Boris Johnson’s new No. 10 hires have given him a chance to catch his breath, very briefly, from the turmoil of the past week. But it’s worth noting that the plot has always thickened as a result of something the Prime Minister himself has done, rather than the mistakes or otherwise of his team.
Guto Harri, Andrew Griffith and Steve Barclay now have the unenviable and – many Conservative MPs think – impossible task of encouraging the party to feel more forgiving towards the Prime Minister whenever he next makes a mistake. They cannot, though, stop him from making mistakes, and this is why he is still in a great deal of trouble.
The greater mistake is the Prime Minister’s own attitude to his predicament
Munira Mirza’s departure showed that even people who have stuck by Johnson for many years are struggling to keep patience with him now. When I interviewed Rachel Wolf, who co-wrote the majority-winning 2019 manifesto with Mirza, on Times Radio yesterday, she underlined what many formerly pro-Boris MPs are also feeling. She said:
‘There are two different questions there, which is – Is it possible a priori to turn this around and then is it possible for Boris Johnson to turn it around and I think the former maybe, I think the challenge with the latter is that it would require him to be able to set an unbelievably clear direction across the whole of government, stick to it, prioritise it, have a Treasury that is behind it, and keep focusing on delivery day-to-day. Because I am still of the view that this does come down to what you do as well as how you talk and what you sound like and how you say things, and it’s not something he’s ever done…’
She also called Johnson’s Savile comments ‘stupid’ and said she thought he ‘should apologise’. Those comments upset a number of MPs, not just for their content but because they confirmed what critics of Johnson have long been pointing to: that he has a pattern of behaviour he cannot change, even when he’s fighting for his political life.
The reaction to both of those things was what drove more MPs either to send their letters calling for a vote of no confidence, or to decide that while they weren’t ready to send them yet, the conclusion of the Metropolitan Police investigation into lockdown parties in Downing Street is now too far off for them to wait. The next big mistake might be sooner, and finally decisive.
That’s why Harri’s interview in which he reveals Boris Johnson sang Gloria Gaynor to him when he asked him, having accepted the job with him, whether he would survive, is likely to rile up the many unhappy MPs again. It may have been a mistake for Harri to reveal it, but the greater mistake is the Prime Minister’s own attitude to his predicament and the wider political context of a delayed plan to tackle the NHS backlog and a cost of living crisis that is about to get very serious and painful indeed.
His main audience is Tory MPs, not the voters most affected by those two things. But backbenchers do want to know that he is treating the situation with some gravity, rather than joking, as I hear he does when among those he believes are on his side, about ‘how f***ed are we today?’
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