Hasn’t Boris Johnson done enough damage to the Tory party?

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Eric Garcia

Washington Bureau Chief

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If only Boris Johnson had been in a position to do something about the European Court of Human Rights, he wouldn’t need to be calling for a referendum on it now. But when he was prime minister, he preferred to grumble about it and hint that he might consider withdrawing from the Convention or the Court that enforces it.

Apart from advertising the weakness of his government, his support for another referendum on “Europe” seems to be an idea calculated to inflict as much damage as possible on the Conservative Party.

We shouldn’t really give him the oxygen of publicity. Really, the broadcasters should be required to have his words spoken by an actor. At least Laura Kuenssberg of the BBC and Beth Rigby of Sky News refused to interview him. Admittedly in Kuenssberg’s case, it was because she accidentally WhatsApped him her draft questions, intended for her production team. In Rigby’s case, it was because Johnson refused to allow the recording of an interview, in public, at a literary festival. Self-censorship of a most peculiar kind.

As a former prime minister, however, there is some interest in his views. He is also held in high regard by some Conservative Party members, including Nadine Dorries, who continue to maintain, in defiance of the facts, that he was brought down by a conspiracy rather than by his own bad decisions.

Even so, the scales may be falling from some of their eyes as it dawns on them that it was Johnson who chose to use the UK’s Brexit freedom to relax the rules and to triple net immigration.

So let us consider his plan on its merits. The European Court of Human Rights is a flawed institution. Sensible centrist prime ministers including Tony Blair and David Cameron found it frustrating. Partly, this was because it was doing its job, which is to protect the rights of unpopular minorities, including criminals and terrorists, which is bound to make life difficult for governments. But partly it was because its interpretation of human rights, such as the right to family life, has become too wide.

The Court prevented a flight from taking off for Rwanda in June 2022 – even though the government could have argued that it was not bound by the interim injunction. For all that Johnson had cultivated a reputation for taking a bullish approach to international law, he and Priti Patel, the home secretary, respected it.

Now, though, he wants to take Dominic Cummings’s advice: “Do mental stuff that proves you’re not the establishment.” Asked by The Daily Telegraph if he would support a referendum on ECHR membership, he said: “I would. I think it has changed. It has become much more legally adventurist.”

Typically, in the next interview to promote his book, he backtracked, telling Tom Bradby on ITV: “I’m not certain it has to be a referendum.” But the underlying message was clear: that the ECHR is intolerable and that Britain should withdraw from it.

This just happens to be the policy of one of the four candidates for the Tory leadership – Robert Jenrick, who has said that the party will “die” if it fails to advocate leaving. Johnson huffed and expostulated when Bradby pointed out that he appeared to be backing Jenrick, having refused to say which of the four he supported. “That’s a logical fallacy,” Johnson protested.

Whatever it is, it is deeply unhelpful to the Conservative Party. Any suggestion that the party ought to be still “banging on about Europe”, as Cameron put it, especially after it supposedly “got Brexit done”, makes it seem out of touch with the voters.

It may be that the ECHR is unpopular, but the idea that the Tory party needs to prioritise fighting another referendum about Europe is eccentric. Especially when, as Kemi Badenoch says, leaving the ECHR would not deal with “the root of the problem” of small boats.

Johnson, by his scattergun publicity for what my colleagues who have speed-read it say is a surprisingly dull book, risks confirming his weaknesses. He still dreams of making a comeback, yet seems fundamentally unserious about preparing for it – just as he seemed unserious about pursuing power in the first place, except at the last minute, when his handlers hid him away and had him saying as little as possible in public.

Since he left office, he has run away from a by-election in Uxbridge that he could have won after he was scolded by the privileges committee, and since then has stayed away from the slog around local Tory associations that might pave the way for a return. His reference to Cincinnatus in his farewell speech spoke volumes: the Roman dictator returned to his quiet farming life and had to be begged to return to save the republic.

The numbers likely to beg Johnson to return to parliament to save the nation are dwindling. His erratic call for a referendum on the ECHR is likely only to cause those numbers to dwindle further.