Boris Unchallenged
The last five months provide a masterclass in the political skills which have allowed Boris Johnson to escape political death time after time
Before my writing on the Ukraine attracted attention, one of my first posts to Substack was an explanation of why, despite predictions of his imminent demise, and even “allies” leaking to the press that he should have a departure plan in place for the end of the summer, Boris Johnson had weathered the “party-gate” storm and was likely to survive as Prime Minister. Almost five months later this looks prophetic. Johnson seems more secure than he has been in more than a year. Even the impending release of the report by Sue Gray, the senior civil servant charged with investigating lockdown breeches next week is not seen to pose a serious threat.
That is not to say everything is rosy. The Conservative party continues to trail Labour in the polls, and took a battering in the local elections two weeks ago. If the BBC’s estimated national vote share of 35% Labour, 30% Conservative, and 19% Liberal Democrat were repeated in a general election, it would almost certainly see the Conservatives lose government. But Boris’ problem was never general election numbers per se. It was always ensuring that the risk calculus among Conservative MPs was that keeping Boris was less risky than attempting to replace him. The greatest reason for Boris’ recovery is not merely events. It is how events conspired to eliminate or discredit all plausible alternatives to Johnson within the Conservative party. “Partygate” in the end strengthened rather than weakened Johnson because whatever damage the Prime Minister took, it was outweighed by its destruction of the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, as viable alternative. In turn, the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, while providing Johnson an opportunity to shine on the world stage, could very easily have instead raised the profile of Foriegn Secretary, Liz Truss. Instead, at a time when Foriegn Policy, which she presides over, is more important than ever, the Foriegn Secretary has been sidelined, baited into the traditional Tory ejection seat of making threats over the Northern Irish Protocol that cannot be made good.
Johnson is not merely lucky. This is what his detractors miss. Johnson has a skill at exploiting events, because whatever his flaws, he has a knack for knowing what is and is not important. If that means he shows an almost insulting indifference to things he feels do not matter, well, the reason he is almost never punished for it is because he is invariably correct that those concerns will not matter to him in the end.
Here is the key to Johnson’s success, never more on display than during the last five months. He may be lazy, disorganized, easily bored, but he has innate understanding of the nature of the party he leads and the system he presides over. One much greater than that possessed by those who dare to look down on him as a “trolley”. Cummings never understood the Conservative party, nor did he understand Britain. Sunak, a creation of consultants and advisers, including Cummings never could either. Nor, I would argue does Liz Truss, the Foriegn Secretary and last woman standing as a viable successor to Johnson.
Understanding the Conservative party, and that with Sunak gone, Truss is what remains, goes a long way to explaining why Johnson has done what he has on almost every major issue during 2022. As I explained in January, the Conservative party membership was unlikely to lose faith in Johnson personally because it never trusted him on that level. Rather, the risk to Johnson was that it might lose faith in his ability to carry out conservative policies. The actual moment of danger was in December when Johnson forced a vote on Omicron restrictions in which nearly 100 MPs defied the whip. The perception that “Partygate” had left Johnson unable to resist “elite pressure” to lockdown implied it had left him unable to implement a conservative policy as Prime Minister, and that alone justified replacing him with someone who could. Equally, the resignation of Johnson’s chief Brexit negotiator, David Frost, was damaging not because Frost was important, but due to the reasons given. Frost suggested Johnson was unable or unwilling to risk a trade war with the EU over the Northern Irish Protocol, drawing a direct connection between the scandal, Johnson’s political strength, and whether or not conservative policy was carried out.
In turn, Johnson had already seen off these threats in January with his decision to end all Covid restrictions. That assertion of authority demonstrated he was still in charge, and framed his opponents as the same establishment which had opposed Brexit, and presumably would wish to “follow the experts” on Covid by locking down. The subsequent revelations about Sunak’s tax status and the Russian invasion of the Ukraine merely enabled Johnson to secure his position by eliminating potential successors. Sunak’s elimination was self-inflicted. The elaborate efforts his wife undertook to protect her inheritance from taxation would be understandable if her husband were not an aspiring PM, and by the time Sunak became a PM in waiting, any effort by Ms. Sunak to dispose of her greencard and change her status would merely have drawn attention to the couple’s finances. They were trapped. Furthermore, it made them a much more tempting target for Boris. It might have been worth sacrificing tens of millions in inheritance tax if Rishi had a shot at the premiership, but not for him to be a backbench MP. This created an incentive, as it led Boris and his allies to believe that if Rishi’s prospects were tarnished enough, the Chancellor would make the calculation that his children’s inheritance should come first and leave politics. The prospect that if sacked, Rishi Sunak is likely to quit as an MP and perhaps even leave the country must appear as an excellent argument for removing him in the next reshuffle.
