After Johnson. What Britain needs next

The bar has been set very low but the country deserves a measure of decency and competence

Britain’s friends are perplexed. Boris Johnson, they observe, led his country into a colossal act of self-harm. Brexit has seen Britain throw out the intelligent pragmatism that had been its lodestar for the embrace of crude English nationalism. The future of the UK union has been imperilled. Johnson has trashed the nation’s international standing. And now he is to be chased from office for flouting Covid lockdown rules at Downing Street drinks parties?

Puzzled they may be in Washington, Paris and Berlin, but there is no mystery. The now infamous parties, and, importantly, the lies told by Johnson to conceal them, have crystallised something Brits instinctively knew about the prime minister, but until now mostly chose to overlook. The charlatan and liar has been found out.

Lying to the Queen, reneging on the treaty he signed with the EU, scrounging personal favours from wealthy Tory party donors, and ignoring his own draconian pandemic restrictions - they all are part of the same story. Rooted in impunity, they speak to the absence of a moral compass or any concept of a public interest that might constrain his personal behaviour. Rules are made for the little people. The prime minister can do as he pleases. 

The disclosure of the regular socialising in Downing Street, however, has shattered a glass wall between Westminster politics and real life. Sure, Johnson has consistently lied about Brexit and has torn up more manifesto promises that you could count. That, though, could be half-brushed off as politics. The booze-ups are different. Nothing could be so vivid or obnoxious in its expression of their contempt as Johnson and his pals living it up in No 10 when the rules barred the bereaved from mourning the loss of loved ones. In a favourite phrase of pollsters, this is the stuff that “cuts through”.

There are still a few naive souls who think Johnson can escape the reckoning indefinitely. The answer, they say, is a clear-out of the “No 10 operation”. A new chief of staff and a promise from Johnson to be on his best behaviour would do the trick. This is all so much tosh. Sure, he may cling on for time. But the rot in Downing Street holds up a mirror to Johnson’s character. The narcissism runs too deep to be cured. The problem, I have heard a close acquaintance remark, is that he lies to himself as well as to everyone else.

What’s needed now is for the Tories, and more importantly the country, to look ahead. Even as Johnson clings to the wreckage of his premiership, his party should turn to considering what can be salvaged after his departure. A glance at the likely candidates for the leadership carries a warning that the bar will have to be set low. If there is a putative Tory leader in the wings with a grand plan to restore the nation’s fortunes, they have kept themselves well hidden.

There is time enough for vision. There are more urgent tasks. Extraordinary as it may seem to say about a nation that calls itself the mother of parliaments, the immediate imperative is the restoration of a measure of basic decency and competence to the business of governing - enough of both to begin rebuilding trust in politics. The required honesty amounts to more than a willingness on behalf of the prime minister to tell the truth. It includes respect for the democratic norms and values trampled under foot by Johnson and his gang. No, you can’t just shut down parliament when you cannot get your own way, or fill public posts with cronies and Tory party donors.

Honesty bleeds into competence. Effective government demands the scrapping of Johnson’s “cake-and-eat” delusions. Conservatives can promise to shrink the state and cut taxes. But they cannot simultaneously pledge to properly fund the NHS and meet their extensive spending commitments to an ageing population while paying down public debt. If it is ever to mean anything - and I have my doubts - “levelling up” requires significant public investment in the poorest parts of the country.

Likewise Europe. The fruitcake fundamentalists on the Tory back benches will forever see the EU as a dastardly plot, but a half-serious prime minister cannot defy the facts of economics and geography by turning Brexit into a perpetual fight with the country’s European neighbours. Britain is not about to rejoin the EU any time soon. Its prosperity and security demand a cooperative working relationship.

Decency and competence. Surely not too much to ask. The Tory party may lack “big beasts” but there are candidates for the job - Jeremy Hunt, Rishi Sunak and Tom Tugendhat come of mind  - who meet at least the minimum standards of integrity.

Plenty in Whitehall and Westminster are pessimistic. The Tory MPs who put Johnson in power, they say, have not suddenly discovered the virtue of honesty. The tension between promises made to supporters in the prosperous home counties and the new recruits in the formerly Labour “red wall” seats of the struggling north are unresolved. Left to their own devices, Tory activists would choose another English nationalist. Imagine Priti Patel as prime minister. 

Liz Truss, the self-styled libertarian foreign secretary, is already busy gathering up support among hard-line Brexiters and small-state zealots. Foreign Office staff say she spends as much time nurturing her Instagram image as thinking about the world. This is the politician who pretends a trade deal with Australia can fill the hole left by Britain’s departure from the EU single market.

The hope must be that enough Tory MPs catch the message from the voters’ presemt rage at Johnson’s behaviour. The country has had enough of these fantasies and lies. It wants and deserves decent government. As Labour leader, Keir Starmer has assembled a front-bench team that is shaping up as a serious alternative. But three years until a general election is too long to wait.  

Britain Alone, The Path from Suez to Brexit (Faber) is published in paperback on January 20.