A Legacy of Discord: Boris Johnson in Power

Johnson’s legacy

Prime ministers very often have complex, and for a time uncertain political legacies. The same will be the case for Boris Johnson. There is much, as he leaves office, that we don’t know. We don’t know if the Conservative electoral coalition put together in 2019 will last. Nor do we know whether ongoing issues with Johnson’s Brexit deal can be quickly resolved by his successor. We don’t know what the COVID public inquiry will discover and conclude about the government’s pandemic response – though a parliamentary committee has already noted some ‘successes and failures’. We don’t know whether, in ten years’ time, plans for ‘levelling up’ will have provided any of the ‘opportunity’ Johnson spoke so much about as Prime Minister.

In part, of course, this uncertainty about Johnson’s longer-term legacy, has been caused by a more immediate and obvious aspect of his record: he is leaving office earlier than anyone would have expected after winning an 80-seat majority in 2019, and amid discord, having resigned only in the face of an extraordinary disintegration of his government. In the days prior to Johnson’s resignation, his spokesperson was asked by the media whether they were going to tell the truth that day after a series of revelations concerning Johnson’s knowledge of allegations of sexual misconduct against Conservative MP Chris Pincher, who had earlier resigned from government after an allegation of groping two men at the Carlton Club in London. This was not the first time that Johnson’s relationship with the facts was queried. The accounts of lockdown parties in Downing Street that had emerged over weeks and months – and resulted in the issuing of fixed penalty notices – often changed.

In this context, and recognising the multitude of possible avenues, we can only sketch out some of Johnson’s legacy. It starts, as it ended for David Cameron and Theresa May, with Brexit, and the deal Johnson agreed to ‘get Brexit done’. In addition, the ideological confusion within the Conservative Party must, at least in part, be considered a product of Johnson’s tenure. Finally, there is – for want of a better term - his political style and way of doing politics. Is Johnson a ‘difficult act to follow’ or, like so many politicians, will we collectively – and swiftly – forget much of what has made him such a controversial figure? During the early stages of the Conservative leadership contest, aside from ‘delivering’ Brexit, there seemed to be a preference to forget. None of the five Tory leadership candidates in an ITV debate in late July said that they would appoint Johnson to their cabinet.

In little over a year after The Times reported that Johnson wanted to be Prime Minister for a decade, he was forced to quit. On the day parliament entered recess this summer, the parliamentary inquiry into whether Johnson misled the House over the ‘partygate’ Downing Street gatherings was in the news – one of the underlying reasons that his leadership unravelled.

A Brexit the Conservatives would tolerate

‘Do not believe,’ Boris Johnson told a fringe meeting at the 2018 Conservative Party Conference, ‘that we can somehow get it wrong now and fix it later.’ He was talking about Brexit, and Theresa May’s proposals for exiting the EU. He had resigned as Foreign Secretary a couple of months before, over those same proposals. Yet, his alternative at that point always seemed unclear.

Jump forward to the 2019 General Election campaign and there were metaphors aplenty – the ‘oven-ready’ Brexit deal – but only vague assurances on important parts of the detail. With the Northern Ireland Protocol, his replacement for May’s ‘backstop’ designed to ensure no ‘hard’ border on the island of Ireland, Johnson seemed to do what he had warned against in 2018 – signing up to something, and then trying to fix it later. At the time of writing, the diplomatic impasse (principally over checks on goods entering NI from the rest of the UK) between the UK and the EU remains, and a Northern Ireland Protocol Bill – providing ministers with powers to disapply parts of the Protocol – is being considered by Parliament. Speaking about that Bill, and the political situation in Northern Ireland, Johnson’s predecessor Theresa May recently warned that the Bill would ‘diminish the standing of the United Kingdom in the eyes of the world’. This is, rather obviously, the most immediate problem for the next prime minister when it comes to Brexit.

Stepping back and viewing Brexit over the longer period of Johnson’s involvement, from his decision to join Vote Leave in 2016, to his more recent decision-making as Prime Minister, there is a disjuncture between seeing Brexit as a personal political victory for Johnson – something Conservative leadership candidates were happy to repeat after his resignation – and recognising the dilemmas and problems that are impossible to ignore. Praising Johnson for having been the person to finally ‘get Brexit done’ sits uneasily with concerns about how to make the Brexit deal work in practice – the NI Protocol being the most pressing example. That he always saw the big Brexit picture, but not the finer detail feels like a fair criticism – though even then, did he ever really know what the ‘big picture’ needed to be after Britain’s vote to leave? After becoming Prime Minister, Johnson delivered the promise of a Brexit deal the parliamentary Conservative Party was prepared to tolerate. There is a ‘conservative’ case for that decision – the argument being that if a ‘hard’ Brexit was the only thing Conservative parliamentarians would accept, and the alternative was further delay, and potentially a second referendum, going for the only Brexit available was the conservative thing to do. But the risks – and consequences – of that judgement are clear to see. This will forever be ‘Johnson’s Brexit deal’ – but as he leaves office, only the electoral effect of Brexit in the 2019 General Election (a formidable one) is clear; the substance of Brexit remains clouded and far from ‘done’.

