Patrick O’Flynn’s monthly look at UK politics, written exclusively for Political Insight
JULY 2020: RECEIVED wisdom in Westminster has often bet against Boris Johnson, partly because of a personal antipathy to the Prime Minister and his programme that is widely shared across the political establishment.
But as the Prime Minister reaches his first anniversary in office, the key lesson to draw is that betting against Boris has seldom proved a fruitful strategy and that our working assumption should be that he will remain politically dominant for the foreseeable future, despite setbacks in important policy areas such as the state of the economy or managing the Covid crisis.
Before the Tory leadership contest of last year, it was widely suggested that Johnson was so unpopular among Conservative MPs that he would not even reach the final two candidates to get put before the wider party membership. That was wrong. He topped the Tory MP poll and then won among the wider membership by a landslide.
Then it was suggested that the public would turn against him after he failed to secure Brexit by his original autumn deadline. In fact they rallied around him.
Senior commentators predicted that removing the Tory whip from Brexit-blocking MPs such as Ken Clarke and Nicholas Soames would be seen as a “lurch to the Right” by voters and send Johnson’s poll rating plummeting downwards. The same was predicted in respect of his extraordinary defeat in the Supreme Court over the prorogation of Parliament. Those predictions were also wrong.
The Westminster establishment also advanced the idea that a so-called “Government of National Unity” (GNU) would emerge to oust Johnson, to be led by a senior MP such as Ken Clarke or Harriet Harman. That never happened either.
Expectations from the same anti-Brexit political “blob” that December’s general election would solve nothing and see a standstill result were wrong as well. Johnson emerged with the first commanding Conservative majority since 1987.
Still that has not stopped many media pundits predicting Johnson’s political collapse, notably when attempting to force out his key adviser, Dominic Cummings, over his apparent non-observance of lockdown rules. Despite dozens of Tory MPs coming out against Cummings and commentators predicting that keeping him would use up huge amounts of political capital, the Prime Minister toughed it out. And the evidence suggests that despite a narrowing of the Tory poll lead, the saga was indeed a storm in a tea cup.
The Johnson-Cummings partnership remains absolutely central to the Government, with Michael Gove – another long-term Cummings ally – now having established himself alongside them as part of a political triumvirate guiding the administration.
And though it is hard now to make a case that the Government has handled coronavirus well (the percentage of the public thinking that has dropped from over 70 per cent early in the crisis to a little over 40 per cent now) there is no sign that mistakes in this area have changed the political terms of trade fundamentally.
The Conservative poll lead has, if anything, recovered from the “Cummingsgate” saga, now settling in high single figures – an astonishingly strong position for a party entering its eleventh consecutive year in government.
Again in contradiction of most pundit expectations, it is clear that rock-solid support for Brexit has served the Government well with the British public. This is fundamentally a Vote Leave administration, with all the four great offices of state (PM, Home Secretary, Chancellor, Foreign Secretary) being filled by people who campaigned under the Vote Leave banner in 2016.
Turning to the Labour Party, it should be acknowledged that it is now under much more credible leadership. Most voters can imagine Sir Keir Starmer as prime minister, shaking hands with foreign leaders and representing the UK on the world stage. Having a big job on his CV – former Director of Public Prosecutions – does bring him a sense of substance and authority.
But again the punditry class, possibly led by political antipathy towards Johnson, has become hugely over-excited about Starmer’s good personal ratings and the very marginal improvement in Labour polling (it has still not exceeded a high-30s vote share and is often to be found in the mid-30s).
Labour would need a truly transformational leader to propel it to power and there is no sign of Starmer being that. If we compare him, briefly, to Labour’s last transformational leader, Tony Blair, the extent of the odds against him becomes clear.
Blair became Labour leader when Labour was already ahead in the opinion polls and facing a broken prime minister with a tiny majority. He had a core team of impressive and well-known political performers around him, including Gordon Brown, Jack Straw, David Blunkett, Robin Cook and Mo Mowlam.
Nonetheless, he was so ruthlessly focused on winning power that he unleashed his game-changing ditching of Clause Four socialism at his first party conference as leader. From then on until the 1997 election, Labour was typically 15-20 points ahead of the Tories in the polls.
Starmer, by contrast, took over a party that was a long way behind in the polls (and still is), with only 201 MPs – 164 fewer than the Tories – and with no core team of high calibre politicians viewed by the public as potential Cabinet ministers. And rather than taking over from respected John Smith, under whom the party’s reputation had risen, Starmer took over from Jeremy Corbyn, under whom Labour’s reputation had collapsed, especially in the eyes of floating voters.
While Blair was already known as the shadow home secretary who had toughened up his party on law and order (“tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”) – a popular stance – Starmer was only known as the figure who ditched the party’s 2017 pledge to honour the Brexit referendum verdict. And he has not yet found his own “Clause Four moment” either.
As a London-based liberal lawyer who “took the knee” for the Black Lives Matter group and supports an even more lax immigration regime, he is not well placed to win back the provincial working class vote in Labour’s lost “Red Wall”. And that is to put things mildly. In fact, Labour’s electoral coalition would appear to be fractured beyond repair.
There is no sign either of Labour coming back in its old heartland of Scotland (where it used to be able to bank at least 40 seats). And, by the way, in the event of Scotland voting for independence and thereby losing all its Westminster MPs, Labour would be left with the almost impossible task of trying to beat the Tories outright in England.
Companies seeking to ensure good contacts with the government over the long-run would therefore be well advised to focus their attention on the Conservative Party and to cease being heavily influenced by those voices that have continually predicted a watering-down of (or even cancellation of) Brexit or an opinion poll collapse in the Johnson political brand.
Naturally, it will remain sensible to maintain open and friendly channels of communication with Starmer’s Labour, but the overwhelming probability is that the Conservatives will not only govern with a strong majority throughout this term, but will come back with a further majority in mid-2024 as well.