I’ve said it before, and will doubtless have cause to say it again: Boris Johnson might be the single most effective political illusionist this country has ever seen. No matter how many times experience fails to live up to the promise, there still seems to be no shortage of buyers for the could-have-been king act.
This is likely in part because, since stepping down as Prime Minister, the man himself has been careful not to pick any battles which might puncture that myth: he bottled out of the Uxbridge by-election (which the Tories went on to win), and marched his followers to the top of the hill before changing his mind about challenging Rishi Sunak (while claiming he had the numbers to do so).
Yesterday’s last-minute campaign intervention was another bit of shrewd judgement. It seems to have been enough to get him credit for doing his bit from people who forget that he spent most of the past six weeks on a second summer holiday. But it gives him enough distance to avoid close association with this disastrous campaign.
Most importantly, it lets the sort of person still inclined to chant his name at the rally comfort themselves with thoughts of how different things would have been if only he had been more involved. Or better yet, never been deposed at all – remember how much better the Conservative Party was polling then?
This last is a weirdly common argument, considering how bad it is. Setting aside for a moment that it matters that Johnson had lost the confidence of his parliamentary party and suffered an historic mass resignation from his government, why should his polling be assessed on the point it was at when he stood down, rather than the trajectory?
Whether or not you personally feel that Partygate was a scandal fit to topple a government, the public anger was a fact. Imagine how much more brutal for the Tories the Covid Inquiry would have been with Johnson still in place.
Even beyond the circumstances of his downfall, Johnson’s premiership was mostly an exercise in missed opportunities. It is true to an extent that he was derailed by the pandemic, but even in those few short months after the 2019 election when things were normal there was a notable lack of dynamism about the new government. His first hundred days weren’t shaping up to be anything special.
“Levelling Up”, supposedly the centrepiece of his political strategy, was never defined. Absent an actual, intellectually rigorous theory of Britain’s lopsided economic geography, it swiftly devolved into a slogan under which the usual lobbyists advanced whatever they usually peddle, and a handful of funds that distributed nice but structurally-insignificant pots of cash around target seats.
Worse still, it became yet another excuse for British politicians (and voters, in fairness) to tell themselves that we didn’t need to do unpopular but urgently-necessary things, such as build houses in the South or accept that people often have to leave their home town to pursue their career.
Yes, Johnson won a big majority. That’s a nice thing to have. But it only matters if you are prepared to use it, and he wasn’t. The one really ambitious part of his programme – Robert Jenrick’s planning reforms – was abandoned, and Jenrick himself sacked for the crime of loyally attempting to deliver the Prime Minister’s legislation.
But politics is a tribal game, and to those who don’t really think of it as anything more than that Johnson offers the wonderful feeling (or memory) of winning. He’s the Golden Calf of British politics – a comforting idol around which Tories can practice hollow rituals of imagined triumph.
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