Conscience and parliament are two forces to constrain a prime minister, and Boris Johnson is troubled by neither. There have been leaders without scruple and ruling parties with large majorities before, but it is a while since Britain felt the combination. It will take some adjustment after the hung parliament years, when government had to scrimp for votes to legislate. That situation flattered opposition parties who felt their hands on a lever of power, albeit only to obstruct.
A majority of 80 takes the heat off Johnson to satisfy anyone but himself. He has already done the only thing most people will remember from his election manifesto: Britain has left the European Union. He can treat stray pledges left over from the campaign as disposable. The Tory leader’s record shows no fear of being caught in a blatant lie, and his supporters’ record of indulgence justifies that confidence.
Johnson also has an extra layer of impunity within his party. The majority is his more than it is Conservative. There are many reasons why former Labour strongholds in northern England, the Midlands and Wales went Tory last December. The foundations of the “red wall” had been rotting for years, but it was a Boris-branded wrecking ball that took it down. The MPs now sitting in those seats form a phalanx of loyal Johnsonites.
If there is any meaning to be eked out of the word “Johnsonism”, it will be found in geography before ideology. The man has no fixed beliefs except in his entitlement to rule, for which purpose he must strengthen his attachment to parts of the UK that were once inoculated against voting for people like him. Lacking any cultural affinity with those places, Johnson aims to cultivate loyalty by spending money there. That ambition is given doctrinal respectability under the rubric of “levelling up” – planting infrastructure to rehabilitate depressed regions, breaking with the Thatcherite method of letting them sink.
No Tory leader could explicitly badmouth the Iron Lady, but Johnson is flirting with heresy. His government bailed out Flybe, the failing regional airline, and it is taking privately run rail franchises into public ownership. These are not the actions of a party wedded to carnivorous market economics. Most Tories can swallow state meddling as political expedient, but not if it looks like fiscal profligacy – or, worse still, if it means taxes must rise to maintain budget discipline. They like new railways as long as they whizz at high speed through someone else’s backyard.
Johnson believes in a third way between orthodox Thatcherism, which mutated into hardline Brexitism, and the more paternalist, interventionist tradition sustained in recent years by Tory remainers, with Michael Heseltine as their figurehead. With typical solipsism, the current leader pitches himself as the incarnation of this hybrid idea. He calls himself a “Brexity Hezza”, which is the kind of thing the imagination can summon, but not for any practical purpose, like a chocolate onion.
For the time being, Johnson gets away with abstract verbiage and theatrical bombast. His technicolour flannel is the standard under which the Tories marched to power, and they aren’t going to abandon it yet. The prime minister is planning a cabinet reshuffle to reinforce his authority. The changes are unlikely to bring intellectual coherence to the government. Docile servants will be promoted. Room will be made for them by trashing those ministers with too few friends in the party to ever be dangerous.
Johnson certainly has little to fear from the official opposition. Labour’s leadership contest is defined by fear of defiling the corpse of an election result with anything like a proper postmortem. Corbynism is being embalmed for installation in the mausoleum of martyrs to public ingratitude, from where it will not disturb the government.
One lesson from history is that Tories are better than Labour at bringing down Tory prime ministers. Another lesson: in parliaments where the government has a large majority, serious disruption must come from within the ruling party. The opposition will vote reliably and impotently against whatever Johnson proposes, so the salient question is what might cause a few dozen Conservatives to rebel. Precedent suggests hardline Eurosceptics will break first, which is why Johnson sustains his anti-Brussels rhetoric at campaign pitch. Tory pro-Europeans were supine even when they had the numbers to harm him.
The EU itself will be less compliant and there are other players in this drama beyond Westminster. Scotland is not susceptible to Johnsonian wit. Nor is the global economy. The long victory parade cannot go on for ever. Even the cheerleading portion of the press has taken some exception to No 10’s new, Trumpesque practice of banishing unhelpful journalists from lobby briefings.
But external checks have limited effect when Britain’s constitution bestows the privileges of a medieval crown on a prime minister with a big majority. Johnson proved his readiness to abuse that power last year, when he tried to chasten an obstructive Commons with illegal dissolution. And now he has no need to arrogate the royal prerogative if he has submissive MPs to rubber-stamp his bills.
This is not a new flaw in the structures of democratic accountability but it is newly hazardous after the steadying voices of convention and protocol shouted themselves hoarse over Brexit, then fell silent. It is doubly troubling under a prime minister with no internal mechanism for moral restraint and every outward symptom of relishing the monarchical style that his office allows. History is clear on what must happen next. Such habits can be checked only by rebellion. A new generation of Tories will have to discover the independence of mind and insurrectionary spirit necessary to restore sovereignty to the House of Commons. Parliament’s the thing that has to serve as conscience for this king.
• Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
