What follows is all extremely relative, all highly conditional, and there is no guarantee that any of it will be sustained in the future, even if it is correct in the first place. But here’s the thing to note: as we near the close of what one Conservative MP rightly called “a torrid year” for the country in the Commons today, Boris Johnson is moving towards a style of government that will be to his party’s advantage and, in some ways, to that of the country too.
That’s because there are signs – only signs, but a number of them all the same – that a somewhat less confrontational form of UK governance is beginning to take shape. Where it may lead, if and when life begins to return to some sort of normality in 2021, is tricky to predict. But if this very tentative reading of the government is even half right, the consequences may be influential for Johnson, for his party and within British politics into 2021 and beyond.
The enormous conditionality of this revisionist proposition needs to be clear. Any snorts of disagreement, and worse, as some readers sense a blurring of the anti-Johnson case with which many of us – myself often included – are most comfortable are understandable. Yet to make this case is not to trivialise the Johnson government’s responsibility. Over the coming weeks hundreds more will die avoidable deaths in the Covid pandemic and Britain will complete a historic act of self-harm by leaving, utterly mistakenly, the European Union. He owns these tragedies.
The essential claim here is that the departure of Dominic Cummings from 10 Downing Street in November has in fact marked a watershed moment. The post-Cummings era has been signalled in recent days by several things. Almost all of them have involved, sometimes after the all too familiar false starts and mixed messages that have been the government’s stock in trade, a discernible but uneven retreat from the top-down No 10 centralism associated with Cummings.
There is now, for example, a greater readiness to negotiate Covid policy with the devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. There is also an enhanced willingness to reason more sensibly with local authorities in England over tiering allocations. Only this week, the government’s latest U-turn – a hugely important one in party and social policy terms – marked a preparedness to think again on the planning and housing measures that Cummings, a hater of localism, wanted to drive through. And if Ursula von der Leyen is to be believed – which she is – there has also been a recognition that some kind of Brexit trade deal is better for the country than none.
There are, of course, exceptions. Gavin Williamson’s peremptory crackdown on local authorities who thought their schools should close early for Christmas as Covid cases rose in their areas was the classic act of an over-promoted centralist martinet. It is also wise not to load everything entirely on to Cummings. He was certainly the driver of many of the most confrontational acts and stances. But he was there at moments of pragmatism, too, such as the changed Northern Ireland protocol with the EU in 2019. It is no part of this argument that the departure of Cummings has suddenly inaugurated an era of Johnsonian enlightenment and reasonableness.
Nevertheless, Wednesday’s announcement that the Christmas relaxation of Covid regulations will stand, amid sterner warnings, is a highly pragmatic compromise of the kind that most governments in Europe are also choosing. Ideally, the Christmas relaxation would never have been introduced. It was a typical piece of Johnson’s erratic cake-and-eat-it approach to tighten with one hand and loosen with the other without thinking enough about the consequences.
Yet Johnson’s is not the only government in Europe that has been embarrassed more than once by the resurgent virus. No government has had an impeccable pandemic, not even Angela Merkel’s in Germany, and certainly not Nicola Sturgeon’s in Scotland, or Mark Drakeford’s in Wales.
The important thing that happened this week is that the UK governments have at last cooperated in ways that they have avoided doing throughout much of the pandemic. Drakeford expressly linked this to the departure of Cummings at a press conference today. That may now change in other contexts, though this may be too optimistic. There may nevertheless be implications for the torrid conflict with Scottish separatism that looms in 2021, an issue on which Johnson’s record has so far been inept.
There is a similar embryonic cooperative momentum in this week’s tiering decisions. In the Cummings era, local concerns counted for nothing. National and local lockdown decisions were made by a small group in London. That is beginning to change. This week’s new English tier rules in which parts of Essex and Hertfordshire were kept in tier 2 and other parts placed in tier 3 seems likely to become a sensible precedent. It portends similar tinkering with tiers in other counties that were originally treated as indivisible.
If that is so, it will reflect greater ministerial attentiveness to local Tory MPs and councils, as well as some attention to Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs and councils, too. This, too, is a change. There has been no backbench rallying behind a radically different Covid strategy this time round, of the sort that saw 71 Tory MPs vote against the government or abstain only two weeks ago. This surely reflects not just the start of the vaccine programme and fear of new Covid variants, but a recognition of the government’s more granular and sensible approach.
All this is very provisional. It may prove naive. Much will depend on the Brexit trade deal endgame. If Johnson makes a deal, this thesis will look stronger. If he does not, it will look weaker. A cabinet reshuffle in the new year, bringing in some stronger and more talented ministers, would be another important piece of evidence. In the longer term, though, a more balanced approach is likely to be essential in 2021, as we struggle to reach the point at which vaccination levels permit some sort of return to normal.
None of this makes Johnson any less of the Marmite figure that he has always been. None of it negates the shamefully slapdash and bumptious way in which the prime minister expresses himself, which is so demeaning to this country. Nor does it wipe out the sometimes appalling mistakes and preposterous claims that have marked his career in general and this year in particular.
All of these things remain realities, on the record, and cannot be undone. They leave a tawdry leadership legacy that Johnson cannot simple bulldoze aside – although he will naturally try to. And this is unquestionably the year in which Johnson has been rumbled as a political leader.
This is perhaps part of the reason he now needs to recalibrate the way he governs. My argument is not to propose seeing this as a glass half-full government rather than a glass half-empty one. But it is to recognise that there is something in the glass that Johnson’s opponents cannot ignore either.
Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
