When Boris Johnson became prime minister, he inherited a parliamentary party that was badly divided: between supporters and opponents of Brexit, between a thousand different visions of what Brexit meant, and between MPs who thought he lacked the necessary qualities to be prime minister and those who thought he was a natural-born winner and their only hope of defeating Jeremy Corbyn.
A year later and all those divisions have been healed, after a fashion. There are no Conservative Remainers any more; more importantly, everyone accepts that, in the Conservative party at least, Brexit means leaving not only the political project of the European Union, but the single market of the European Economic Area and the common customs zone that extends as far as Turkey.
Unity, too, extends to perceptions of the man at the top: the Conservative party is no longer divided between those who believe Johnson to be an election winner and those who fear that he lacks the necessary qualities to be prime minister. Everyone knows him to be a winner, but fears that when the history books are written his time in office will have little to distinguish it.
One participant complains that the problem is that the prime minister both communicates in, and is easily led by, platitudes. “We must close the gap between the north and the south,” says one participant. Yes, yes, we must, the prime minister agrees enthusiastically. But taxes must be kept as low as possible, pipes up another. Yes, yes, we can’t have any tax rises, Johnson agrees. And the NHS, that needs to be fully funded, pipes up a third. Fully funded, fully funded, comes the response from the man in Downing Street. But debt, we have to keep that under control, warns a fourth, and again the PM agrees.
The meeting breaks up and the machinery of the civil service and ministers are left with the impossible task of increasing NHS funding, closing the gap between the north and the south, keeping taxes low and reducing debt over the course of the parliament. The incoherence has a golden thread: the contradictory positions that the government has arrived at are all popular. Johnson, picked not because a majority of MPs thought he would distinguish himself in Downing Street but because they thought he would at least keep Corbyn out of it, has assembled a team of people whose CVs are heavy with words such as “won” and “election” and low on terms such as “implemented” or “managed”.
Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s chief strategist, is no exception. He is undoubtedly an electoral strategist of considerable ability, but his record of successfully implementing policies is less stellar. The education policies of Michael Gove have seen significant improvements in English and maths, but they built on, rather than tore up, the work of the Labour government that went before. It’s less clear that Cummingsism can achieve significant change from a standing start.
The dominance of election winners over administrators contributes to the feeling that this is a new government, rather than a continuation of a decade in power. What usually happens to parties in power is that they shed talented communicators and political street fighters and acquire able but dull ministers and thoughtful wonks. The difference is perhaps best illustrated by the shadow cabinets of Tony Blair and Ed Miliband. Blair’s shadow cabinet were masters at the art of opposition, of smelling out a weakness in a government policy and running with it, but they had little to no experience of life in office and one of Blair’s early tasks in office was winnowing out the ones who were unable to make the transition. Miliband’s shadow cabinet was one of the most experienced oppositions in recent times, but they struggled to adjust to life outside government, one reason why they never got to apply their experience with a return to office.
But the trend is a cross-party one. Margaret Thatcher entered office a supreme reader of the public mood and lost power because she lost sight of the fact that the poll tax was hated. Theresa May negotiated a Brexit deal that polls consistently showed to be popular once you explained what was in it, but then proved incapable of explaining it to anyone, least of all her own MPs.
The prime minister is fond of joking that he was at his most popular with the public when they believed he was on the brink of death, but the difficult truth is that MPs and civil servants at least know what the government’s position on the coronavirus is: they’re against it. It has also rendered some of the government’s more irreconcilable promises, on taxes and debt, wholly redundant thanks to the extraordinary borrowing the government has had to embark on.
But the downturn also exposes the lack of a grip on government or, indeed, any real governing philosophy beyond “if it’s popular, we’ll promise it”. The coronavirus recession is the result, yes, in part of the government-ordered lockdown on 23 March, but the blow to demand began, in this country as across Europe, the moment that photographs of overwhelmed Italian hospitals hit the news. Individuals and businesses sensibly reduced their social contacts and moved to home working in order to reduce their exposure to the virus.
While some of those changes in behaviour will unravel when either palliative treatments or a vaccine render the coronavirus non-lethal, not all of them will. Business leaders, looking at workplaces that have been no less productive, are planning a future in which office estates are shrunk to a handful of desks for new starters and trainees and a handful of executive suites. The result will have painful consequences for the industries that have arisen to service workplaces in which workers head to work five days a week for most of the year.
A normal Conservative government would have a simple response – to allow the market to do its thing and for new jobs to be created servicing the needs and desires of hybrid workers. Even with suppressed demand, some jobs are being created in new industries servicing home workers and there is no reason to believe that the same process won’t happen this time.
But instead, Johnson’s government is handing out vouchers to encourage people back to restaurants in the middle of a pandemic and trying to cajole businesses to bring an end to home working in order to save Pret a Manger. The government’s largesse risks adding to the country’s debt pile and would be better spent on providing support and security to the unemployed.
Johnson’s strength is that he is a winner, but because he has no great ideological project he has no group of MPs who will rally round in order to protect the project, as most prime ministers do. If things go wrong, his reign could come to an abrupt end.
Of course, that might not happen. Despite everything, Johnson still retains the central commodity that made him so appealing to Conservative MPs in the first place: he is a winner. His party enjoys a healthy lead in the opinion polls over Labour, albeit one that is much reduced from its height during the early days of the pandemic. That reality is one reason why Downing Street doesn’t share the depressive account of its first year in office that many backbench MPs do.
Who’s right? There are two ways to read the polls. The first is that the government has bungled its handling of the coronavirus outbreak by locking down too late, is betraying a lack of economic sense in its approach to unlocking, has failed to come up with a convincing attack line against Labour’s new leader, Keir Starmer – yet it still can’t lose. Sharpen up administratively, manage the exit from lockdown right or simply get lucky with a vaccine and things will turn around.
The other is that the gap between the Conservatives and Labour is a lagging indicator – that Starmer’s own popularity, and the lack of grip, focus or competence at the top of government will eventually make themselves felt on the government’s overall popularity. Even if the government is bailed out by a scientific breakthrough, its underlying problems will eventually cause it to collapse and fail long before the next election.
Which of those analyses is right will ultimately shape Johnson’s second year in office – and the eventual ending to the prime minister’s political story.
• Stephen Bush is the political editor of the New Statesman
