A very un-Conservative Tory
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What was so striking about the letter from Jesse Norman to Boris Johnson, aside from saying that he could no longer support the Prime Minister and calling for him to go, was his suggestion that Johnson’s style of government was at odds with Conservative values.
Turning to the Prime Minister’s determination to breach the Northern Ireland Protocol, Norman wrote, “You are the leader of the Conservative and Unionist Party, yet you are putting the Union itself gravely at risk.”
He went on, “No genuinely Conservative government should have supported the recent ban on noisy protest — least of all when basic human freedoms are facing the threat of extinction in Ukraine.”
He accused Johnson of wild over-promising on energy policy: “There is,” he wrote, “zero chance that this or any government will be able to build a nuclear power station a year at any point in the next decade,” and followed this by lambasting the PM for “trying to import elements of a presidential system of government that is entirely foreign to our constitution and law.”
“In my judgement, all these things are at odds with decent proper conservatism,” wrote Norman, “with effective teamwork, careful reform, a sense of integrity, respect for the rule of law and a long-term focus on the public good.”
In this central criticism, Norman is right. Johnson the Prime Minister has not been much of a conservative. Not for him the cautious advance of economic and social change, ensuring the preservation of society’s hard-won structural and institutional gains. Quite the opposite. Johnson is a habitual sower of precisely the kind of discord that Margaret Thatcher so famously set out to quell, in his professional life as a journalist, in his private affairs and now in his political career.
The way he grabbed for power was indicative of what was to follow. He destroyed the careers of both David Cameron and Theresa May, acts of political aggression that have shattered the Tory party’s reputation for stability. He unlawfully prorogued Parliament in an attempt to shut down debate in the Commons and purged his own party of senior Remainers. Conservatism does not seek to curtail free speech in this way.
His suggestion that Britain should build a bridge to Northern Ireland was not only bizarre but extremely costly — the idea consumed nearly £1m of taxpayers’ money and in the end came to nothing. Again, no true Conservative would burn cash on such an outlandish idea. His attempt to re-write the Parliamentary rules on lobbying to save the career of Owen Paterson was an astoundingly ill-judged and deeply un-conservative move and as for the Partygate scandal, the spectacle of a Conservative Prime Minister apologising to the Queen for misbehavior in No10 will have horrified Tories.
The truth of it is that Boris Johnson is not a conservative and never has been. Like Trump and Corbyn, he has no real interest in the party that has appointed him leader, and is interested only in generating waves to carry him forward to personal success.
But what really marks out Johnson, and perhaps his defining characteristic, is that he doesn’t believe in anything at all. He has no ability to articulate political ideas because he doesn’t have any. He stands for nothing. His policies sum to zero. He has talked about leveling up, nuclear power stations, impossible bridges and Peppa Pig in a confused stew of ideas, jokes and half-jokes, but at no time has he been able to define what Johnsonism really is.
The trouble for him now is that other people will define Johnsonism for him. It will come to mean a nihilistic, directionless political mess. That is what we have in No10. “For you to prolong this charade by remaining in office,” Norman wrote, “insults the electorate, and the tens of thousands of people who support, volunteer, represent and campaign for our party.”
The defensive line taken by Johnson’s supporters is to ask, rhetorically, “but who could replace him?” That question will be deployed with ever more enthusiasm in the coming hours. But that attempt to shut down the competition — and to dismiss the very idea of competition itself — is fundamentally un-conservative. For what do conservatives believe in if not competition?
Johnson may well win this evening’s vote of confidence, but even if he does, his political capital is now spent. He is out of time. His support is draining into the ground. The Wakefield by-election on 23rd June will be a crushing Tory defeat. And he doesn’t even have a core conservative message with which to rally the base. He is the high tax Conservative, the Tory who doesn’t care for Parliament, for the Union — for the law, even. As his party now seems to realise, and as the jeering crowds at this weekend’s Jubilee celebrations made clear, that is not a popular combination.
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