That left Truss. Boris clearly thought much less of the threat she posed. It would be easy to ascribe this to misogynies, but it seems more likely Boris saw her as a less subtle or clever version of himself. Truss was a Liberal Democrat in University, a libertarian under Cameron, campaigned for Remain, and then reinvented herself as a hardline Brexiteer, who positioned herself as the most “Terfy” member of the government on transgender issues, a topic the Prime Minister has largely avoided, perhaps due to the close links between his wife and the old guard at LGBTory who are heavily Pro-Trans. Boris seems to have made a calculation that whereas Sunak posed a personal threat - his selling point was that he could do the same things Boris did more competently - and hence had to be discredited on a personal level, Truss posed an ideological threat. On any issue where Boris and Truss were on the same page, Truss would come off as amateurish and grandstanding, an impressive feat given the point of comparison was Johnson. So Boris for the last few months has sought to ensure that they are always on the same page.
This has developed in three major areas. The first, and perhaps least important, was hijacking her ground on Trans issues. Truss had largely avoided confrontations with the liberal contingent within the parliamentary party by using her secondary perch as Women and Equalities Minister to stack bodies such as the EHRC(Equality and Human Rights Commission) with individuals inclined to push back against activist demands. This avoided clashes with rival ministers or power centers, and ensured a series of symbolic battles over non-binding legal guidance without the need to formulate legislation. Nonetheless, Boris all but sidelined more than a year of careful, behind-the-scenes labour on Truss’ part when he announced that the government’s proposed ban on conversion therapy would apply to methods designed to alter an individual’s sexual orientation but not their gender identity. Poorly framed, especially when contrasted with the masterful messaging from Republicans in the United States against underage “gender transition”, the proposal proved divisive among MPs, and provoked a meh reaction from everyone else. But it more than sufficed to neutralize the issue for Truss. If it passed, she would be blamed by opponents. If it failed or proved unpopular, it would prove her issue was a dead-end.
Ukraine was another area where Boris managed to sideline and diminish his Foriegn Secretary. Shortly before the war, Truss traveled to Moscow where she confronted Russian Foriegn Minister Sergei Lavrov. In an effort to project a hardline on Ukrainian territorial integrated, she allowed herself to be baited. Having rejected the prospect of any Ukrainian territorial concessions, Lavrov asked her whether Britain would recognize Russia’s sovereignty over the Rostov and Voronezh regions, both of which are within Russia. Truss responded that the UK “will never recognize Russian sovereignty over these regions.” This was clearly a trick to embarrass Truss, allowing Lavrov to describe the meeting as “ between the dumb and the deaf.” The main point, is that Russia’s goal of embarrassing Truss also served Boris’ purposes. By allowing herself to “fall for” the trick, she indicated she was not ready for primetime.
This was in contrast to Boris’ “statesmanship” in handling Ukraine, including visits to Kyiv. Boris, by involving himself personally in all aspects of Britain’s response to the Russian invasion, has not only built up his own profile, but allowed his foreign secretary no chance to redeem herself for her pre-war foibles with Lavrov. She has been almost entirely sidelined from the single-greatest foreign policy issue, with the implication she is not up to it. Which in turn, feeds into the preferred Johnson narrative that he is “needed” to deal with the Ukraine conflict and other crises like it.
This brings us to Northern Ireland.
As for Truss, she was relegated to raising the temperature on the one remaining hot button issue, Northern Ireland. Following Frost’s resignation, Truss took over the portfolio for Brexit negotiations. This was a poisoned chalice. A poisoned chalice because the pattern had been set since 2016 that Brexit within UK politics largely functioned as a weapon for use within the Conservative party, and by the Conservative party against its rivals, in which binaries were created not around what anyone actually wanted, but who would “fight” the hardest. Because someone could always argue that they could demand more, any negotiator, no matter how hardline would end up termed a sellout, and only the Prime Minister could make any sort of breakthrough. All Frost could do was make threats which only the Prime Minister could follow through on. Frost recognized this. Truss appears to have been repeating the pattern.
