There is an old Whitehall story, probably apocryphal, concerning a minister not especially well liked by his officials delivering an important policy speech to some august body. Not long into his oration he turned over a sheet of paper on which was written: “You’re on your own now matey.” The remainder of what he imagined would be a 20-minute speech was blank.
Watching Boris Johnson’s address to the CBI on Monday, I wondered if the same prank had been played on him as he rummaged through the pages looking for something, anything, to latch onto. Brilliantly he remembered he’d been to Peppa Pig World with his family at the weekend so he could talk about that. Not only was this an unlikely British success story arising from what seemed to be a fairly nondescript idea, but the peaceful, litter-free society dependent on mass transit was an appealing example for children to follow.
It was vintage Boris, the juxtaposition of the colloquial alongside the consequential to make a serious point. It was a technique he had honed over many years as a newspaper columnist and after dinner speaker. Once upon a time, it would have had his audience in stitches.
Yet it bombed, triggering another round of “what’s wrong with Boris?” head-shaking in the party and “we told you so” sniggering from his detractors. Not that it troubled the PM. That same evening he spoke at a dinner hosted by the Centre for Policy Studies, in partnership with the Telegraph, and was off, unapologetically, on his Peppa Pig riff once more.
His fascination with this anthropomorphic porker owes everything to the fact that he is the father of a young child, otherwise it would hardly feature in his life. But he would have used some other demotic allusion, maybe from his childhood, like Ivor the Engine to talk about HS2 or Captain Pugwash to extol the importance of Global Britain.
This is what Boris is and how he speaks. It is one reason why he has attracted such a large following in the country because he uses the language most people understand, not the ponderous, formulaic cant we are usually fed. But there comes a point when the public perception switches. It can do so almost overnight and then, afterwards, what were perceived as strengths, or at least accepted as endearing eccentricities, become the stick with which you are beaten, mercilessly.
So it was with Theresa May whose seriousness, stoicism, and stubbornness were considered just what was needed in the circumstances of the post-referendum crisis only to be seen later as fatal flaws that almost crashed the constitution. So it was with Gordon Brown, whose brooding solemnity was to begin with regarded as the antidote to Blairism before being recognised more widely as a character defect that those inside New Labour had identified years earlier.
John Major was less a victim of his personality traits than of circumstances, harried relentlessly by Eurosceptics for refusing a referendum over the Maastricht Treaty until in the end he resigned the Tory leadership, throwing down a gauntlet that only John Redwood picked up. But Major was weaker than Johnson in parliamentary terms. His majority had gone by 1996 and Labour under Blair was sometimes 25 points ahead in the polls. Even if the PM’s personal ratings have subsided recently, Labour has yet to open a significant and consistent poll lead.
Mr Johnson’s difficulty, of course, arises when that changes. His biggest political problem is not a predisposition to make references to a porcine cartoon or the shambolic goings-on inside No 10 but reneging on hitherto unambiguous pledges. Whether or not the U-turns on tax, HS2, social care, Owen Paterson, the Northern Ireland Protocol, freeports and the rest were the right things to do, they were not what he said he would do and voters (and MPs) dislike broken promises more than anything else.
Mr Johnson has been sustained for two years by the fact that he delivered Brexit as promised and was seen, by and large, to have handled the pandemic as well as anyone could faced with the same circumstances. This afforded him the latitude to be himself. But there comes a point where his once full tank of goodwill is left to run on fumes alone and we may well have reached it.
He is as aware of his political mortality as anyone. A few weeks ago while attending the G20 summit in Rome, he recounted to fellow heads of government his memories of another visit to the city 31 years earlier. On the exact same day, October 29, Margaret Thatcher was ambushed at a European Council in the Italian capital by her fellow Europeans determined to press ahead with monetary union. I was in Rome that weekend covering the meeting as this newspaper’s political correspondent in tandem with our Brussels-based reporter, one Boris Johnson.
The outcome had a profound impact on his already jaundiced view of the European project, now irredeemably on course to introduce the euro and lay the foundations for the EU. It also set in train a series of tumultuous events that brought about Mrs T’s downfall. She returned to London to denounce the Rome decision and within a month she was gone, toppled by her own party – not because of her views on Europe, even if they triggered the leadership challenge, but because her MPs no longer saw her as a winner. They had just lost the Eastbourne by-election, watching in horror as a 16,000 majority was overturned.
Once the ground begins to move beneath the leader’s feet it is hard to stop it becoming an earthquake. Someone in Downing Street has even taken to briefing the BBC that “it’s not working under Boris” while, on the backbenches, emboldened MPs walk through the division lobbies in opposition to their own Government with almost daily regularity.
When the writing is on the wall, the Conservative Party can be ruthless. It is an unsentimental vehicle for holding on to power. If its MPs can throw out their most successful post-war leader, who had a Commons majority of 102 and was regarded at the time as the world’s towering democratic figure, they can get rid of anyone. The end, when it comes, will be swift and brutal.
