Politics is a serious business, and jokes aren't enough
We are easily distracted by flashes of wit in public life, but governing a state is hard work and it requires deep thinking
It has been, obviously, quite an eventful day. In the wake of a disastrous piece of parliamentary management, in which the Conservative Party managed to raise the stakes on an Opposition Day motion, waver, win the vote convincingly but collapse in absolute chaos, the beleaguered prime minister, Liz Truss, looked more and more vulnerable. Her more media-hungry Members of Parliament were issuing dire predictions that she had hours left in office and would be gone by the end of the day, the denouement of her premiership came rapidly.
The cat was out of the bag as soon as the famous black door of Number 10 Downing Street swung open and the prime minister strode out accompanied by her husband. An unexpected statement, at a lectern outside the prime minister’s residence, had already raised questions and hinted that perhaps momentous events were in the offing. But the fact that Truss was shadowed by Hugh O’Leary, her accountant spouse, removed any doubt. Partners only appear on high days and holy days, when a victorious prime minister celebrates an election victory, or bids his or her farewell to the job of the King’s chief minister. It was obvious which this would be.
We knew that the prime minister had already had a meeting with Sir Graham Brady, chairman of the 1922 Committee and the Conservative Party’s shop steward. As Brady is responsible, among other things, for the administration of leadership elections and challenges, it was a strong signal that all was not well, but one could still suppose that he had been briefing the prime minister on the levels of backbench support or opposition, allowing her to plan the next step of her struggle to retain office. But it was at least possible, we all knew, that Brady had delivered the most unpalatable message of all, that Truss’s support had leaked away to a fatal degree and she should now reflect urgently on her future.
In the old days, it was said that the “men in grey suits” would visit a failing prime minister and leave him or her alone with a revolver and a bottle of whisky (the implication being that the leader, fortified with Dutch courage, would commit political suicide). It is a brutal metaphor, redolent of an age when public scorn was intolerable for a member of the ruling classes. (When George V learned in 1931 that the Earl Beauchamp, a leading Liberal peer and former cabinet minister, had been unmasked as a homosexual, his reaction was characteristic: “My God. I thought men like that shot themselves.”)
One unkind but witty Twitter account had already caught the mood on Tuesday by remarking “Liz Truss has just drunk a revolver and fired a bottle of whiskey into her ear.” Like the best political jokes, it was cruel and slightly unfair, but captured a certain spirit of the times and conformed to many prejudices about the prime minister. But now she had achieved the task set for her by the men in grey suits. She announced that she could no longer lead an effective government and had therefore notified the King of her resignation as leader of the Conservative Party (which is, it might be observed, constitutionally of no interest to him) and would step down as prime minister when her party had selected a successor.
Now we have another leadership election, the third in three years. Sir Graham Brady has announced a swift timetable: nominations must be submitted by 2.00 pm on Monday 24 October, and any candidate must have the support of at least 100 of his or her fellow MPs (which therefore means there cannot be more than three candidates). The process will take place within a week, and the new leader will be announced at the latest on Friday 28 October. The party grandees obviously hope that a short contest will be less divisive, and that perhaps there will not be a contest at all if MPs can agree on a “unity” candidate to be named leader nemine contradicente, as Michael Howard was in 2003 (I examined that leadership election yesterday).
The newly appointed chancellor of the exchequer, Jeremy Hunt, swiftly ruled himself out of contention. He has failed to win the crown twice (in 2019 and 2022) and may now see the Treasury as the summit of his political ambition, an office from which he can wield a great deal of influence. It seemed at first, then, that there were only two plausible candidates: the former chancellor, Rishi Sunak, who had been the runner-up in the summer’s contest; and the leader of the House of Commons, Penny Mordaunt, who had been narrowly eliminated at the penultimate round in July’s competition. It would be a relatively straightforward choice: the man who had triggered the downfall of the previous prime minister and was now lurking in his tent in Yorkshire after his defeat while feeling somewhat vindicated by the collapse of Truss’s premiership; and the third-placed candidate who had performed very strongly in unofficial polling, had agreed to serve under Truss and had achieved some notable public successes at the King’s Accession Council and then at the despatch box of the House of Commons.
