‘Running out of lives’: How vulnerable is Boris Johnson?

“It’s like the world’s worst advent calendar,” laments one Conservative MP. “Every day we open the door and there’s another crisis.”

For several weeks, Boris Johnson has been lurching from one crisis to another — from allegations of sleaze in the Conservative party, to claims of secret Christmas parties in Downing Street last year in contravention of strict government-issued Covid guidance, to the surge of infections from the new Omicron variant.

Then on Friday morning the prime minister awoke to discover that North Shropshire, a slice of Tory England represented by Conservative MPs since before Queen Victoria ascended the throne, had fallen.

As dawn broke over the pastures and comfortable small towns on the England/Wales border, the scale of the electoral calamity in the parliamentary by-election became clear, as voters delivered a startling rebuke to Johnson and his accident-prone, chaotic premiership.

A Tory majority of 23,000 was reduced overnight to rubble by the Liberal Democrats, a party which previously had only 12 MPs. “The voters have sent a clear message to the prime minister: the party’s over,” said Sir Ed Davey, after his party recorded a 6,000 majority.

After a calamitous end to 2021, some Conservative MPs are coming to the same conclusion.

Fortunately for Johnson, most of his MPs have this week dispersed from Westminster to their constituencies for Christmas, reducing the immediate threat of plots against his leadership. But he is rapidly burning through political capital. As one minister puts it: “The PM should not feel safe in the slightest. He should worry that something is going fundamentally wrong.”

Two years on from a huge general election victory and a year on from securing a post-Brexit trade deal, Johnson is limping wounded into a Christmas break, his approval ratings at a record low and with his party in a state of open mutiny: 99 Tory MPs this week voted against his Covid policy, just one hour after he personally pleaded with them to back him.

Behind him in 2021 lies a trail of self-inflicted errors. The Shropshire fiasco only happened after Johnson tried and failed to save the career of the incumbent Tory MP Owen Paterson, who was embroiled in a “sleaze” scandal, by collapsing the rules on parliamentary standards. Paterson resigned in the subsequent chaos.

The last two weeks have seen Johnson pouring fuel on the flames of reports that his staff in Downing Street had a Christmas party last year while the country faced Covid lockdown restrictions. Johnson denied the party took place — raising renewed questions about his familiarity with the truth — before belatedly ordering an investigation to find out what happened.

Next year offers little sign of political respite. While the country remains in the grip of a worsening pandemic, many Tory MPs are opposed to further Covid restrictions. Interest rates this week started to rise and inflation is over 5 per cent; a cost of living crisis that will worsen in April when Johnson’s government hikes taxes towards their highest level since 1950.

Meanwhile the economic consequences of Brexit are catching up with Johnson, depriving him of the growth, trade and tax revenues that might have allowed him more leeway to spend his way out of trouble. Relations with the EU remain fraught.

Alarmingly for Johnson, he appears to have been unaware of just how much trouble he is now in with his own party. After his personal appeal to MPs to vote for his Covid policy this week, one ministerial ally assured journalists that the Tory rebellion was “haemorrhaging”. An hour later 99 MPs voted against the prime minister, blindsiding Number 10.

“There is now a party within a party,” winced one Tory official after the Commons vote. Steve Baker, a former minister, quoted Romans to fellow rebels in a WhatsApp message, urging them to show magnanimity as they inflicted humiliation on the prime minister: “If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.”

The prime minister is a proven election winner. He has delivered Brexit for his Eurosceptic party and his populist appeal still reaches parts of Britain that other Tories cannot reach. But he has only limited time to prove the magic is still there. “He’s running out of lives,” says one Tory MP.

The Omicron factor

In the fallout of the Shropshire debacle, one of the problems for Johnson is that the furore over parties and sleaze is mingling with bigger questions about policy and the direction of his government.

Even though few MPs are left in Westminster, the prime minister still faces imminent danger if the spread of the Omicron variant — which has new infections doubling every two to three days, fuelling a rise to over 93,000 daily cases — requires him to introduce new restrictions. That would pitch him into renewed conflict with libertarian Tory MPs who oppose them. Johnson has promised to recall parliament if he does propose new measures.

