In the thinned ranks of Conservative MPs who nonetheless assist Boris Johnson, few think about him a person of honour. Maybe none. Their loyalty can’t be composed of ethical inspiration or shared precept, because the prime minister believes solely in his entitlement to dwell in Downing Avenue. Principally it's concern of shedding present privileges and hope of gaining new ones.
Some MPs have been promised promotion; others cling to ministerial jobs that will by no means have been accessible if competence had been the recruitment criterion.
Coverage is just not absent from the transaction. A wounded prime minister with out convictions and determined for mates is engaging to ideologues whose conditional backing could be wielded as a veto over the federal government’s agenda. That's the reason there was a U-turn final month over an anti-obesity plan that will have banned some junk meals promoting and grocery store offers. MPs who hated the infringement of market freedoms threatened Johnson with letters of no confidence. He yielded.
This explains additionally why 22 Conservative donors, accountable for greater than £18m in previous contributions to celebration coffers, signed a letter providing “unwavering assist” to the incumbent chief. A person totally on the hook to his political collectors is reliably biddable.
After which there's Europe, ever current in Tory feuds. It's the outdated infidelity, unmentioned within the bickering stage of a marital tiff, that will get blurted out when tempers flare. Within the hours earlier than Monday’s confidence vote, Nadine Dorries, the tradition secretary, declared that Johnson’s critics had been disgruntled remainers. Jacob Rees-Mogg, the cupboard’s official groomer of Eurosceptic pastime horses, denounced the poll as a plot “to undermine the Brexit referendum”.
That's nonsense as an outline of Tories who oppose the prime minister. Their quantity contains loads of hardline leavers. However as a premonition of the trauma that Johnson’s departure will sooner or later inflict on the Conservative celebration, it's proper to invoke Brexit. Sacking prime ministers calls their legacies into query. That doesn’t imply that Tories will all of the sudden begin pining for misplaced intimacies with Brussels, however new management will reopen the opportunity of a relationship primarily based on diplomacy as a substitute of threats, information as a substitute of fictions.
In Tory mythology, Johnson introduced the celebration again from the brink of annihilation in 2019 by getting a Brexit deal. He succeeded the place Theresa Could had failed and was rewarded with a landslide election victory. What truly occurred is that Johnson hit the identical negotiating deadlock as Could – the difficulty of the Northern Eire border – however resolved it in a different way. Whereas Could had struggled to search out compromises that will function in actuality, her successor allotted with that onerous obligation, releasing himself to do a deal within the realm of Brexit fantasy. He signed issues with out desiring to implement them, then lied about their contents.
The present menace to enact a regulation that will override the Northern Eire protocol quantities to an admission that the unique deal was a foul one in spite of everything. Fixing it requires a return to the quagmire from which Johnson’s election was speculated to be the discharge. The monument the place Tory MPs pay tribute to their chief’s document – Boris rampant over Brussels – will sooner or later have to come back down.
It's hardly stunning that Rees-Mogg and mates wish to defer that second, and never simply because a alternative will most likely find yourself wanting extra like Could’s deal. To ponder the succession in any respect is to ask what course the Conservative celebration ought to take subsequent, which is an uncomfortable query after years in deviation from financial, diplomatic and strategic rationality.
Johnson loyalists complain that the rebels can not agree on an alternate chief; that not one of the potential successors has superstar heft to rival the incumbent. What they imply is that nobody can repeat the trick of profitable over conventional Labour supporters in these fabled “pink wall” seats in northern England and the Midlands, whereas additionally holding the affections of a traditional Conservative base within the south.
The flaw in that defence is that Johnson himself exhibits little prospect of repeating the trick, which was as a lot a operate of Jeremy Corbyn repelling voters because it was proof of a magnetic “Boris impact”. Opinion polls, council ballots and byelections recommend there are loads of demagnetised seats accessible to a much less poisonous Labour chief.
The attraction to electoral alchemy that solely Johnson can carry out is born of concern that Britain doesn’t actually wish to purchase what the Conservative celebration is promoting, besides when it has a gifted fraudster on the gross sales counter. It's a recognition that the Tory majority is brittle, not least as a result of it's glued along with votes which may have gone to Nigel Farage’s Brexit celebration if he hadn’t withdrawn candidates from 317 Conservative-held seats. Farage had tormented the Tories for not less than a decade previous to that ceasefire.
Brexit merged two antithetical forces: a Conservative celebration that historically convenes round pillars of the British institution and a demagogic rebellion that defines itself as a scourge of the institution. Johnson’s campaigning expertise was to signify each issues directly. Nevertheless it was an phantasm, a spell that may’t be recast as soon as damaged. No surprise so many Tory MPs are disoriented and alarmed. They know Johnson is an issue, but in addition that eradicating him will expose how a lot deeper the issue goes. They remade their celebration within the picture of a frontrunner with out conscience, integrity or values past the determined pursuit of energy. So that they don’t like this disreputable “Boris” character that they now see in entrance of them? They're wanting within the mirror.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
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