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A Johnson RegicideAnother Great Political Escape?
Professor Chris Painter evaluates the prospects of the Conservative Party should Boris Johnson’s latest crisis of leadership prove terminal
As 2021 sauntered to a conclusion, speculation about Boris Johnson’s future as Leader of the Conservative Party once again reached fever pitch, not least because of inquiries initiated into his alleged abuses of public office.
Commentators such as Steve Richards validly point to the difficulty of removing sitting prime ministers from office short of an election. Yet, post-1945 precedents do exist for this eventuality – significantly all applying to the Conservative Party: Sir Anthony Eden in 1957; Margaret Thatcher no less in 1990; and most recently Theresa May’s fall in 2019 (albeit having squandered the modest parliamentary majority inherited from David Cameron).
The Conservative Party’s relationship with Johnson on becoming leader in 2019 was primarily a transactional one. He was perceived as being the candidate equipped to deliver a full-blooded Brexit and best able to lead it to an election victory on that platform.
If recent ground conceded in opinion polls proves to be persistent, or a growing body of incriminating evidence about his behaviour take its toll, his position therefore becomes extremely tenuous.
The interesting question is whether the Conservative Party – if it deposes another sitting Prime Minister – might yet again sustain an already long period of continuous rule since 2010.
Post-1945 Historical Precedents
Prime ministers who take up the reins of power when their party has occupied – or near-monopolised – office for a decade or more tend to trigger elections at the last possible opportunity, which is very instructive.
Sir Alec Douglas-Home was elevated to Number 10 in 1963, following three consecutive Conservative Prime Ministers over a period of 12 years. With the Labour Party recovering its electoral swagger under Harold Wilson, Douglas-Home went on to lose the 1964 General Election.
James Callaghan found himself in a comparable position when succeeding Wilson in 1976, the latter having successfully formed governments from four of the five elections held between 1964 and 1974. With Margaret Thatcher providing the Conservative Party with a more incisive ideological direction, she won the election against Callaghan in 1979.
A final example is provided by Gordon Brown, replacing Tony Blair in 2007 after his 10 years at the helm, but coinciding with a young David Cameron injecting renewed vigour into the Conservative opposition. Although Cameron failed to secure a majority in the 2010 General Election, he did well enough with the help of the Liberal Democrats to eject Brown from Number 10.
A notable exception to this pattern was John Major, who became Prime Minister in 1990 following Thatcher’s removal. He went on to win the 1992 General Election as Labour continued to flounder under Neil Kinnock. But, within a matter of months, Major’s Government found itself in the political doldrums through financial and economic mismanagement, troubles compounded by the rise of Euroscepticism in the Conservative Party (en route to the Brexit endgame). Major, of course, fell to a landslide defeat against Blair’s New Labour in 1997.
Should Johnson come to resign later this year, the Conservative Party will have already been in office for 11 consecutive years. Turning to a fourth leader after Cameron, May and Johnson, this will be against the background of opinion polls showing a potential Labour revival (not to mention two recent spectacular Conservative by-election defeats at the hands of the Liberal Democrats).
As the earlier post-1945 examples demonstrate, omens are not auspicious for a belated new incumbent, should they take the next election all the way to the wire in 2024. Nor, given current polling data, would any attempt to make a quick dash to the electorate – comparable to May’s (unfortunate) 2017 gamble – necessarily pay dividends.
Aspirant Candidates in Context
What about the personal credentials of Boris Johnson’s likely replacements? Three names most frequently canvassed are Michael Gove, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak.
What limited polling evidence exists suggests that Sunak would have the best prospects of successfully taking on Keir Starmer’s Labour Party. The Chancellor clearly gained kudos from his interventionist economic support programmes during the Coronavirus pandemic, imposing eye-watering costs on the Exchequer.
Yet, he has been at pains of late to emphasise his desire to be regarded as a tax-cutting, small-state Conservative – no doubt to bolster leadership prospects with a party drifting ever further away from the pre-occupations of median voters. This is at a time not only of an ongoing threat from a pandemic, but also the climate emergency, widening social inequalities and demographic pressures that all point in the direction of a more proactive state.
The Foreign Secretary has also become a favourite to succeed Johnson with the Conservative grassroots. But, apart from coming across as a lightweight on the international stage, Truss’ political trajectory over the years is something of a liability – embracing, as it does, republicanism, a pro-Remain stance during the 2016 EU Referendum and now, because of her leadership ambitions, indulging the Conservative Party’s hard Brexit core.
As for Gove, revealingly, he is probably too moderate to be a frontrunner, while his toxic electoral qualities were evident to Cameron even prior to the 2015 General Election.
Then there are outsiders such as Jeremy Hunt. His political flank is vulnerable due to a long stint as Health Secretary from 2012 to 2018 – precisely the period during which a historic squeeze on NHS funding and poor pandemic contingency planning helped to pave the way for the public health debacle since 2020.
Prospects for another great electoral escape act by the Conservatives nonetheless should also take on board factors other than individual attributes. As vividly exemplified during Johnson’s premiership, those at the top of any organisation shape its culture and values. The Prime Minister’s lack of probity will surely have tainted those around him too. But, at another level, come the broader structural, institutional dynamics of the Conservative Party – now highly factionalised, with the internal balance of forces becoming reminiscent of the peculiar blend of authoritarianism and libertarianism that has taken grip of the US Republican Party.
That direction of travel will constrain the freedom for manoeuvre of whoever takes over as Conservative Leader. Indeed, Johnson himself has become a prisoner of the very political forces he helped to unleash.
This comparison alerts us to a yet wider point of reference: transnational networks underpinned by ‘dark money’ that pose a serious threat to the norms of plural democracy.
So while, empirically, the likelihood of a Conservative revival under the various scenarios considered above would appear to be relatively remote, it remains essential to keep an eagle eye on those wider destabilising forces.
Chris Painter is Professor Emeritus of Public Policy and Management, and formerly head of social sciences, at Birmingham City University