Springtime for Boris Johnson — but will voters forgive and forget his failures?

Boris Johnson and his Government are comfortably ahead in the polls. Sir Keir Starmer and Labour have collapsed. Spring is around the corner and the first blossoms are out. 

It’s beginning to look like Johnson will emerge pretty much unscathed from a year of dither, delay and muddle, just in time for the local elections in May. He may even succeed in throwing a veil over more than 125,000 heart-rending Covid deaths and turn a year of failure into a triumph of sorts. 

Say what you want about Johnson. He’s a formidable political operator with a preternatural instinct for bouncing back from a debacle. 

The Prime Minister’s get-out-of-jail card, of course, is the vaccine. Signing off on a proposal to order multiple vaccines (on the advice of his Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance) before they were tested, was a bold move. It has paid off. He can now claim his share of the credit for what, in truth, is mostly an extraordinary worldwide effort by the international scientific community and a nimble pharmaceutical industry. 

Downing Street will now work hard to move the narrative seamlessly from “Getting Brexit Done” to a world-beating vaccine roll-out. It will want to gloss over the misfortunes in between. The list is long: Johnson’s scrapes with the law; the education shambles; an eye-wateringly expensive test-and-trace system (described by a former Treasury Permanent Secretary, Sir Nicholas Macpherson, as “the most wasteful and inept public spending programme of all time”); the backfiring Brexit trade machine; food shortages in Northern Ireland and rumblings over the Protocol; the increasingly scratchy relationship with our European neighbours; and Britain’s sinking prestige abroad. 

So what if his Government routinely breaks the law? So what if taxpayer’s money is handed out covertly under the cronies’ charter? The National Audit Office (NAO), the body we trust to keep public bodies on the straight and narrow, says PPE suppliers with political connections were ten times more likely to secure contracts, running into hundreds of millions? So what?  

Millions of masks were unfit for use by NHS staff. So what? Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor whose “Eat Out to Help Out” policy turbocharged the second wave of infections, liberally sprinkles his Budget with pork-barrel handouts, while offering frontline NHS staff a pay rise that will just about buy them a Starbucks skinny latte. So what? 

Johnson lies with practiced ease. Nobody does it better. His ministers turn truth on its head virtually every day, enabled by a largely supine media. There is “no fall-off in cross-border trade” with the EU. (And if there is, it’s the EU’s fault.) The Prime Minister’s doberman, Lord (David) Frost, tells the EU to stop moaning and make Brexit a success. You have to hand it to him. His master threatens, yet again, to break an international accord he signed, to fix a problem of his own making. 

The latest opinion polls suggest that, as a nation, we’re OK with this. Enough voters are willing to treat these as minor transgressions in pursuit of a greater good at a time of national crisis. 

To infer that Johnson has got away with all this is, I suggest, gravely to misread voters’ intentions. They may be willing to give the Government the benefit of the doubt. For now. But the electorate is not gullible. It’s just at the end of its tether. We all yearn for a return to some kind of normality, to feel the sun on our face. 

There is barely an opposition. Sir Keir Starmer and his lightweight front bench team, after a promising start, have hardly laid a glove on the PM or the Government during the deadlier second wave. If Starmer harbours a new vision for Labour, he has yet to share it. He has successfully persuaded us that he is not Jeremy Corbyn. But he has yet to tell us who he is. Johnson controls the narrative. 

When things come back into focus, the questions will come thick and fast. What kind of nation do we want to be? Do we care about honest government? Or have we become so polarised that anything your side does is fine? Are we really OK when ministers treat taxpayer’s money like a piggy bank for their chums? 

Then there are the big political questions. What is this “world-beating” Britain? We’ve cast ourselves adrift from Europe — and in the process put in play our own Union. What are we going to do with our new-found freedom? 

Johnson’s answer to these big, existential issues, so far, is simply: Brexit. Like “Make America Great Again”, the image of a renewed Britain striking out on its own speaks to vaulting ambition, a sense of grievance and unfulfilled promise. 

It is in the nature of politicians to sugar-coat moments of great challenge in the egalitarian language of sacrifice and heroism. To quote George Osborne’s hollow aphorism about austerity, “we’re all in this together”. Or as Del Boy once said: “Rodney, everything between you and I is split straight down the middle: 60-40”.

The problem comes, as plenty of Johnson’s predecessors have discovered, when wishful thinking collides with reality: Anthony Eden and Suez; Margaret Thatcher and the poll tax; Tony Blair and Iraq; David Cameron and Brexit. 

I read the other day that if only Johnson and his team can get the economy right, if Sunak can deliver a swoosh-shaped recovery, the Tories could be in power for another generation. It’s possible. But he will need to replace feel-good crooning with a deep understanding of how people live and what they want. My guess is that he will struggle. Realism is not his strong suit. 

Johnson’s other mantra is that international bodies are an impediment to Britain recovering its world role. Everything he does, everything that goes right or wrong, is seen through the prism of nationalism. This isn’t helpful because it isn’t real. 

True, unilateral action by national governments (mostly small ones) has been decisive in curbing the virus. But this is to draw the wrong conclusion from the events of the past year. The Covid pandemic, like all the 21st-century threats we face – cyberconflict, climate change, terrorism, inequality, the refugee crisis — can only be addressed by mobilising actors on an international scale. You can’t do that if you spend your time picking fights with your allies. 

In Britain Alone, a highly-readable history of Britain from the end of empire to Brexit (not recommended for Leavers of a fragile disposition), my erstwhile Financial Times colleague Philip Stephens quotes Sir Henry Tizard, the distinguished Whitehall scientist and confidante of Winston Churchill, in 1947. Referring to Britain, exhausted after its struggle for survival, slipping down the world rankings, Tizard said this: 

“We persist in regarding ourselves as a great power … only temporarily handicapped by economic difficulties. We are not a great power and never will be again. We are a great nation, but if we continue to behave like a great power, we shall soon cease to be a great nation.” Something to bear in mind as the Scottish parliamentary elections approach. 

Uninterrupted power is the dream of autocrats and fantasists. Power ebbs the instant you take it for granted. So does electoral popularity, when it dawns on voters — as it did with the MPs’ expenses scandal of 2009 — that you’re having a laugh at their expense. 

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