Amid the splendour of Blenheim Palace, west Oxfordshire, an area we might reasonably describe as David Cameron’s manor, Boris Johnson will on Friday night weave his spell. The mayor of London is promoting his new book – a thing he rattled off to suppress the ennui of running the capital – The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History.
Johnson’s theme is leadership, and as he visits the great man’s birthplace, he considers two leaders. One returned from exile to save the nation in its darkest hour. The other, more contemporary, will arrive dramatically, on a zip wire perhaps, to save the Conservative party. The nation’s salvation will be as much a certainty as night following day.
Johnson, a historian and certainly a wily strategist, takes the leadership of a supreme, uniquely gifted individual as his theme with good reason. For it is the foundation stone upon which the legend of Churchill sits, in the minds of Tories especially. But it goes wider than that. Churchill is also the exemplar for political leadership in the minds of the wider electorate.
Illiberal and a heavy drinker he may have been, but Churchill was steadfast when others wavered. He radiated resolution, traded on authenticity. None has engineered that authenticity with such flair and precision. None, except for Boris Johnson. Certainly Cameron fails the authenticity test. He knows it. Johnson knows it. Thus his leadership is always vulnerable.
And viewed through this prism, his problem is getting worse. The prime minster is beset. He cannot be what he is, a centre-right Tory, pragmatic, mildly liberal. He is forced to nip and tuck just to keep the opposition at bay, Ukip at bay, his own party at manageable distance.
Politics is positioning, and daily we see Cameron struggling with his persona as a leader. Here is a man whose pitch to the public was that he is non-ideological, clear-eyed and sensible, now bobbing and weaving into ever more absurd positions just to keep himself relevant. He is afraid of the shadows at the window, frightened by the knocks from the basement. He has flipped and flopped so much to preserve his leadership that he doesn’t know who he is.
Cameron as was would have taken a more enlightened view on social policy. Instead we have moved from hug-a-hoodie to eye-watering numbers being sent to prison during his premiership. He would have fought for a sustainable position on Europe. Instead he is reduced to shaking his fist at the European mainland for the benefit of his own Eurosceptics and Ukip defectors, and making promises he cannot keep.
A Cameron true to himself would more honestly reflect the capitalist market view of migration – indeed his own Treasury’s view of migration as being essential to a healthy economy. Instead he jostles other leaders in the squalid race to see which can better exploit community anxiety. It isn’t just that he has lost his compass. He seems to have forgotten that he once held one in his hand.
On Thursday we learned of the Conservative suppression of a report which indicated that a punitive approach on drugs is no more likely to reduce harm that a liberal one. Nip-tuck Cameron can’t endorse such a report because swaths of his turbulent right exult in the war on drugs. David Cameron as was knew better. Time for fresh thinking, he said in 2002. “We need to get away from entrenched positions and try to reduce the harm that drugs do both to users and society at large.”
Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Perhaps the problem is the Churchill model itself; this idea that every four years a single heroic leader will be moulded out of the Churchill template. The bar is set absurdly high. Ed Miliband can’t reach it. He can present as he does; a sharp, clever, thoughtful, well-meaning guy who might, given the levers of power, govern effectively. But the way he might lead, if he is true to himself, is light years away from the messianic Churchillian template we seem to demand.
The perpetual search for that individual, cast from that mould is endlessly problematic. Blair – from the outset presidential – fitted the bill, Gordon Brown never did. With their initial attempt at positioning – Not Flash, Just Gordon – Labour’s image makers tried to address that, but the public wasn’t buying it.
Inevitably this yearning is exploited. There is Farage as pseudo-Churchill, unencumbered by scruple, marshalling the anti-migrant forces at Dover and the anti-EU battalions in Brussels. And then there is Boris Johnson himself, unable to run London with even a glimmer of vision or distinction, and yet – by dint of personality – portrayed (by himself) as Red Adair with a blond mop; ready to rescue party and country.
Cameron seems unable to cope with all of this. As next May approaches, he has Boris and a book to remind him of his failings. Our leaders are all prisoners of the template; but deep into his premiership, Cameron seems to be suffering more than most.
The French revolutionary journalist François-Noël Babeuf describes the route to his salvation. Better that we should die on our feet, he said, than live on our knees.
•This article was amended on 7 November 2014 to correct the spelling of François-Noël Babeuf’s surname.