As the afternoon wore on, a surprise third candidate emerged. Slowly at first, but with increasing strength, rumours built up that the man deposed in the summer’s political crisis, Boris Johnson, was considering a bid for a dramatic comeback, leveraging his charisma and memories of 2019’s electoral success to persuade the party that it had judged him hastily. The Conservatives needed him back, the message went out, and he was the only candidate with a chance of reversing the party’s political decline and perhaps winning the next general election.
As matters stand at the end of Thursday 20 October, Johnson is not only in the running but leads the field, with 50 more-or-less declared supporters. Sunak trails with 39, and Mordaunt has 17. These figures must be taken with more than a pinch of salt: some are anonymous (there are supporters listed as “a whip”, “1922 exec” and “party board”). Nevertheless, it is obvious that a Johnson candidacy, largely dismissed only 24 hours ago, is now at least a possibility.
The potential presence of Boris Johnson in the election process adds a new dynamic. The former prime minister’s appeal has always leaned heavily on his jocular, bumbling charm. His shambling manner, unkempt hair and ability to joke about anything has been his calling card since well before he entered front-line politics, going back to his earliest buccaneering days as a journalist in late 1980s. He was always regarded as amusing and capable of producing a ringing (if sometimes bathetic phrase), and he used this winning manner to distract from a carelessness with the truth and a disregard for intellectual rigour. He has always been, in some ways, a giant teddy bear, approaching his audience with a desire to be loved, and this appeal has entranced many.
An innate recklessness never seemed to hold Johnson back very much. He was dismissed as a junior hack at The Times for making up quotes in a story—something generally felt by conscientious journalists to be one of the most serious crimes against the profession—and he was reprimanded in his following position at The Daily Telegraph for similar inappropriate creativity. His editor there, Sir Max Hastings, has since been excoriating about Johnson’s character, saying he “cares for no interest save his own fame and gratification” and predicting that any tenure in high office would “almost certainly reveal a contempt for rules, precedent, order and stability”.
Hastings was absolutely accurate in his assessment of his former employee, yet, albeit with fits and starts, Johnson gradually rose to political prominence. After a piebald career as a Conservative MP and a shadow minister under Michael Howard, he won the party’s nomination for mayor of London, and defied political and demographic gravity to win the office in 2008. He served two chequered but high-profile terms, making himself one of the biggest beasts in Conservative politics, and returned to the House of Commons as MP for Uxbridge and South Ruislip in 2015. It was now taken for granted that he had an eye on the premiership at some point in the future, and it was almost certainly with this in mind that he agreed to star for the Vote Leave campaign in the 2016 Brexit referendum. Although he was not a Brexiteer by deep conviction, he had always enjoyed poking fun at the EU’s worst excesses, and saw Vote Leave as a priceless opportunity for advancement.
Again, Johnson was right. In June 2016, the UK voted narrowly to leave the European Union, and Johnson was given much of the credit for the win. He briefly considered a tilt at the premiership when his old Eton and Oxford rival David Cameron stood down in the referendum’s wake, but a last-minute assassination by his former lieutenant Michael Gove made his candidacy impossible. Nevertheless, when the new prime minister, Theresa May, assembled her cabinet in July 2016, she invited Johnson to be foreign secretary.
Boris Johnson’s ascent to, tenure of and defenestration from the office of prime minister are still recent enough to be burned into our collective memory. But most will agree that he exercised power largely through personality, displaying a carefully calculated and calibrated clownishness which disarmed and attracted those who might otherwise have been political opponents. There is a school of thought that this outlandish character allowed him to reach beyond traditional party lines, and that voters in traditional Labour areas were, sometimes reluctantly, won over by the exotic pedigree and unashamed upper-middle-class values of the Conservative prime minister. This apparent electoral power allowed him to seize so-called “Red Wall” seats in the 2019 general election, left-wing strongholds like Bishop Auckland, Bassetlaw, Bolsover and Ashfield returning Tory MPs often for the first time in their history.
Now that there is a hint of a second act, denied to so many political lives, Johnson’s effervescence is being touted as a pick-me-up for the Conservative Party, an antidote to months of gloom, mishap and decline. His former parliamentary private secretary, Sir James Duddridge, could barely conceal his glee as he tweeted “I hope you enjoyed your holiday boss. Time to come back. Few issues at the office that need addressing.” Johnson’s sister Rachel was in similarly high spirits when she declared “If he wants to stand, wild horses won't stop him.” Brendan Clarke-Smith, the MP for Bassetlaw deep in the Red Wall of Nottinghamshire, stressed that the Conservatives needed “somebody actually who can get this party going again, get us winning elections again.”