But the prime minister’s willingness to lay down state diktats on Covid has fuelled unrest of a more general nature among Tory MPs, some of whom feel that Johnson is altogether too willing to preside over a big state, far removed from the Thatcherite vision they prefer.

Liz Truss, the foreign secretary who tops popularity polls among activists and is seen as a potential leadership rival to Johnson, makes none-too-subtle references to her Thatcher-adoration, including recently posing atop a tank in Estonia, echoing a famous Iron Lady image. “Liz’s tactic is to look like Thatcher and say ‘freedom’ a lot,” says one Tory MP.

To the frustration of Tory rightwingers, Brexit has not unleashed the low tax, low regulation “Singapore on Thames” that some wanted — and which many in the EU feared. Instead, under Johnson, corporation tax rates are rising from 19 per cent to 25 per cent to help fund a big wave of public spending, particularly in northern England.

And in spite of Johnson’s heroic rhetoric that Brexit would unleash a big expansion of trade — “there lies the port, the vessel puffs her sails, the wind sits in the mast” he said in a speech in Greenwich last year — the reality is quite the opposite.

The independent Office for Budget Responsibility is sticking to its 2016 estimates that “total UK imports and exports will eventually be 15 per cent lower than had we stayed in the EU”. Britain this week struck a trade deal with Australia which, by the UK government’s estimate, might add 0.01-0.02 per cent to GDP.

“It simply isn’t worth jeopardising access to the [EU] single market for the sake of global trade,” wrote David Frost, the then head of the Scotch Whisky Association, in a long-forgotten 2016 pamphlet, arguing the single market could be worth 5 per cent of GDP. Lord Frost is now Johnson’s Brexit minister, chief proselytiser of the opportunities of life outside the EU.

Meanwhile, almost a year on from Johnson’s Christmas 2020 “bare bones” Brexit trade deal with the EU, the OBR assumes a 4 per cent loss of national income over the medium term as a result of Brexit. Ultimately that would amount to some £100bn a year in foregone national income or £1,500 per person per year; tax receipts could be £40bn lower.

With Covid ripping through Britain’s public finances and with Johnson committed to higher spending on “levelling up” an unequal British economy, the economic hit of Brexit is having real-time political consequences for Johnson, forcing up taxes and borrowing. “If anyone thought Brexit would supercharge a Thatcherite agenda, they must surely be disabused of that now,” says David Gauke, former Tory cabinet minister.

‘If he looks like a winner, we’ll back him’

Johnson enters 2022 with a party riven by divisions and disgruntled with the prime minister.

“He has managed to annoy everyone,” says one former cabinet minister. Rightwingers lament Johnson’s big state approach and Covid strategy; centrist Tory MPs, still smarting over Brexit, dislike the prime minister’s style and contempt for political convention; newly elected Tory MPs in the north feel he is not delivering for them: Johnson recently scrapped a promised high-speed rail line from London to Leeds.

But even his biggest critics acknowledge that Johnson has a proven ability to bounce back. He was once dismissed as a journalist for making up quotes and sacked as a Tory spokesman for lying about an extramarital affair. But he later went on to become mayor of London, a city that had been controlled by Labour, before leading the winning Brexit campaign and delivering an 80-seat Tory majority at the 2019 general election.

“If he still looks like a winner, we’ll back him,” says one senior Conservative MP. “If he doesn’t, the end for him will be swift and brutal.” Johnson has been getting plenty of advice on how to turn things around. He met a series of Tory MPs this week who urged him to change some of his advisers at Downing Street and replace a party management operation which appears to have lost control over the parliamentary party.

“He needs to get rid of the sixth formers who seem to be running things and get someone heavyweight in to help him,” says one MP who met the prime minister this week and pleaded for change. “Boris needs to be managed.”

Johnson’s allies downplay the likelihood of any imminent internal shake-up. Indeed some argue that the problem is not the prime minister’s team but the principal himself — a politician who appears to relish chaos. Yet the status quo is no longer enough for Tory MPs, who saw in the early hours of Friday in Shropshire an omen of electoral disaster unless Johnson can turn things around.

Paul Goodman, a former Tory MP and editor of the ConservativeHome activists’ website, says: “There’s a sense that Covid and Brexit present a big opportunity for a reset. The fear among many Conservative MPs and activists is that it’s ‘business as usual’.”

Additional reporting by Sebastian Payne