Bye, Boris, and thank you

I set out my thoughts on the PM's resignation

While he has made mistakes, we owe him a debt of gratitude for the important things he got right

 

Much has been written about Boris Johnson. I am sure much more will be written in the days and weeks to come, as the Conservative Party moves to elect a new leader to replace him as Prime Minister, following his dramatic resignation last Thursday. This blog, august though its readership undoubtedly is, will not even register as a footnote in that plethora of opinion pieces and editorials across newspapers and blogs up and down the land but I want to set out my own thoughts on the sad events of last week, nonetheless.

I should start by saying that last week was an unedifying spectacle and, while Boris still has (and will always have) many fans and admirers and some of them will be keen to attribute his fall from grace entirely to a combination of the nefarious machinations of the BBC and the rest of the 'MSM', treacherous Remainer types, woke activists, lefty political opponents and envious colleagues, the simple fact is that these events were largely of the PM’s own making. Oh, sure, plenty of people have been vociferously gunning for him and willing him to fail and many of the charges they level at him are mendacious and unfair – but he did supply them with rather a lot of ammunition!

It is, I should stress, fair to say that I was never a natural Boris backer, though I did support his 2019 leadership bid. That, of course, was in the context of 3 years of infuriating parliamentary deadlock over Brexit. The 2017-19 Parliament, the longest and most unproductive parliamentary session in over 300 years, should go down in history as ‘the Zombie Parliament’. Despite 80% of MPs being elected on an unambiguous pledge to deliver the referendum result, a large cross-party contingent of Remainer MPs used every trick in the book to try to prevent us leaving the EU. Boris took up the leadership with an unambiguous mission to smash that intransigence and end the legislative torpor.

Interestingly, Theresa May was forced from office by a series of Commons defeats and, in no small part, the damage to her authority caused by the 51 resignations that took place during her premiership, 33 of them directly relating to Brexit. The pace and number of these resignations was described at the time as “unprecedented”. So that puts it into perspective when you consider that last week Boris received 63 resignation letters in 24 hours!

Obviously, the events of last week were ostensibly triggered by the Chris Pincher affair but I suspect discontent in the Parliamentary Conservative Party has been fomenting for some time, probably at least since the Chesham & Amersham by-election defeat in June 2021. In October, we had the bad mishandling of the Owen Paterson lobbying affair but, worst of all, was the hugely energy-consuming ‘Partygate’ scandal, which has rumbled along for much of this year. Boris weathered these storms with his usual insouciant charm but the damning Sue Gray report and further by-election losses culminated in the confidence vote in June. He survived this too but 41% of his MPs voted against him and it smelled to many like the beginning of the end. He achieved a worse result than Mrs May in 2019, than John Major in 1995 or Margaret Thatcher in 1989. As one of his predecessors as leader, Lord Hague, described it: “A greater level of rejection than any Tory leader has ever endured and survived”.

Mr. Pincher was the final straw, I think, for colleagues. Not explicitly because of his deplorable actions, or the questionable slowness with which the whip was withdrawn. I believe what ultimately did for Boris was his insistence he had known nothing about Pincher’s proclivities prior to appointing him Deputy Chief Whip. This denial was blown apart when Lord Macdonald, the former Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office, wrote an open letter to the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner advising he had been present when the PM (who was Foreign Secretary at the time) was briefed in person about allegations made against Mr. Pincher when the latter was a Foreign Office minister in 2019. As he subsequently admitted, it was not an appointment made out of ignorance but rather a bad failure of judgement. He should have said that from the get-go and much of what has happened since might have been avoided.

One of the many letters the PM received last week was from nearby Colchester MP, Will Quince. In it, he says: “Thank you for meeting with me yesterday evening and for your sincere apology regarding the briefings I received from No 10 ahead of Monday’s media round, which we now know to be inaccurate. It is with great sadness and regret that I feel that I have no choice but to tender my resignation as Minister for Children and Families as I accepted and repeated those assurances in good faith.”

And therein, I suspect, lies the rub. Tory MPs have put up with a lot. They were prepared to because this was a Prime Minister who won an 80-seat majority – the biggest since Mrs Thatcher in 1979! – and had an unquestionable mandate. He had, as we have heard many times over the past few months, ‘got the big calls right’ (quite true, in my view), getting Brexit done, leading us through the pandemic, rolling out the furlough scheme and then a world-beating vaccine, brought us out of lockdown and then showed real leadership on Ukraine. At the end of the day though, trust, honour and integrity in politics do matter and Government ministers found it appreciably hard to accept being passed disinformation by Number 10 and then being sent out to repeat it to the press.