I have never been drawn to politicians—or people in any walk of life—who are relentlessly serious and make the heaviest of weather of their professional existence. One of my early annual reports in the House of Commons, written by two line managers of such different personalities that you could see the join in their prose, warned me that I needed to appear more serious and committed in my duties, “but not to the panic-stricken intensity of some colleagues.” Levity is an important safety valve.
In political terms I feel great sympathy for some leading figures who presented a laid-back exterior. I find much to commend in the attitude of A.J. Balfour, prime minister from 1902 to 1905, whose detachment and languid manner were summed up in his remark that “Nothing matters very much and few things matter at all.” Equally, I do my best to follow the maxim of Harold Macmillan, the great actor-manager of Conservative politics, who believed “It's very important not to have a rigid distinction between what's flippant and what is serious.” (In fact, characteristically, Macmillan’s relaxed indifference was a façade: he was an intensely anxious man and would physically vomit before Prime Minister’s Questions. That duality is something I find very easy to identify with.)
Nevertheless, as as obsessive since at least my early teens, I believe that politics is a serious business, and often requires long consideration and hard thinking. Perhaps I sometimes have too great an earnestness for the conversational dissection of ideas and principles, but for me politics is the way in which we organise and regulate our society, and the mechanism through which we express some of the most profound aspects of our identity. I’m perfectly capable of making the silliest, rudest or most inappropriate jokes about weighty matters, but, at my core, I mind about all of these things. If I hold beliefs, especially as I get older and, if not wiser then at least less foolish, it is usually because I have considered an issue at length, trying to get to the core of what I really think.
Penny Mordaunt, who I think is a very strong candidate for the highest office in the land, has cultivated a calm but sober and considered approach to politics, represents the polar opposite of the Johnsonian way of politics. She is very far from humourless: in person she is funny, witty, arch and extraordinarily charismatic, and when on duty in her public persona her gravity is leavened by a very dry wit. Answering questions in the House of Commons this summer after opponents had (quite implausibly) suggested she was a shirker, she picked up the gauntlet and observed with the straightest of faces “I am amazed to find myself here this morning given my reported work ethic, but here I am.”
Indeed, her early days in the Commons displayed a delicate but punchy sense of humour which belied her juniority. In June 2014, she was invited to open the debate responding to the Queen’s Speech, traditionally a time for light-heartedness. She produced a masterful and accomplished performance, again delivered deadpan, which had Members on all sides of the House roaring with laughter. Referring to the speech given in the same debate by Lady Tweedsmuir in 1957, she told the House that the then-leader of the Opposition, Hugh Gaitskell, had complimented Tweedsmuir’s “soft, attractive voice” but regretted that it had rendered him unable to concentrate on what she had said. Mordaunt then wondered how Gaitskell’s successor, Ed Miliband, would approach the situation.
I realise that, in recounting this, I might have left the present Leader of the Opposition with a modern man’s dilemma. Should he now risk insulting me by concentrating solely on the issues raised, and failing to mention that I am also a softly-spoken charmer? Or, if he were to compliment me, would he risk incurring the wrath of the Labour party’s women’s caucus, potentially triggering the newly introduced power of recall? These are perilous times for a chap.
Her most famous remarks dwelled on the training she had received as a Royal Navy reservist, and the ongoing but still incomplete integration of women into the armed forces.
I am proud that the Government are to review the roles in our services currently barred to women, to make sure that we make use of the best talent. In doing so, there must be no compromise of standards, but we must recognise that we cannot set women up to fail. Training must be tailored to enable us to be our best. I have benefited from some excellent training by the Royal Navy, but on one occasion I felt that it was not as bespoke as it might have been. Fascinating though it was, I felt that the lecture and practical demonstration on how to care for the penis and testicles in the field failed to appreciate that some of us attending had been issued with the incorrect kit.
Nevertheless, as she offers herself for the leadership of the Conservative Party for a second time, Mordaunt’s supporters are emphasising her calm demeanour and her ability to appear in control in times of great gravity and stress. She has certainly had a number of high-profile opportunities. Appointed leader of the House of Commons and lord president of the council by Liz Truss two days before the death of Elizabeth II, she found that her second role, usually almost wholly a sinecure, required her to preside at the new King’s Accession Council on 10 September. It was a task no politician had been required to perform for 70 years, and the corresponding event to mark Elizabeth II’s accession in 1952 had been overseen by Lord Woolton, wartime minister of food and proponent of the famous (or notorious) “Woolton pie”.
