In the appointment of David Frost to oversee the consequences of Brexit, Mike Buckley sees little evidence that the Prime Minister can hold his winning ‘Get Brexit Done’ coalition together
The Conservatives are single-handedly fighting a ‘war on woke’. In recent weeks, Home Secretary Priti Patel denounced Black Lives Matter protests, Education Secretary Gavin Williamson accused universities of cancelling conservative speakers, and Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden urged museum and charity leaders to ‘defend’ Britain’s culture and history.
Senior Conservatives argue that the ‘culture war’ helps them unite two distinct types of Conservative voter: Telegraph-reading traditionalists in the south of England and working-class voters in ‘Red Wall’ seats who switched from Labour in the 2019 General Election.
That may be true – in 2019 Labour did particularly badly among left-wing voters with authoritarian views, a good proxy for cultural issues. Support for Labour among such voters dropped by 17% between 2017 and 2019, the biggest decline among all voter groups.
Without the spectre of Corbyn and evidence of a levelled-up UK with transformed public services, Johnson will need a better story to tell next time. On current evidence he doesn’t have one.
But the Conservatives’ focus on culture is an act of desperation. Their 2019 voter coalition agrees on little else, a fact that concerns them because their last election win was borne of a unique set of circumstances.
Jeremy Corbyn was the most unpopular party leader since data was first recorded; the public were sick of parliamentary infighting, giving ‘Get Brexit Done’ a resonance that went far beyond Leave voters; and Boris Johnson’s pledges of more nurses, police officers and hospitals were precision-designed to appeal to voters worn down by the years of austerity that Johnson’s own party had authored.
The 2019 General Election was a one-off.
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Holding the Coalition Together
In finding a way to hold this coalition together, Johnson faces two clear problems.
The first is that, while the public wanted Brexit dealt with, it was the one culture issue that would unify voters in the Home Counties and Red Wall in sufficient numbers that it would impact electoral outcomes.
The second is that, in 2019, Johnson could promise the earth. Hard Brexit could co-exist with tax cuts, levelling-up and record investment in public services. The Guardian could opine that Johnson’s “warm words about public services are underpinned by fantasy economics”, but all the public heard were promises of more nurses, police officers and hospitals.
At the next General Election, Johnson will be judged by his actions, not his words.
He denies being a populist leader but campaigns and governs as one; deliberately creating division while claiming to represent a downtrodden people against a corrupt elite. Populists survive in power only when they combine rhetoric with effective delivery. The more a populist government fails on policy, the more it is tempted to make things look better than they are – distracting attention by reverting to a permanent campaign against real or manufactured opponents.
And Johnson will find it hard to deliver. By 2024, his vaccine success will have been tempered by a sober reflection on our ‘world-beating’ public health failure and worst-in-class economic performance during the Coronavirus pandemic.
His claim to level-up the country will have come face-to-face with reality. Doing so would have been hard in normal times but post-pandemic and a hard Brexit – the economic harm of which will fall almost exclusively on regions that are already poor and are home to Johnson’s Red Wall voters – is all but impossible.
“The price, the cost that [Brexit] imposes on the economy, will be pretty much 100% absorbed by exactly the demographic profile that voted Leave and then voted Boris Johnson, having never voted Tory before, in December 2019,” argues former Conservative Chancellor Philip Hammond.