Timing is everything in politics – and Boris Johnson’s luck may just be running out

Timing is everything in politics. It’s often not under a politician’s control. Boris Johnson, seen by many Conservatives as a lucky general, takes to the centre of the world stage next week, when he meets Joe Biden and chairs a G7 summit in Cornwall.

But the UK’s efforts to broker global agreement on Covid-19 vaccines, on a minimum rate of business taxation, and later on the climate crisis will be hampered by an untimely, embarrassing Tory backbench rebellion on Monday over the government’s £4bn cut in overseas aid.

Although ministers insist the UK is still one of the world’s big spenders on helping the poorest nations, no other major economy is cutting its aid budget in the middle of a pandemic. Bad timing again. Privately, some ministers admit the aid cut is harming the image of Global Britain as the world watches closely the dawn of the post-Brexit era. More bad timing.

The word in Whitehall is that the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, made a pact with Johnson under which the Treasury approved a £16.5bn rise in defence spending over four years last November. In return, the chancellor won a reduction in the share of UK gross national income to be spent on aid, from 0.7 per cent to 0.5 per cent. Sunak would like the cut to continue for a second year as he wrestles with rebalancing the public finances.

In fact, the economic picture for this year is better than he painted in his March Budget, with higher growth, lower public borrowing, and a smaller rise in unemployment than forecast then. But the Treasury knows big post-Covid bills are coming; money must be spent on a catch-up programme for schools, on social care, on the NHS backlog in non-Covid treatments, and on resilience against future pandemics. It fears Johnson will want to spend any spare resources rather than cut the deficit. Whitehall officials tell me that one reason Sunak blocked a £15bn education catch-up plan was to send a message to cabinet colleagues – including the guy who lives next door – that the days of Treasury largesse are over.

The aid cut was also made for crude domestic purposes; the Tories are sure that it plays well in the red wall. There’s only one problem: despite Johnson’s Commons majority of 80, many Tory backbenchers recognise the damage the cuts will do on the ground in poor countries – including in areas Johnson supposedly champions, such as girls’ education – as well as the harm to the UK’s international standing. Opposition is spread across the Tory spectrum (in contrast to the noisy band of mainly right-wing lockdown sceptics), which explains why Johnson has avoided a vote on the aid cut.

The rebels have been, as one put it, “lurking in the bushes, waiting for the moment to ambush” – and now they believe they have found it, in a vote on Monday. Thirty have backed an amendment to divert funding from the proposed Advanced Research and Invention Agency to make up the aid shortfall. Its proponents are confident of securing the 45 Tories needed to defeat the government if the amendment is called by the speaker.

Ministers are probably right about the red wall, but “charity begins at home” is no strategy for a pandemic. The same approach makes ministers reluctant to hand some vaccines to poor countries, even those like Nepal, with whom the UK has close ties. Handing money to bodies like Covid-19 Vaccines Global Access (Covax) is all very well, but what many countries urgently need most is vaccines.

Given the real threat from new variants, UK ministers understandably want to complete the vaccine rollout at home first. But the government has ordered more than 500 million doses of the seven most promising vaccines, and so could surely pledge now to divert some of those later this year. It would give a lead to G7 nations. It would also be good for the UK, because unless all countries are able to obtain and distribute enough vaccines, new variants could return to bite fully vaccinated nations.

Johnson has a unique opportunity to fill a worrying vacuum in global leadership that emerged during the pandemic. On the last occasion that the UK hosted a major summit during a global emergency – in 2009 during the financial crisis – Gordon Brown brokered a $1 trillion stimulus by the G20 nations in London. Covid-19 is worse – both a health and an economic crisis. Yet we have seen vaccine nationalism, with UK ministers enjoying the slow start to the EU’s programme, and countries such as China and Russia using vaccines to enhance their geopolitical influence.

Johnson will probably be able to forge some kind of agreement in Cornwall; these summits are usually choreographed in advance and rarely end in failure. The G7 might endorse earlier targets for the world’s population to be vaccinated. But whether the summit matches the scale of the immense challenge is another matter. The prospects for doing so will not be helped by Johnson’s untimely aid cut. He would be wise to reverse it, and to get some credit for that, before Tory MPs – sooner or later – take matters into their own hands.