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How well is Boris Johnson doing as Prime Minster

Conservatism

The cost of living crisis, following the immense upheaval of the pandemic, is a big challenge for the government – and one that, both prior to Johnson’s resignation and since, has been a source of ideological disagreement. In his letter to the Prime Minister resigning as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak wrote that while preparing for a joint intervention with Johnson on the economy, it had ‘become clear to me that our approaches are fundamentally too different’. Following Sunak’s exit from the Cabinet, differences over tax policy and cost of living measures were aired by various politicians. The contest to be the next Conservative leader was notable, within hours, for significant commitments to reduce taxes from some, and different approaches on how to pay for them. It quickly descended into accusations of ‘fantasy’ economics, and a stretching of the word ‘socialist’ to a description devoid of any meaning at all: Jacob Rees Mogg reportedly referred to Sunak as the ‘socialist Chancellor’. Sunak in turn – while being criticised for supposedly ‘big state’ tax rises – suggested Truss’s plan for borrowing to fund tax cuts was ‘socialism’.

Yet this divergent set of priorities was not a startling development – for some time, the Conservative Party has looked uncertain about how to respond to the rising cost of living, and about how Johnson’s levelling up pledge should be defined within contemporary British Conservatism. As many academics have observed over the years, Conservatism is a dynamic and changeable ideology. The last 15 years, 12 of them in office, has seen many changes. Cameron’s ‘modernisation’ sought to change his party’s emphasis, yet he swiftly shifted to familiar austerity in response to the financial crisis and public spending. Following Brexit, Theresa May seemed uncertain how far to change again, while Johnson’s commitment to more spending – before and after the pandemic – began to undo some of the cuts that took effect after 2010. There was some continuity, of course, from the ‘Northern Powerhouse’ to levelling-up, yet the latter in particular requires significant investment, some of which – in the government’s White Paper - remained a bit unclear. Whether levelling-up continues, even in a different form, is a topic of debate amongst political commentators. There is, of course, nothing inherently bad in a political party actively debating its objectives – it can demonstrate confidence, and even crowd out the opposition, if conducted sufficiently seriously. The key question, following Johnson, is whether new leadership brings clarity regarding the party’s ideology. At the time of writing, the legacy of discord seemed more observable than any unity around shared ideas.

The leadership of ‘Boris’

Both the historian Robert Saunders and the political scientist Tim Bale, have made convincing cases for seeing Johnson’s leadership as part of a longer Conservative story, both in terms of his ‘populist’ style and policy direction (in some areas). In Bale’s words, Johnson may have ‘accelerated’ parts of this change, but he ‘didn’t kickstart’ it – for example, the Conservatives had campaigned, after 1997, on ground that Vote Leave focused on too. Johnson has drawn on his own interpretations of the party’s traditions, and traditions are shaped by people and their responses to political events.

The leadership of ‘Boris’ had multiple meanings. The picture of the then London Mayor taken during the 2012 Olympics, dangling in the air in Victoria Park, East London, following a zip-wire malfunction speaks to a couple of those meanings. For some, this was a ridiculous image: the two union jacks waving on the zip-line to, apparently, nowhere. For others, it was classic Boris, the sort of thing most politicians would be constantly reminded of but not Johnson. He could get away with it.

‘Boosterism’ was another word sometimes associated with Johnson’s leadership, again speaking to a powerful part of what became the ‘Boris myth’. That somehow he would ‘get things done’, through some investment and a lot of willpower. The alternative meaning, however, was also ever-present – was it all rhetoric? As the public searched for outcomes, would the rhetoric look increasingly empty? The Churchill Myths, by Steven Fielding, Bill Schwarz and Richard Toye includes discussion of Johnson’s literary treatment of Winston Churchill, including how Johnson’s reading of Churchill can be seen in part as a vision of the leader Johnson wanted to be. Churchill is depicted as a ‘man of destiny’ – taking charge, making things happen, because leaders can. The sense that one can will their way to a better future – something which contributed to the tenor, arguably, of Johnson’s leadership – may well still prove a tempting political trick, and so form a part of his political legacy within the Conservative Party. Certainly, Liz Truss has placed great emphasis on ‘getting things done’ – an orientation very much drawn from the ‘Boris playbook’.

Conclusion

Boris Johnson’s political legacy is by definition only now beginning to take shape. There are elements of it that are already clear, though, from Brexit to the succession of scandals that forced him out of Downing Street. He leaves office amid discord, with a governing party uncertain about its ideological direction, and without an obvious successor to bring clarity and unity. After a 2021 that saw the party register sizeable poll leads over Labour, and a win in the Hartlepool by-election, the Conservatives now trail Labour and have lost a succession of by-elections. The much-discussed ‘walls’ – red, blue – are all subject to commentary on their relative strength and durability. The next Conservative leader’s challenge is to turn this around electorally, provide ideological clarity and leadership, and unite an apparently divided team. The Conservative Party, with more than a decade in office, finds itself seeking reinvention once again.