Labour's target should be the Tory party, not Johnson's credibility
Boris Johnson was crowned Conservative leader by MPs who knew he was lazy, unprincipled, and incompetent, a charlatan driven by one cause: himself. But there was a greater consideration than his suitability for high office, and that was his effectiveness as an antidote to the twin menaces of Faragism and Corbynism. If they did not recoup their electoral losses to the Brexit party, and disillusioned remainers flocked back to the Labour fold, Toryism faced an existential crisis that might parachute Jeremy Corbyn into No 10.
Johnson was the panic button, to be pressed only in the direst of political emergencies. Uniquely, of any viable Tory candidate, Johnson met the challenge of the age of populism, and his Teflon qualities allowed him to revise Brexit red lines – throwing his unionist allies into the Irish Sea – to secure a deal that his supporters could make-believe would cause Brussels to cave.
The Tories are the world’s most successful electoral force in large part because their ruthlessness vastly exceeds their sentimentality. Margaret Thatcher led her party to three successive, thumping wins, overturned Britain’s postwar social democratic order, smashed the trade unions and forced her opponents to capitulate to key tenets of her philosophy.
Thank you very much, said her parliamentary party three years after her 1987 landslide victory, but now you must go because you have outlived your usefulness and become a menace to our prospects. Some wept as they betrayed her, and the price was a fratricidal Tory split that lasted for a generation; but it was a tolerable price for routing Neil Kinnock’s Labour party. Unlike Johnson, Thatcher was respected, admired and indeed loved by her party. The sole observable skill of our present incumbent is that he is an eccentric and successful campaigner.
Which brings us to the danger of the present moment, in which Boris Johnson absorbs the blame for a national catastrophe for which his party is collectively responsible. After Theresa May – whose MPs once called her “Mummy” when she appeared master of all before her – self-detonated with the 2017 snap election, George Osborne described her as a “dead woman walking”. Yet her MPs preserved her zombie premiership for another two years, because she retained a vital role: let the coming inferno incinerate her career, then start afresh.
Today’s Conservative parliamentarians are aware that Johnson is a byword for shambolic; and while the Brexit culture wars currently appear to offer a firewall – their electoral floor remains a stubborn 40% – the worst death toll and recession in Europe are eroding Johnson’s charismatic selling point, his can-do optimism.
Keir Starmer’s Labour party has made competence their signature dividing line between them and the Tory administration. It’s a strategy that has historical precedent. Back in 1992, Labour collected rich political dividends after Britain crashed out of the European exchange rate mechanism despite having supported the country’s entry. Why not again offer no distinctive alternatives to the Tory pandemic response, pin the disaster on Johnson’s incompetence and win by default?
The danger lies in underestimating Tory ruthlessness. The Johnson reboot targeted two key Tory weaknesses – the loss of its leave flank, and disillusionment with a decade of austerity – by promising a harder Brexit and targeted spending announcements in three distinctively popular areas: the NHS, schools and police. If Johnson is an obvious long-term liability – and if he has truly tired of the position he spent a lifetime craving, as the rightwing press speculate – then, like his predecessor, he will be surely kept in place until the worst is over and then disposed of.
Should his reputation for competent economic management survive the next six months of restrictions, Rishi Sunak would be a natural candidate to replace Johnson. If he is savvy, he will replicate his predecessor’s trick of pretending to head an entirely new government that breaks definitively with the past, remorselessly jettisoning those most associated with the pandemic – so long Matt Hancock, and thanks for all the car-crash interviews! The first person of colour as prime minister would offer a convincing story of change.
Faced with a new government, Labour would be forced to pivot from their current strategy. But there is another more compelling and honest dividing line. Britain was plunged into the abyss not by incompetence but by ideology. Lockdown was fatally delayed in a misguided attempt to protect business interests, ensuring both a deadlier outbreak and a greater economic hit, as consumer confidence dropped. The disastrously premature drive to force people back to the office – “or risk losing your job”, as the Telegraph put it exactly four weeks ago – put the interests of corporate property owners ahead of public health and again the economy.
There was a lack of personal protective equipment because years of cuts meant stockpiles had diminished. Outsourcing led to a collapsed trace-and-test system, a disaster that should be attributed not to incompetence but to valuing private profit over the building of public infrastructure. As coronavirus restrictions are reimposed, Sunak’s soon to be withdrawn support measures – potential U-turns notwithstanding – will sacrifice livelihoods on the altar of Tory anti-state ideology.
While incompetence can be pinned on to one disposable man, ideology is harder to scrub away. If unemployment increases and we see a Rishi Sunak recession, responsibility should be rooted in the very political nature of the Conservative party, not the maladroitness of one particular administration. Labour should fear the two “Rs” that have long preserved Tory hegemony – ruthlessness and reinvention. Starmer is competence incarnate; but, when Johnson is shuffled off without remorse, that may not be enough.
• Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
