The music has stopped playing but Boris Johnson continues to dance until the rope runs out completely. The populist prime minister is like a tribune of the people who has been left without a people, after the motion of censure in which more than 40% of the conservative parliamentary group voted against him. He is going to have enormous difficulties to take his party to the elections of 2024, let alone to win them, but he intends to cling to power and he will have to be taken out of Downing Street with his feet first.
Johnson is not a conventional politician (any conventional politician would have resigned several times already), but one who exposes his flaws as thanks, hopes they will be forgiven him, and invites voters to be passengers on his journey of self-destruction. . That he sees politics as a hypocritical ceremony and a cynical ritual, in which people feel better creating and destroying avatars of their own fears and hopes, raising leaders to the altar and then deposing them. Jovial and melancholic, formidable and careless at the same time, with a historical and short-term vision, he observes life from his heavenly cloud as an incongruous, passing and tragicomic reality. He doesn’t answer to any canon.
In less than three years, he has incinerated the absolute majority that he obtained in 2019, when he forged an atypical coalition to implement Brexit, stop the socialist Jeremy Corbyn (then leader of Labour) and equalize the rich south and the poor north of the country. But he is not a man of great plans and projects, or of a defined ideology, but he thinks that the stories are consumed but the problems remain. With the same attention span as a teenager, he quickly loses interest in things. The strategy of his ministers, when he demands something impossible from them, is not to contradict him and just wait for him to forget about it. Most of the time it works.
He may survive a few weeks, a few months, or even a few years, depending on what comes first in the by-elections on the 23rd in Wakefield and Tiverton (the Tories may lose both seats), on what the committee investigating whether he lied to the Parliament on the issue of parties, and how the cost of living crisis evolves. The moment of maximum danger for her may be around the Party congress in October, when her people will consider in all their crudeness if she is a winner or a loser, and if they want to go to the elections with her.
And if not Johnson, who? Several cabinet heavyweights would no doubt jump into the fray, but they’re all tainted by the unquestioning loyalty they’ve shown him, defending the indefensible at partygate. Finance Minister Rishi Sunak lurches about and says he wants to lower taxes but he raises them, defends Thatcherite orthodoxy but completely ignores it; Education, Nadhim Zahawi, is too green, as is Defense, Ben Wallace; the head of the Foreign Office, Liz Truss, has a small tribe of supporters but too many enemies in the parliamentary group; Priti Patel, from the Interior, appeals to the extreme right but policies such as sending immigrants to Rwanda are censored even by Prince Charles; Sajid Javid has the disaster handicap of the public health disaster; Dominic Raab lacks sufficient intellectual capacity, according to many of his colleagues.
Few Tories are tainted in one way or another by subservience to the Premier. One of them is Jeremy Hunt, a former health and foreign minister, who has been a leading figure in last week’s rebellion and is the bookies’ favorite if there is a succession war; a possible “cover” is Tom Tugendhat, chairman of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, limited by his inexperience in any executive position; Between two waters is Penny Mordaunt, purged by Johnson but who returned to the Government as Secretary of State for Commerce, and voted against the leader in the motion of censure.
Whatever happens with Johnson, none of them would question Brexit or consider returning to the single market, all would maintain the current policy towards Ukraine, commit to changing the Ulster Protocol and seeking advantageous trade agreements with countries outside the EU to develop a more competitive economy and less tied to the European ones. The problems of inequality between the different regions and territorial disintegration are above individuals. Maybe Boris will fall, or maybe he won’t. But Johnsonism will last a while.
