Saturday 13 November 2021

Is Boris Johnson Doomed?

A six-point lead for Labour? Its widest margin since May 2019? Nice. It seems the events of the last fortnight are taking their toll and pushing the Tory numbers down accordingly. With some looking nervously st the polls - the third in a row refusing to give the party a lead - and looking to see what the damage will be in North Shropshire and Old Bexley and Sidcup, some are starting to think about life after Boris Johnson. New MPs particularly are apparently looking forward to a solid clear out of the party. But the question, last asked here two years ago, is whether we can start talking about the end of Johnson's time at the top?

It's worth noting a few things. Unlike the situation facing his precarious predecessor, the Tory wagons aren't circling a beleaguered leadership. It's tempting to read things into the quiet disappearance of Rishi Sunak from the scene, but this is hardly unusual for him. Of course he'll want to avoid association with the corrupting stench wafting about Johnson's administration, but this isn't indicative of a plot. Nor is anyone apart from the new Tory backbenchers out to make life hard for the Prime Minister. Therefore, while Johnson isn't loved by his MPs his position in the party can't be described as weak. And what determines "weakness" is tied to poll ratings, which leads to a further question: is Johnson's position recoverable?

Time for a trip down memory lane with visits to Thatcher's, Major's, and Brown's polling. From the 1987 election, the Tories led more often than not up until summer 1989. After then the polls slowly widened until the point Neil Kinnock and friends were posting leads in excess of 20 points. The only time Thatcher's Tories enjoyed a poll lead again was after she had announced her intention to resign and John Major was poised to take over. For Thatcher, there wasn't just one thing that did her in. The Poll Tax certainly damaged her a great deal, particularly among the layer of working class voters she had won over with bargain basement council houses and cheap mortgages, but there were other things too. By this time negative equity was starting to bite, along with a slowing economy, and examples then (as now) of Tory corruption and sleaze. It was ructions over Europe that brought things to a head. Obviously, Thatcher would have seen off Geoffrey Howe and the subsequent leadership election if it weren't for these failures hanging like a millstone around her neck. Her defenestration was a process and made inevitable by decisions she didn't need to make.

Major met the same fate. With a promise to abolish the Poll Tax and a more emollient style than Thatcher's brash bullishness, the Tory polling position immediately recovered once he took over. Despite presiding over the initial stages of the recession, throughout 1991 neither party could establish lasting poll leads and it remained this way right until the election, which saw Major win a new majority as well as the highest number of votes ever cast. Legend then has it that Black Wednesday, the day the UK humiliatingly crashed out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism, destroyed the Tory reputation for economic competence and from that point they were doomed. True, the polls did begin their decisive swing away, but according to Major himself recovery was decisively set back by the announcement of Michael Heseltine's pits closure programme, which came across as overly vindictive. And the later intention to introduce VAT on pensioners' fuel bills. This triple whammy ensured a slippage became a rout, reinforced by a never-ending parade of delicious Tory scandal, humiliating by-election defeats, and infighting over Europe. Funny how someone presiding over the most egregious sleaze and corruption is, today, a pin-up for many liberals.

And then Gordon Brown. This was a curious one because it appears his fateful misstep was the election that never was in Autumn 2007. In the BBC's The New Labour Revolution, Brown adamantly denied he was never going to call an early election - his mistake was to allow speculation to get out of hand, to the point a couple of unions and the party itself was put on campaign footing. When he finally ruled an election out, the poll slippage began and only widened over time - with the exception of the response to the 2008 crash and the lead up to the election itself. Why did this prove fatal? The point is it didn't have to. The most precious commodity for a government is its authority, a point Boris Johnson understands very well, and one that led him into his current difficulties. Brown's apparent dithering wounded his government, and the Tories looked credible with a blue-blooded adman at the helm to the Tory-curious voter. But it might have been reversed, but for the abolition of the 10p income tax rate, continuity New Labour in most respects, and a general malaise of tired ineptitude. Perhaps a more decisive policy shift once Brown had taken over might have saved his premiership and reversed the polls, but like his predecessors he compounded his errors and the great politics dustbin awaited.

