help the Conservative Party. Even if the odds are stacked against us, barring a seismic event, we must stand behind the prime minister, keep our nerve, create a positive vision for the United Kingdom and persuade the electorate we are capable of delivering that vision for all the people. Nothing else will do.