Beware what you wish for

For proof of how dangerous Boris Johnson’s leadership has become, consider this: public health policy is now merely a subplot in the horrendous drama engulfing the Conservative party. Last weekend, as government advisers urged caution over Covid restrictions, the prime minister’s allies suggested that the imminent lifting of England’s remaining curbs would launch his fightback. But an unnamed minister cited in the Spectator thought that binning the last rules could neatly coincide with the prime minister’s resignation. This, it was said, would give him an opportunity to claim a huge job had been done and “depart with dignity”.

But as with most of what we are hearing from senior Tories, the suggestion seemed to have another meaning: the curtain falling on a period of interventionist, bigspending government, so normal Tory service can be resumed.

The prime minister’s disgrace is entirely down to events in Downing Street, the dreadful symbolism of so many elements of the story, and an administration mired in arrogance, deceit and an awful absence of seriousness – a condition now to be cured by a staff-blaming effort named “Operation Save Big Dog”.

But in the surrounding mood music, there are also ideological elements. Over the past two years, as the Treasury funded people’s wages, austerity diminished as a political priority, and the state’s reach increased to an extent unseen outside wartime, there has been a lot of speculation about how those changes would permanently

Brexit unsettled the party’s suburban heartland, which is not just full of remainers

alter politics. For the Tories, such a shift would have gone hand-inhand with what Johnson embraced, albeit in his usual half-arsed way: his embryonic “levelling up” drive, a readiness to put up taxes, the flexing of the state’s muscles in pursuit of net zero carbon emissions. But with the prime minister seemingly broken and potential successors on less-than-subtle manoeuvres, the Covid crisis seems to have sent terrified Tories back to their old beliefs – in small government, untrammelled business and the idea that even well-intentioned spending always leads to disaster.

In December, Westminster journalists were picking up anxiety among Conservative MPs about a “Covid state”, and the risk of Johnson creating a “high-tax, highspending, high-inflation country”. Steve Baker, the de facto leader of the Brexit backbench hardcore, thinks that “today’s Conservative party is in the wrong place and heading in the opposite direction of Conservatism”.

As ever, a reliable indicator of Tory restlessness is how often people mention Margaret Thatcher. The frontrunners for Johnson’s job are routinely seen as inheritors of her mantle. According to the Economist, Rishi Sunak “has the same ingrained enthusiasm for balancing budgets and limiting expenditure as the grocer’s daughter had”. Liz Truss seems ecstatically happy to give the impression of someone starring in a school play about the blessed Margaret, and makes speeches about the dangers of “inexorably growing the size of the state”, as opposed to the wonders of “free trade and free enterprise”.

Is this what 2022 really demands? Thatcherism may still define the Tory soul, yet the revolution was completed: there are no powerful unions to tame, no utilities to privatise, no big bang to detonate in the City, and not much else to deregulate. Some Conservatives would like to finally subject the NHS to the disciplines of profit and loss, but to do so would risk political calamity and more sensible Tories long ago realised that austerity had already gone way too far.

The reason that there have been sporadic Tory attempts to move away from the politics of the free market – the fitful stirrings of “Red Toryism”, the tilts in that direction under both Johnson and Theresa May – is because that approach has long since run out of road. Certainly, if whoever succeeds Johnson wants to sustain the electoral coalition that delivered victory two years ago, the need for different thinking should be self-evident. Nevertheless, the self-styled inheritors of Thatcherism have always wanted to keep the revolution going, and their furious zeal has long since unhinged Conservative politics. In the absence of a big, disruptive Thatcheresque project, Brexit moved from the political fringes to the Tory mainstream and unsettled the party’s relationship with many of its old suburban heartlands, which are not just full of remainers but increasingly liberal and left-leaning.

In the hands of Baker and co, Thatcher’s legacy has been reduced to a puritanical animus that leads people to endlessly scent betrayal and plot against the people at the top. The Tories may soon be on to their seventh leader in 20 years. This, perhaps, is what happens when a party simply doesn’t know what to do with itself.

Among people on the left, there is a righteous relish about the prospect of Johnson’s departure. But this is a moment replete with both hope and danger. Even if he goes, it could be nearly two-and-a-half years until another general election. If the next occupant of Downing Street attempts the full-blown return of Tory ideas that have already torn Britain apart, could the weary public mood after Brexit and Covid allow them to succeed? Or will something so clearly out of step with its time soon fail? Whenever post-Johnson politics arrives, these will be its defining questions.