It has been a mystery to many how Johnson has been left largely unscathed by the Brexit balls up, the Covid catastrophe, Dominic Cummings, and the egregious stupidity, not to mention incompetence, of his government. A friendly press only goes so far, and so we must consider the Tories' adroit politics on matters pandemic, and the usual divide and rule for the rest. But a camel can only bear so much, and a government straining under such weighty baggage is vulnerable to any number of straws. And this one, the reality of Tory corruption, was avoidable had Johnson chosen not to make a stand on it. It's not just the substance of the corruption either, the arrogance that came with it inadvertently knocked a few chunks out of the only blue wall that matters: the Tory press. With Keir Starmer now considered a safe pair of hands for the bourgeois interest, it's safe to clip Johnson's wings, which they're doing with alacrity. IDS, Javid, and now Jacob Rees-Mogg have serious questions to answer. As the scandal rumbles on any immediate recovery seems unlikely.

But is this the dam failure through which the 2023/24 election hopes flood out? Nothing is inevitable in politics, but it is possible the corruption charges could change the framing of the Tory record up until now, undoing all the work of the last two years. And there's more. There are signs inflation is edging up and with it the chance of rising interest rates. If there is a cold snap, high energy prices and lack of gas storage capacity - thanks to Tory sell offs - could result in winter fuel shortages and pensioners freezing in their homes. And further down the line there's the National Insurance increase to look forward to, and a possible, unwinnable trade war with the EU as well. Johnson is a proven slippery customer, but grease does not counteract gravity and at last his misdeeds are pulling him down. It's too early to say if this is a turning point in his political fortunes, but if the past is anything to go by the doom could well be upon him.

Image Credit

7 comments:

Blissex said...

«A six-point lead for Labour?»

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-politics-41952976
«Tony Blair: 'Labour should be 20 points ahead in polls'»

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/dec/02/labours-great-crisis-time-to-fight-back-momentum-jeremy-corbyn
«Fears about victory for the far-left helps to hold down Labour’s opinion poll lead to 4-5% at a time when the government’s incompetence should put him 20 points ahead.»

«Its widest margin since May 2019? Nice. It seems the events of the last fortnight are taking their toll and pushing the Tory numbers down accordingly.»

As usual, poll numbers are "what would you vote if it did not really matter" mere popularity numbers. This for both tory and socialdemocratic (see how Labour got a lot more votes in the 2017 general election than polls were reporting just a few weeks before) voters.

Blissex said...

«This triple whammy ensured a slippage became a rout, reinforced by a never-ending parade of delicious Tory scandal, humiliating by-election defeats, and infighting over Europe. [...] And then Gordon Brown. This was a curious one because it appears his fateful misstep was the election that never was in Autumn 2007. [...] The most precious commodity for a government is its authority [...] Brown's apparent dithering wounded his government, and the Tories looked credible with a blue-blooded adman at the helm [...] Perhaps a more decisive policy shift once Brown had taken over might have saved his premiership and reversed the polls»

To me all this is the usual laughable "Westminster bubble" bullshit about what drives elections, the "spatial"/"menu" theory where "centrist" voters want authoritative leaders, and carefully weigh party images and programmes in wykehamist ponderings as to the party with the programme nearest to their own "centrist" voter preferences.

This theory is being tested to destruction by the Militant Mandelsoncy: since New Labour cannot have a political programme substantially different from that of the Conservatives, because New Labour targets the same constituency of affluent "soft tory" property owners, New Labour is trying "cargo cultism", reproducing the *appearances* of the 1997 landslide, making the choice between thatcherite New Labour and thatcherite Conservatives a question of the character of the leaders (see the relentless columnist attacks in "The Guardian" against Johnson on character rather than politics).

* Classy looking barrister as New Labour leader.
* The New Labour leader is making a big deal of pushing out the "trots".
* Much noise is made of the competence of the Conservatives.
* Much noise is made of the sleaze of the Conservatives.

A more realistic approach is that opposition parties don't win elections, never mind on "character", but governing parties lose them, and governing parties lost elections in the past 40 years only after property crashes, and the effects of those property crashes lasted 10 years (after 1997 the Conservative vote levels did not recover, and only partially, until 2010, when New Labour also crashed property prices).