When considered in the context of the Gray report and the upcoming Privileges Committee investigation into whether the PM lied to Parliament (a long-standing constitutional deal-breaker for any Minister of the Crown), it is understandable but regrettable that many felt the PM had to go. It started with the Chancellor and the Health Secretary but soon expanded to numerous ministers and junior office holders. By the end of the following day, as it became painfully clear the PM was determined to cling on, and clearly feeling they had no other choice but to force the issue, 30 ministers had quit within a matter of hours.

This historic mass resignation now has the distinction of being the largest number of ministerial resignations in a 24-hour period, more than tripling the previous record of 11 resignations, set in 1932 during the collapse of the 2nd National Government of Ramsay MacDonald!

So, on Thursday, no longer capable of populating his ministry, Boris Johnson stood outside the famous door of 10 Downing Street and announced that he would resign as Leader of the Conservative Party and as Prime Minister. The Party is now holding an internal election to select his successor. Under the process agreed yesterday by the 1922 Committee, Boris will leave office on September 5th. I cannot help admitting, I feel sad about it.

In my June 2019 blog, I said of Boris: “It would be futile to pretend that Boris is not, to say the least, a somewhat controversial and polarising figure.” That was probably something of an understatement. Boris is, without doubt, one of the most iconoclastic politicians of our lifetimes. Possibly since Lady Thatcher herself. He elicits strong reactions. People either love him or positively loath him.

For my own part, I think history will be kind to Boris Johnson. I for one will never forget the sense of elation in December 2020, when Boris actually did get Brexit done with the signing of the trade deal that cemented our withdrawal from the EU. It is important to recall that many people, including fellow Tories, claimed that it would be ‘impossible’ to negotiate a new Withdrawal Agreement, until Boris did it. They also said it would be ‘impossible’ to negotiate a trade deal with the EU, until Boris did it. Even with the problems that have since emerged with the Northern Ireland protocol (entirely down to Brussels’ bad faith implementation, by the way), it was an incredible achievement. In my blog, I compared it to Benjamin Disraeli at Berlin in 1878, which smacked of hyperbole at the time but, when I reflect upon it, I still feel it was a once-in-a-generation, era-defining foreign policy triumph.

Many commentators, media talking heads, future biographers and blokes down the pub will undoubtedly focus on Boris’ personality quirks and foibles, and his undeniably less than savoury qualities, such as what Sir Winston Churchill might have called his “terminological inexactitudes”, but when I think back on the past few years and what the Johnson Ministry means to me, I think about that extraordinary, visionary 2019 Conservative Manifesto.

As I have already said, in that manifesto Boris promised to Get Brexit Done in January and we left the EU at 11pm on January 31st, 2020. He delivered. Then, despite getting thrown into an unprecedented global health crisis, followed almost immediately thereafter by the largest-scale land war in Europe since the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, you might be forgiven for assuming that little progress had been made on the rest of manifesto, but you would be wrong.

Boris said he would put extra funding into our NHS, with 50,000 more nurses. Since then, funding has risen steadily and he has delivered over 25,000 more nurses (half-way there). He also promised 50 million more GP appointments per year. Last year, this increased by 31 million. Even with the impact of Covid lockdowns and 40 million fewer face-to-face appointments, 70 million more took place virtually online or over the phone.

He promised 20,000 more police officers by March 2023 and the latest figures show we are two thirds of the way there, with 14,000 recruited so far. He said he would pass laws for tougher sentencing for criminals and the Police, Crime, Sentencing & Courts Act was brought into force this year, including measures for whole-life orders for child murderers and ending automatic release of dangerous offenders (all of it opposed by Labour and the Liberals).

He promised an Australian-style points-based immigration system and this was implemented as soon as we left the EU.

There is more. Promises relating to investment in schools, more support for science and apprenticeships, measures to boost our energy security and protect the environment, with investment in clean energy and green infrastructure. All have schemes in the works. It is a shame that, having accomplished so much already, Boris will not be able to see these things through.

I said earlier that I thought ‘history will be kind’ to Boris and, as I glance over at the bookshelf, to my copy The Dream of Rome by a certain Boris Johnson, I am reminded of another Churchill quote. “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.” I look forward to reading the memoirs.