Will Johnson's fall spell doom or redemption for the Tories?

We are now entering the death throes of the Johnson premiership, but are we not also seeing the terminal split of the Conservative Party? It’s not too much of a leap in imagination to see the current civil war tearing the Tories in two — perhaps permanently.

The narrative goes like this. The punch-up we’re currently witnessing can be boiled down to how Tories would like to deal with Europe post-war. When Harold Macmillan first started trying to nail the Union Flag to the European pole, De Gaulle said that “a number of aspects of Britain’s economy, from working practices to agriculture” had “made Britain incompatible with Europe” and that Britain harboured a “deep-seated hostility” to any pan-European project. Jacob Rees-Mogg couldn’t have said it better.

The Tories and Europe is a tit-for-tat saga which has run and run. Europhiles did in Thatcher, Maastricht rebels knifed Major. Brexiters demonstrated little or no loyalty to Cameron, then served up Theresa May for dessert. Remoaners are in the process of exacting revenge on Johnson. There’s no end until the Conservative Party finally splits. Each side has progressively learnt to hate to the point of schism. Johnson’s woes, so this narrative goes, are nothing to do with his lies and deceit, and everything to do with small-minded centrists never managing to bury the hatchet with the victorious Brexiters.

But scratch under the skin of the Tory Party and you’ll find there have always been tensions. The reality of the British political system is two large, catch-all buckets of political thought and ideology: one sitting to the Left of the political fulcrum and the other to the Right. These buckets sit in coalition, always mutating and changing.

The British system needs leaders who can sculpt different ideas into a coherent agenda for government. Two of the most successful examples of this have been Mrs Thatcher moulding Conservative morals to liberal economic policy and Tony Blair creating a coalition of the centre.

Thatcher and Blair were often criticised for being too “presidential” in their styles. But both of them, for the majority of their leaderships, pulled their respective parties, sometimes kicking and screaming, with them. Both their downfalls came when the coalition fell in a Cabinet made up of a range of views (nearly) representative of the party. In the British Parliamentary system, it’s the alliances, unions, partnerships, and associations within the party – many of them uneasy – which give a Prime Minister ultimate power. Only by these means can the Government can whip the party into shape.

Boris Johnson has gone out of his way to not create a coalition. This meant he could go to the country and campaign on his presidential mandate in December 2019 and it worked in the short-term. However, in achieving victory he failed to create unity. Brexiteers in, Remoaners out. No Big Tent Cabinet of all the talents, but overpromotion for delinquents who should have been tweeting fights from the backbenches. Johnson has created government for the next day’s headlines but no vision for the future. This has meant the Union of the United Kingdom has never been in more peril, a body politic never more divided, rule of law torn up and a morgue full of underserving political corpses.

It’s said that at a young age Johnson stated he longed to be World King. In his own way it looked like he achieved that in December 2019, but the gods are mocking him now. Johnson has tried to create a political party in feudal terms, where deference to the personality cult of ‘Boris’ is rewarded with access to his table of riches. It’s destroyed him and it could rip the Conservative Party in two.

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