While metaphysical issues like "character" have some influence, by far and away the most important "vote-moving" issues are about material class interests, and the large surge for Labour in 2017 was due not to the sterling character of Corbyn (even if that was a minor factor), but to his determination to represent the material interests of the "pushed behind" classes and areas, which provoked the ferocious reaction of "the Establishment", of course in the form of character assassination (overtly, and internal sabotage covertly).

A commenter on "The Guardian" in 2018 said as to the politics: “I'm nearly thirty, which means I grew up under Major (just), Blair and Brown then Dave and Nick. In my considered opinion and the opinion of my peers - you couldn't fit a fag paper between them.

And the usual quote from Lance Price in 1999: ““Gordon wants us to be a radical progressive, movement, but wants us to keep our heads down on Europe. Peter [Mandelson] thinks that we are a quasi-Conservative Party but that we should stick our necks out on Europe.

Nothing much has changed except that now Starmer's New Labour policy on Europe is hardcore "get Brexit done" antagonism, a complete (and wholly opportunistic) U-turn from “stick our necks out on Europe”.

Blissex said...

«but it is possible the corruption charges could change the framing of the Tory record up until now»

The problem with that is that tory voters believe *all* politicians are sleazy and corrupt, especially after the expenses scandal spared few parties (and was widely misconstrued by the press as petty embezzlement instead of rancid hypocrisy).

The Mandelson Tendency grand strategy to differentiate New Labour from the Conservatives first on "competence" and then "character" is not working well because right-wing voters (whether tory or whig) by and large think there is no difference among politicians as to gross incompetence or slimy character (except of course for "monstrously evil genocidal racist pro-renter trot Corbyn").

Dialectician1 said...

"Rock Star In Two-in-a-Bed Romp" (VIZ Comic)
"Woman Has Baby" (Private Eye)

Apart from the Gruaniad, I'm not sure most people are that surprised that Tory politicians are shifty. The problem is, that since the expenses scandal, there is already a deep & pervasive cynicism about what MPs are in the game for. The current hand-wringing by liberals about the relative state of virtuousness of Johnson and his cronies deliberately fails to remember Tony & his cronies: the post career of ministerial office, which leads to highly-paid consultancy in the private sector.

Anyway, this is all distracting piffle - (BTW, it's not 'sleaze', that's something that has sexual connotations. If Johnson was caught fucking his batman, that would be sleaze) - on the day that world leaders decided to continue the process of destroying the planet - but at a slightly slower rate than in the past.

Blissex said...

«opposition parties don't win elections, never mind on "character", but governing parties lose them»

Just to be sure, this applies mostly to governing and opposition parties that have similar core politics, like New Labour, LibDems, Conservatives. In the case of parties with different politics then coalition building and motivating turnout does matter (as in the 2017 general election for Labour), but often still elections are the governing party's to lose, because if they won the previous election their coalition building and motivating turnout was likely better.

In some cases, like 2019 general election, the governing party, also by posing as the opposition, did better coalition building and motivating turnout, around brexit in addition to property; while Starmer as leading advocate of the undoing of the 2016 referendum pushed Labour brexiters to vote Conservative or to abstain, demolishing the Labour coalition and demotivating Labour turnout.

BCFG said...

"on the day that world leaders decided to continue the process of destroying the planet - but at a slightly slower rate than in the past."

According to the projections I have seen, this sentence needs slightly amending as follows:


"on the day that world leaders decided to continue the process of destroying the planet - but at a much faster rate than in the past, they also decided to cynically use the climate emergency to continue the process of authoritarianism and at a much faster rate too."

But you do get to the nitty gritty here, PhilBC is fighting 20th century battles, and seems to think there is a material difference between Tory and Labour. There isn't. Not sure who is the bigger dinosaur, Phil or Rees-Mogg?

Anonymous said...

Define "doomed". I'd suspect that Boris Johnson is a lot less "doomed" than the average UK citizen, let alone people who are much worse off than that (refugees, for one obvious example).

The likes of Boris Johnson generally don't face real consequences, no matter what they do. Unless there was a revolution, of course. But they don't happen very often.