Boris Johnson’s relaunch speech this week contained something for everyone: a clear-sighted policy on Ukraine, the bizarre idea that stoking up housing demand is the way to overcome a shortage of housing supply and a take on the economy that one might charitably describe as a Keynesian-Thatcherite synthesis.
But the most telling line came in a section about energy policy, when the Prime Minister claimed to be ‘building a new nuclear reactor every year rather than one every ten years’. Not to be planning to do so, but actually to be doing so right now, in real time as it were. In Johnson’s mind, the preliminary expression of an intention to do something complicated, time-consuming and difficult clearly means it is being done.
This would appear to explain an awful lot about his administration. For instance, when you want to stop civil servants working from home you just get Jacob Rees-Mogg to leave a note telling them to do so and this constitutes effective action.
Or when you wish to deter Channel-hopping migrants, you get Priti Patel to make a speech saying they will be sent to Rwanda.
Johnson has been compared to many supposedly right-wing historical figures
Or when you want to demonstrate some action on ‘levelling-up’ you get Michael Gove to say the House of Lords might be transferred to the north of England.
Or when you want to assuage the DUP, you say the Northern Ireland protocol is going to be changed or dumped.
Or indeed when voters are getting prickly about the next wave of loopy diversity coordinator recruitment in the NHS, you get Sajid Javid to say he’s against it.
And then you can use the present tense to kid yourselves that effective action is being taken on all these things.
In the meantime, an increasingly weary Conservative electorate is noticing the growing chasm between intention and delivery. Home Office civil servants are aghast about the Rwanda policy, even before it has lead to the transfer of a single irregular migrant. The anti-Brexit House of Lords is gearing up to thwart whatever version of Northern Ireland protocol reform eventually gets unveiled in draft legislation next week. Civil servants are simply ignoring Rees-Mogg’s injunction to come back to Whitehall. Peers have loftily told Gove to mind his own business about where the Lords sits. And is there a person alive who has any faith that the creeping infestation of highly-paid ID politics types across the NHS – and, indeed, the rest of the public realm – will be brought to a halt by a lone harrumph from Javid?
Throw into the mix impending rail strikes and a feeble response to taming rampant inflation – despite sustaining the pretence that the Bank of England is seriously commanded to hold it to two per cent – and one is not a million miles away from the ‘imaginary divisions’ mindset which tends to afflict leaders with strong personalities when things cease going well.
The new backroom team in Downing Street is reported to believe that the key to political recovery for Johnson is for his administration to be seen to be doing at least one Conservative thing each week. This follows a year in which the PM appeared to have turned into a climate warrior, much to the disgust of the wider Tory tribe.
Patel’s Rwanda plan was apparently singled out for early praise, having landed well with Conservative-leaning voters. Yet a demonstrable inability to deliver beneficial change – whether due to a lack of statecraft, insufficient concentration span or a deficit of sheer willpower – in the face of determined opposition from dug-in vested interests is just as corrosive for a government’s reputation as not even trying to do so.
Johnson has been compared to many supposedly right-wing historical figures by the more hysterical among his left-wing detractors, including Genghis Khan and Atilla the Hun. He has insisted that, in fact, he is more like a ‘Brexity Heseltine’.
One figure he should try at all costs to avoid being likened to is Edward Heath, a man who could hardly have been more different on the issue of European political integration. The trouble is that the Brexiteer and the arch-integrationist appear to be in grave danger of meeting around the back of the political bike sheds when it comes to the metric of effectiveness in office.
In early 1974, while plagued with an oil crisis, rising inflation and a wave of strikes, Heath called an election on the basis of ‘who governs Britain?’ only for the electorate to decide that if he needed to ask the question then clearly it couldn’t be him.
Plodding Labour leader Keir Starmer appears to be latching on to this as Johnson’s key weakness, going through a painful inventory of Tory under-achievement in PMQs this week. Johnson won himself some more time in this week’s confidence vote. But if he has not become far more adept at implementation by this time next year then he is going to get dumped. He will fully deserve such a fate.
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