Three prime ministers in a year: Is Britain ungovernable?

My favourite subject in history is the origins of the English Civil War, which I remember dividing into “conditions, causes and triggers”. The same categories can be used for trying to explain most things, and I look forward to reading the two new books published this week to see how they can be applied to the fall of Boris Johnson and the even quicker fall of Liz Truss.

The two premierships are now part of what Professor Jon Davis and I called ultra-contemporary history, when we launched a course on the Blair government at Queen Mary, University of London, in 2008, the year after it ended. (The course is about to start its 13th year – there was a gap when we transferred to King’s College London – and now feels more like actual history, not least because most of its postgraduate students were not born when Tony Blair became prime minister.)

If we were setting up a new module on “The fall of the two prime ministers in 2022”, we could take these two books, by Sebastian Payne of the Financial Times on the fall of Boris Johnson, and by Harry Cole and James Heale of The Sun and The Spectator on the seven weeks of Liz Truss, as our starting point – although we would have nothing equivalent to Alastair Campbell’s diaries as a high-quality primary source.

Our first task in these hypothetical classes would be to impress on the students that Truss’s premiership lasted 49 days – exactly seven weeks – and not the 44 days often mentioned. It was after 44 days that she announced that she would be resigning; she did not actually leave office for another five days, after the accelerated nomination procedure produced a single candidate to succeed her.

Then we would turn to the important questions: why did Johnson’s premiership come to an end after just 32 months; and why did Truss make such a disastrous mistake in her emergency Budget after 17 days?

“The origins of the fall of Johnson” is probably the more interesting historical puzzle. It was only in the autumn of last year that The Times was speculating on its front page about Johnson being prime minister for another decade. He had put together an electoral coalition that didn’t seem sustainable, and yet he had defied the conventional wisdom before, and it was plausible that he, and he alone, might have sustained it.

Yet the flaws in the edifice were visible from the start. If we apply the three-part Civil War analysis, the condition of the fall of Johnson was that he had no base of committed loyalty among Conservative MPs. They had turned to him in desperation, at a time when the failure to get Britain out of the EU seemed to threaten the party’s survival. He stood on a manifesto that was, Brexit apart, essentially New Labour in its focus on public services, leaving Tory MPs unclear, Brexit apart, what he stood for.

The main cause of his fall was his response to the belated discovery of coronavirus rule-breaking in No 10. According to the Criminal Records Office, he broke the law only once, and that was the unconvincing pause for sandwiches between meetings to celebrate his birthday, but the impression that he wasn’t being straight with people snowballed into a crisis.

Other misjudgements fed into the avalanche, especially the attempt, little more than a year ago, to exonerate Owen Paterson, the Brexiteer former cabinet minister, on the charge of paid lobbying. And in the end, the trigger for Johnson’s fall should have been survivable. But it shone a light on his character.

When he was confronted with evidence that he had been warned about Chris Pincher’s sexual misconduct before promoting him, he said he couldn’t remember, when he could simply have said that he wanted to give Pincher a second chance.

Johnson’s explanation for the end of his premiership was disarmingly simple: “At Westminster, the herd instinct is powerful and when the herd moves, it moves.” It was a typical way of disparaging the ministers who were resigning while admitting defeat.

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Payne’s account of the day before he said those words, which has appeared in the book’s serialisation, is a brilliant story, revealing the role of Sir Graham Brady, chair of the 1922 Committee, representing Tory backbench MPs. Sir Graham held back the pressure on the executive of his committee to change the rules to allow another vote of confidence in Johnson’s leadership, while making it clear to the prime minister that he had lost the support of a majority of the parliamentary party.

Johnson was initially defiant, saying that Tory MPs should go ahead, change the rules and vote him out. Sir Graham told Johnson: “It would be better for the country, the party and for you personally if you didn’t push it to that point.”

He didn’t. Truss was a more obvious failure, although the speed of her collapse still surprised. Sir Graham was once again at the centre of things: it was up to him to tell the second prime minister in a few months that they did not command the confidence of their own MPs.

Does this mean that politics has become more unstable? I don’t know, but it is beginning to feel as if Thatcher (11 years), Major (seven), Blair (10) and Cameron (six) were the exceptions rather than the rule. But is this a product of the turmoil of Brexit, of an increasingly unstable system, or of the personalities of individual leaders? We need a new course in ultra-contemporary history to help us to find out.

The Fall of Boris Johnson: The Full Story, by Sebastian Payne, Macmillan, £16.99, and Out of the Blue: The Inside Story of the Unexpected Rise and Rapid Fall of Liz Truss, by Harry Cole and James Heale, HarperCollins, £20