Boris's red wall problem

When Boris Johnson met with his cabinet in person for the first time in four months on Tuesday, his aim was simple: to boost morale. He was conscious that the replacement of normal meetings with virtual ones had led to ministers feeling muted. He believed that giving everyone some face-to-face time would help, and pushed hard for an actual meeting. Johnson won that argument, even if the cabinet did have to meet in the faded grandeur of the Foreign Office’s Locarno Suite to allow everyone to be socially distanced.

This is not what Johnson’s team envisaged when he won his 80-seat majority in December. They assumed with a majority that large they would not have to worry about party management. But in the past few weeks, the government has had to U-turn on issues ranging from free school meals to 5G because of parliamentary pressure. One catalyst for this breakdown in discipline has been the lockdown. ‘Not having people physically in any office means you are less of a team and there’s less loyalty,’ explains a government aide.

Nowhere is the issue viewed as more acute than with the 2019 intake. These MPs barely had time to set up their offices before they were sent back to their constituencies for lockdown. Since then, they haven’t exactly earned gold stars for good behaviour. They’ve been among the first to call for U-turns, to ask the Treasury for more money and to publicly distance themselves from Dominic Cummings. ‘We call them the WhatsApp warriors,’ says an MP from the 2015 intake. ‘They are not backward in coming forward with their grievances.’ ‘They’re just not controlled at the moment,’ sighs a minister. ‘Lockdown has made it harder — it’s not allowed the usual bonds to form.’