Truss opened last week, by responding to the Northern Irish elections and the decision of two of the Unionist parties to boycott the Assembly until the protocol is removed, by announcing that if the EU did not agree, the UK would have no choice but to unilaterally alter the protocol to preserve the “peace process.” The problems with her approach were two-fold. First, Pro-Protocol parties had made extensive gains, winning 53/90 seats, while those parties boycotting held a mere 27/90. Truss was championing the cause of less than a third of the Northern Irish electorate, something that not just the EU played on, but which caused serious unease even among Tory MPs. If the Tory grassroots insisted their potential leaders call for this sort of thing, actually making yourself the face of it was poison with the wider electorate. Second, Truss wrote a cheque she could not cash. She could announce or call for whatever she wanted. Only the Prime Minister could decide and parliament pass legislation. Having let Truss raise expectations and bluster, Johnson then flew over to Belfast to meet with the Northern Irish parties, and cut a more conciliatory line, suggesting that the proposed legislation was a contingency for leverage in negotiations. A week after Truss suggested she had lost all faith in fixing the Protocol, Johnson stated he was confident it could be fixed.
Having let Truss annoy moderates and the EU with her bluster, he then humiliated her in front of the hardline Unionists while sending a message to the EU that, like Lavrov, they were free to disrespect his Foriegn Secretary. At the same time, his suggestion that this is merely about contingencies contradicts Truss’ claim that the situation is “grave.”
Here she erred, and if there was any chance Boris was serious about a showdown now, the cost-benefit shifted. Given the choice between restoring devolved government in Northern Ireland, or putting an an aspiring challenger in her place, Boris Johnson will err on the latter side.
Truss, by declaring that the Protocol cannot be fixed, that the baseline for any solution is DUP support, and that a restoration of power-sharing is the goal, cannot claim a success if none of those is accomplished. As she has said the situation is “grave” she faces a lack of face if it is not settled soon. Boris can undermine her, while still neutralizing pressure, by proposing legislation, then letting it languish. The rhetoric about a trade war from Dublin and Brussels just proves how serious he was.
As for “power-sharing” or the lack thereof, Unionist leverage depends on anyone particularly caring whether it resumes or not. For the “Pro-Protocol” parties, preserving the protocol, or at least not agreeing to the DUP’s demands is worth more than a return to dysfunctional devolution. For London, a Sinn Fein First Minister is an awkward inconvenience, and if SF itself is not hugely fussed about the continuation of a stalemate which the party feels is to its advantage, London will not care particularly. Boris has taken an interest, much as he did with the conversion therapy ban, not because the issue is a priority, but to prevent it being used by a prospective successor to build an independent profile. He had to act when Truss tried to do so, but the purpose was to neutralize her, not to satiate Unionist sentiment or to restore devolved government. Having done the latter, he is likely to be satisfied with letting the proposed legislation languish for months in parliament while he returns to other matters.
There is a reason Boris has been able to weaponize the Northern Irish issue against opponents, including Theresa May, but no one has been able to weaponize against him. He understands the dirty little secret, that few outside of Northern Ireland itself, actually care about it, and even there most are indifferent to both the Protocol and power-sharing. For Conservative “Unionists”, they care about Brexit, not Northern Ireland. Sovereignty for them means completing Brexit with the greatest possible break from the EU, and they support the Unionist demands not because they share any sort of commitment, but because they see it as a means of driving through a harder Brexit. Which means Boris does not need to satisfy the DUP to satisfy Tory opponents of the Protocol, only pick a fight with the EU.
This is not to say there is not a real crisis in Northern Ireland. As I will explain in another post, there has been one building for the last six years, as the Unionists have awoken to the degree to which the Good Friday Agreement was a defeat, and have lashed out, including backing Brexit and bringing down Theresa May, in a poorly-conceived effort to reverse the process set in motion back in 1998. But the current crisis is a Kabuki dance aimed more at Boris’ own position within his party than actually forcing the issue. Even if Boris were intending on a showdown, including a trade war, he would most likely delay until just prior to the next general election to be able to use the conflict, and even a possible last minute resolution, as a campaign stunt.
This is not to say that the EU, Dublin, and Washington should not take the situation seriously. As the Atlantic pointed out the other day, there are deep flaws the the protocol, and while neither Brussels nor Boris Johnson may particularly care about Unionist complaints, that attitude is precisely what risks destabilizing the situation. Just that the current dispute is one more example of the Johnson style of politics.