Despite only a few days in the job, Mordaunt conducted her duties with aplomb, reflecting the public mood in appearing sombre, somewhat shocked, deeply affected but dignified. The ceremony, only 10 minutes or so, is worth watching. As a friend, I was deeply impressed and rather proud to watch her stately performance. Later that day, she wound up for the government after two days of tributes to the late Queen in the House of Commons. She observed that it was a task which, in 1952, had fallen to Winston Churchill.
Penny and Boris therefore represent two extremes of the political spectrum in terms of demonstrating leadership. Mordaunt’s supporters, among whom I firmly count myself, believe that her dignity and confidence, her sheer grip when representing the government on important occasions, are important qualities. She reassures and is capable of phrase-making which is resonant and moving (as when she paid tribute to the Queen at this month’s Conservative Party conference), and her remark earlier today that she would “keep calm and carry on” hit an important note. That kind of serenity and seriousness is an essential weapon if the next prime minister is to put recent events behind himself or herself and begin to rebuild the public’s faith in our political institutions.
It seems to me, with considerable sadness, that Boris Redux would represent quite the opposite instinct. At a basic level, I understand why Conservative MPs, fearful of an electoral apocalypse at the next general election, are clutching memories of Johnsonian jollity and the winning ways of earlier times. But we cannot turn the clock back, and legislators above all should be grown-up enough to understand that.
I do not want to exacerbate divisions within my own party, and I have always tried to conduct discussions of political differences with good-humour and (hopefully) mutual respect. But I find myself compelled to put my judgement in the plainest and starkest terms. Quite simply, those who long for and support the restoration of Boris Johnson as prime minister are, whether they admit it or not, declaring that they are no longer interested in serious politics. They are turning their backs on the weighty challenges which the party and the country face, and, focusing to the exclusion of anything else on the retention of the seats, they are allowing themselves just to lapse into a warm and comforting reverie of easier times.
Of course one can sympathise with that attitude. But, as I began, politics is a serious business, and there is duty incumbent on those lucky enough to serve in the House of Commons to face reality and recognise it for what it is. A crude revival of the “best of Boris'“ ignores how times have changed, plasters the smile of a clown on the grim visage of contemporary politics, and elevates the show, the show which warms their hearts, above everything else. We cannot forget the systematic untruths and disingenuousness which became the hallmark of Johnson’s premiership. And they frankly insult the electorate by ignoring that their candidate is under investigation by the House of Commons Committee of Privileges for misleading the House of Commons and making no effort to correct the record when his lies were exposed.
This is a grave matter. If Johnson is found guilty by the committee, he could be suspended or even expelled from the House. He could be found to have committed a contempt of Parliament, and might even face a recall election in his Uxbridge and South Ruislip constituency, an electoral test he would be by no means certain to win.
To promote his candidacy for the premiership is to imply that none of this matters. It is not important, his supporters are effectively saying, that he is a liar and may be held to be such by the House of Commons on the confidence of which he would depend for his position as prime minister. It is not just that they are potentially storing up very serious trouble for the future; more profoundly they are slapping the electorate in the face and dismissing as trivial basic issues of honesty and probity in the conduct of public business.
I put an elementary plea before Conservative MPs as this rapid leadership election unfolds. Understand the gravity of the situation in which the country finds itself. Understand the mountain the new prime minister will have to climb to surmount the accumulated difficulties and reach for even a respectable performance at the next election. And understand the politics is not a game, that the prosperity and wellbeing of the nation hangs on how the government conducts itself over the next months. This is not the time to usher back a beaming but ruthless joker. It is a time to embrace seriousness of purpose and show the voters that we get it, that we understand their anguish.
Fitzgerald said there were no second acts in American lives. Well, Boris was born in New York, so it is not too harsh to apply this maxim to him. He was prime minister for nearly three years, and can count some real achievements alongside the low points, but for now we need to say thank you, but no thanks you. Your time has passed, and we must turn to someone else to lead us now. In my view, it has to be Penny Mordaunt who takes up the burden of leadership and seeks to take us forward, united, determined and in deadly earnest.